Activity

Yet again … a disappearing post. This is getting to be a REGULAR occurrence.
So I’ll post it here to see if both re-posts disappear. If so, it will answer a question or two.

This was originally posted as a reply in the thread following TSC’s post concerning
“traits” of white supremacy curriculum.
” … Realism v Nominalism … pick one.
” Peirce understood nominalism in the broad anti-realist sense usually attributed to William of Ockham, as the view that reality consists exclusively of concrete particulars and that universality and generality have to do only with names and their significations. This view relegates properties, abstract entities, kinds, relations, laws of nature, and so on, to a conceptual existence at most. Peirce believed nominalism (including what he referred to as “the daughters of nominalism”: sensationalism, phenomenalism, individualism, and materialism) to be seriously flawed and a great threat to the advancement of science and civilization. His alternative was a nuanced realism that distinguished reality from existence and that could admit general and abstract entities as reals without attributing to them direct (efficient) causal powers. Peirce held that these non-existent reals could influence the course of events by means of final causation (conceived somewhat after Aristotle’s conception),[1]and that to banish them from ontology, as nominalists require, is virtually to eliminate the ground for scientific prediction as well as to underwrite a skeptical ethos unsupportive of moral agency. ” – passage from a review of Paul Forster’s Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (E-journal, 03/14/2012)