§29. Nominalism
Boethius in the early sixth century began the Latin logical tradition with his translation of late antiquity’s standard logic course. That, supplemented with material from the Byzantine grammarian Priscian, was Europe’s science of logic down to the time of Peter Abelard in the twelfth century.
We first hear of “nominalism” in association with Abelard’s exploration of ways in which language can be true of the world without being like the world, a representation or “species.” What language is about, what linguistic expressions pick out, are res, things in the world, but predication is fundamentally a linguistic affair, something the logic of language handles on its own. To evaluate a conditional proposition (if p, then q) Abelard’s opponents, the Reales, think that one must attend to the res, while what is crucial for Abelard and the Nominales are terms and syntax.39Bonaventure explains the origin of their name from what he calls their unitas-nominis or unity-of-name theory. This is a thesis on unified propositional content, stipulating that the same things may be said by expressions in different tense, case, and gender. These are changes of consignification, changes in how things are signified, not what is signified. To appreciate the ecclesiastical passion this point inflamed, consider that the faith of the ancients and people today is identical, despite the fact that what Abraham and Moses believed was in the future tense (Christ will come) and what Christians believe (Christ has come) is in the past tense. If to this difference there correspond different things, then it is not the same religion, an unthinkable result! Scholars trace the theory of the unity of names back to Augustine, but Abelard generalized it and incorporated innovative technical methods to solve thorny controversies in logic and theology.40
Abelard lived before the European recovery of Aristotle.
Shortly after him came the tide of new texts, which were translated, commented upon, disputed, and absorbed in the course of the thirteenth century. Ockham and Abelard are like bookends between which stand the Complete Works of Aristotle and the Islamic Commentaries. The historical consistency of nominalism is a matter of philosophical tendency, not conscious affiliation, shared purpose, or agreed doctrine. The tendency of nominalism is to reduce differences of truth-value in propositions to differences in the syntax of signs rather than the inventory of nature. The tendency is to think the eternity and incorruptibility of truth does not derive from anything eternal or incorruptible, that it is an artifact of the logical way terms signify things. So too generality, relation, motion, quantity—who knows how far the reduction of significance to language and its logic might be pressed?The Nominates of the twelfth century are conjecturally associated with Peter Abelard, and the Nominalistae of the fifteenth century are polemically associated with William Ockham. Teachings of or by these “Nominalists” were banned at Paris in 1473. Ockham's name was associated with them, even as a kind of leader, although he died more than a century earlier. Ockham's views were under suspicion throughout the scholastic era, and there was never a school of Ockham as there was of Thomas or Scotus. None of the canonical nominalist authors explicitly pattern their work on his or present themselves as part of a movement that includes him. But there is that canon; it includes John Buridan, Nicole Oresme, Nicholas Autrecourt, Albert of Saxony, and Jean Gerson, generations of prominent teachers at Paris.41
Buridan stands out for influence on later generations. He remained an Arts master his entire career, never taking a doctorate or teaching theology, nor did he join a mendicant order. His works concentrate on the Arts curriculum (logic, natural philosophy, and ethics) and were widely read, becoming primary texts for courses in logic and Aristotelian philosophy throughout Europe for some two centuries after his death in 1361.
These works were a deep and consistent expression of the perspective that his contemporaries began to describe as nominalism. Buridan apparently never mentions Ockham, though scholars seem sure that he had an early and penetrating acquaintance with his writings, and even seems to have made it his life's work to show what the technical resources of nominalist semantics can do for problems the Arts masters confront in their teaching. What Ockham began Buridan continued. “It was Buridan's careful attention to theoretical detail, coupled with prudent practical judgment and pedagogic skill, that in his hands could turn Ockham's innovations into relatively uncontrover- sial, viable textbook material, capable of laying the foundations of a new, paradigmatically different conception of the relationships between language, thought and reality.”42It is widely supposed that nominalism has something to do with the existence of “universals,” nominalism being the theory that universals are merely names, not subsistent entities. This understanding is not wrong, but leaves much unsaid, and it would be better to forget about universals, which are not what nominalism is principally about. Ockham says that the error he wants to set right, and which is “the basis of many errors in philosophy,” is the assumption “that a distinct signification always corresponds to a distinct word, so that the distinction among things signified is just as great as that among names or significant words.”43
For instance, the distinctions of Aristotle’s Categories are sound, but philosophers make the mistake of thinking these are categories of being. They are not, they are categories of predication—not different realities, but kinds of names and ways of signifying. Things are not categorized, only concepts or words. It is linguistic considerations that divide the categories and linguistic or conceptual entities that get categorized. “These are distinct words and distinct intentions or concepts in the soul, signifying external things.
And it should not be said that [since] these intentions are distinct from one another (no one of which is another), so too the corresponding things are distinct. For distinctions among signifying words or intentions in the soul do not always line up with distinctions among the things that are signified.”44This is an important point for Ockham, important for modern empiricism, and important for my argument about what makes empiricism “radical,” namely, rebuffing the nominalism here birthing. That by way of apology for an extended quotation:
I maintain that substance, quality, and quantity are distinct categories, although “quantity” does not signify any absolute thing different from substance and quality. For they are distinct concepts and spoken sounds that signify the same things in different ways....
“Substance” signifies all of its significata in one way—namely, directly; “quantity” signifies the same thing in a different way—namely, it signifies the whole directly and its parts obliquely, since it signifies the whole substance and connotes that it has one part at a distance from another. Likewise for “quality” [and all the remaining categories].45
The passage suggests a thesis and a program. Conceive the diversity of being—universal, individual, essence, existence, actual, potential, substantial, accidental—as a diversity of terms—abstract, concrete, connotative, absolute, oblique—signifying the same being diversely. That is why the argument of nominalism is only incidentally about universals. It is not specifically about general terms more than about terms for potentials, quantities, motions, or durations. The nominalist program is a sweeping relegation of all these putatively ontological categories of being to the level of formal, logical categories of predication. A “universal” is a singular mental term that signifies things in general rather than in particular. These terms are natural mental signs, which are singular mental acts naturally apt to signify (technically, “supposit for”) many.
In “Every man is an animal,” the term “man” supposits for any individual man, and does not refer to something common among all men. A concept is a subjective intellection, an intention, a real singular quality of the soul that is naturally qualified to refer to a plurality of subjects. The proposition “Man is a species” concerns nothing but signs, being a metalinguistic statement about mental discourse. “Man is a species” says, “The mental sign man is a sortal concept.”46Buridan enriches the project. Universality is again assimilated to the semantic properties of signifying many things in the mind of a hearer and in the context of a proposition. In propositions such words do not signify a “what” but a “how,” that is, how we conceive of something, in this case, as “indifferent to many supposits,” or individuals. The semantic approach is similar to Abelard, but Buridan renovates the argument with the innovations of the logica nova, including the distinction of syncategorematic and categorical terms, first- and second-intentions, and the theory of supposition. Abelard's method was to distinguish modes of understanding from modes of being, and deny an ontological reading of the terms of understanding, arguing that it is a mistake to introduce a gratuitous correspondence between how we think of the world and the way the world is. The error of the Reales with whom Abelard contested reappears in the speculative grammar of the Modistae in Buridans time. He denounces “the opinion of the grammarians who hold that the modes of signification are derived from the modes of being, whence they believe that to similar modes of signification attributed to utterances there correspond similar modes of being in things signified.”47
The kernel of nominalism, from Abelard to Ockham and Buridan, is the argument that what has been mistaken for modes of being are properly modes of predication. The varieties of being are varieties of signs, syntactic varieties,
carried by matter but not diversified according to matter.
The diversity of being is a logical diversity of terms signifying the same beings diversely. And what beings are those? For Ockham and Buridan they are absolute individuals with absolute qualities. Writing in his Summa of logic Ockham says, “Besides absolute things (res absolutae), namely substances and qualities, no thing (res) is imaginable either in act or in potency.” Only singular beings and their singular qualities are physically real; only they exist to be referred to, whether naturally by concepts or conventionally by words.48Their individuality is so absolute that Ockham denies the indiscernibility of identicals, the principle that two beings cannot be indiscernible under all conditions. If they are really two, it seems, there has to be a difference, though that is what Ockham denies. Numerically distinct things are not made distinct by a difference in properties, and it is even possible that such things do not differ in any property at all. They are individuated in and of themselves, their unity, their individuality, being absolute. Ockham made it an axiom: nothing is individuated through anything extrinsic. Individuality belongs to a being qua being. A world of absolute individuals is a world of completely separate singulars any of which can exist apart from any other, and none have anything real in common.49
No one in Ockham’s day was calling this or any other view nominalism. But when we look ahead at what they did call nominalism, we see the continuity of a tendency. A Paris defense of nominalism (1474) explains: “Those doctors are called nominalists who do not multiply the things principally signified by terms in accord with the multiplication of terms. Realists, on the other hand, are those who contend that things are multiplied in accord with the multiplication of terms.” We get another impression from a letter (1403) written by an undergraduate to Jean Gerson, chancellor at Paris. He refers to “the sect... of the nominalists,” who “[shift] the differences among nearly all things to human concepts.” Concepts are signs, indicated by names, terms, creatures of syntactic convention without physical reality, existing only because we think. That is what stood out to Albert the Great about Abelard’s colleagues. “Those who are called Nominales say that commonness exists only in the intellect,” a thesis he attributes to the Epicuri. Leibniz remembers “the nominalist sect” as “the most profound among all the scholastics, and the most consistent with the character of our present-day, reformed philosophy.” For him, nominalism is the belief “that all things beyond individual substances are mere names.”50
Gerson's correspondent also associated nominalism with the philosophy of Epicurus's Garden, and it apparently was not uncommon to taint nominalists with the foul name of Epicurean (epicurei litterales). When anything was remembered of atomism it was that the universe is atoms and void; everything else is merely thought to exist, which is a sort of protonominalism. On the one hand, atoms in the void, causes causing causes, on the other, language, reasoning, description, communication, thought, and its intentionality. These are different spaces, discontinuous, the prototype of a later nominalism's dichotomy of reasons and causes (§88).51