§92. Consequences of Nominalism

Since I am drawing up lines between nominalists and radical empiricists, putting Rorty with Sellars and Davidson as nominalists, against James, Dewey, Bergson, and Deleuze as radical empiricists, I should be clear about the terms of engagement.

Many consequences follow from this thesis; for instance, that universality is a semantic phenomenon, a logical condition on signs. Concepts are terms, mental signs, and extra-mental nature is a realm of absolute individuals. Everything else ever conceived as extant or real is to be eliminated by The Razor. That includes relations, because a relation cannot be an individual and individuals alone exist. Relations are mental items, and make no real con­nection among individuals. “Besides absolute things (res absolutae), namely substances and qualities, no thing (res) is imaginable either in act or in po­tency.” That is the sum and substance of nature, the rest being redescription, semantics, and all in the mind, or the language, or an intentional, immaterial, logical space of discourse.³⁰

Ockham's nominalism makes onerous baggage. His meticulously braided bundle has been fraying and redistributing threads for seven hundred years, as different parts appeal to different thinkers or are understood in dif­ferent ways. Peirce emphasized this unraveling, though his image was dif­ferent. “There was a tidal wave of nominalism. Descartes was a nominalist. Locke and all his following, Berkeley, Hartley, Hume, and even Reid were nominalists. Leibniz was an extreme nominalist...

In one word, all modern philosophy of every sect has been nominalistic.” Not for holding Ockham's whole package, but for playing variations on the implications of the core nominalist idea that modes of being are syntactic, grammatical, or in some other way nothing but language, signs, discourse, or logical formality. That is nominalism, the ontology that flees ontology.³¹

Nominalism is a variation on the old theme of rationalism. The word “ra­tionalist” (logikoi) was invented by Alexandrian physicians to align them­selves with philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, who did not learn their logocentrism from physicians, unless it is true that Parmenides was a doctor. The rationalism of classical philosophy is the equation of being with the rea­sonably said, the being of the logos. To be is to be rational, logical, amenable to a truthful discourse. This is the rationalism of classical philosophy from Parmenides to Plotinus, and opposed by the empiricism of Democritus, Epicurus, and the Empirical wing of ancient medicine.³²

Medical rationalists acquired their rationalism in imitation of the philosophers and their assimilation of being and logos. To explain or justify a thing is to make its rationality explicit. If you cannot do that, you understand nothing, which is why medicine requires rationalization. It is not enough for doctors to know how to relieve suffering; they must understand what they do, which means they must know the cause of the disease they treat. If you do not know why a therapy works, you do not really know that it works. Its use is just habit, so-called experience. You have to have a reason, and experience, your memory of what worked, is not a reason.

It was in medicine that we find the first robust claim made on behalf of experience as an instrument of knowledge. Empiricism provided an alter­native to rationalism in both medicine and philosophy. Democritus was the foremost empiricist whom Plato and Aristotle had to displace, and his empiricism shows collaboration with sources in the Hippocratic litera­ture new in his time (§9).

With nominalism, what we mean, think, conceive, or perceive and what exists are conditioned by the semantics of terms, the modern logos. That makes nominalism a modern, semantic rationalism, residing in the priority of logical items: modes of being are modes of syntax, formal and semiotic, not ontological differences in nature. This is a characteristically modern rationalism; there is no nominalism in antiquity. It is not facetious to call Ockham the first modern philosopher, and his rationalism inaugurates phil­osophical nominalism. However, while semantic analysis may show that various modes of being can be expressed as modes of predication, that does not show that these modes of being are no more than logical differences of syntax. The philosophical interest of nominalist semantics requires the as­sumption that logic conditions being. Semantics proves nothing philosoph­ical without the rationalism that identifies being with the logically said, for only then does a semantic theory of conditions on truth-value reduce modes of being to modes of predication.

Not only is nominalism rationalistic; it is anthropocentric, and for the same reason. If, as nominalism says, the categories of being are semantic cat­egories of language, then what a thing “is” depends on how logic regiments the terms that refer to it, which is ultimately a matter of our convenience; and anything not nominally regimented might as well not exist, since we can say nothing true of it. The logos that nominalism made the criterion of being is one of anthropos, our humanity-defining rationality.

It was in this form that nominalism entered analytic philosophy in the twentieth century, fueling new hostility to philosophical empiricism.

Nominalism has been an obstacle to a consistent empiricism ever since Ockham, who left empiricism where Hobbes picked it up. Sellars and Davidson are more consistent nominalists than Hobbes, who thought logic attained its apogee with Aristotle. If everything about experience turns out to be something about language, then empiricism is overthrown and expe­rience has nothing to do. On the other hand, if relations are empirically real and external to their terms, as James proposed, then nominalism about rela­tions is refuted. If time is duration, as Bergson proposed, then continuity is real and nominalism's absolute individual is refuted. If consciousness is en­during and the past exists, then, as Deleuze finds, existence cannot be limited to the actual and present, refuting this last consequence of nominalism.