Nominalism

Hume as a Trope Nominalist

by Jani Hakkarainen

I will give this paper at the panel on nominalism and relations in Hume Conference, Calgary, July 18-22, 2012.

Nominalistic Adequacy

by Jeffrey Ketland

Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 2011

Instrumentalist nominalism responds to the indispensability arguments by rejecting the demand that successful... more Instrumentalist nominalism responds to the indispensability arguments by rejecting the demand that successful mathematicized scientific theories be nominalized, and instead claiming merely that such theories are nominalistically adequate: the concreta behave ‘as if’ the theory is true. This article examines some definitions of the concept of nominalistic adequacy and concludes with some considerations against instrumentalist nominalism.

The Mathematicization of Nature

by Jeffrey Ketland

PhD Thesis, LSE 1998

The thesis sets out the indispensability argument against mathematical nominalism. The thesis sets out the indispensability argument against mathematical nominalism.

Some more curious inferences

by Jeffrey Ketland

Analysis 2005

Dispensing the Indispensability Argument

by Justin Yeary

A term paper for my Philosophy of Mathematics advanced undergraduate seminar.

The logician and naturalist Willard V.O. Quine makes the argument that mathematical objects(sets, functions, groups,... more The logician and naturalist Willard V.O. Quine makes the argument that mathematical objects(sets, functions, groups, etc.) actually exist due to their indispensable utility to the natural sciences.This amounts to nothing more than an argument from convenience, which is bad logic. The purpose of this paper will be to disprove Quine's hypothesis, and make the case that although mathematical entitiesdo exist, the indispensability argument is not the way to go about proving this. This will beaccomplished in 4 sections. The first section shall be a brief overview of Quine's holistic naturalism, hisindispensability, and where it falls into the historical picture of the philosophy of mathematics. Thesecond part will consider Joseph Melia's paper “Weaseling Away the Indispensability Argument” anduse it as an argument against Quine's thesis. The third portion will be devoted to Alan Baker's “AreThere Genuine Mathematical Explanations of Physical Phenomena?”, which will serve as a counter- point to my thesis. Finally, in the last section I will posit my own attack on the indispensabilityhypothesis from a realist, rather than a nominalist, perspective

extract.MetOfRes

by Ghislain Guigon

The attached file is an extract from my PhD Thesis, "The Metaphysics of Resemblance", which contains the table of contents, a summary of the thesis chapter by chapter, and the first chapter of the thesis. If you would like to read more of my PhD thesis, please send me an email.

Ostrich Nominalism, Peacock Realism, and Liberal Naturalism

by Paul Giladi

Literary Nominalism and the Theory of Rereading Late Medieval Texts: a New Research Paradigm

by Richard Utz

Nominalism and Literary Discourse: New Perspectives

by Richard Utz

Nominalist perspectives on Chaucer's poetry: a bibliographical essay

by Richard Utz

There is no'Truthmaker'Argument against Nominalism

by Josh Parsons

Australasian Journal of Philosophy 77:3 (1999)

An Experiential Approach to Musical Semantics: Deixis, Denotation and Cognitive Maps.

by Mark Reybrouck

Full reference:

Mark Reybrouck.  (2009). An Experiential Approach to Musical Semantics: Deixis, Denotation and Cognitive Maps. In J.Deely & L.Sbrocchi. Semiotics 2008 (pp. 806-818). Ottawa: Legas.
ISBN 978-897493-14-4

This paper is about knowledge construction in music listening. It argues for an experiential approach to music... more This paper is about knowledge construction in music listening. It argues for an experiential approach to music cognition, stressing the dynamic-vectorial field of meaning rather than the symbolic field. Starting from the conceptual framework of deixis and indexical devices, it elaborates on the concept of pointing as a heuristic guide for sense-making which allows the listener to conceive of perceptual elements in terms of salience, valence and semantical weight. As such, the act of (mental) pointing can be predicative, either in a nominalistic or processual way, giving a description of the temporal evolution of a situation as against episodic nominalizations that refer to just one single instance of the process. the latter, especially, are characterized by distancing and polarization between the listener and the music, allowing him/her to deal
with the music also at a level of mental imagery and to construct a mental or
cognitive map of its unfolding.

Indispensability arguments and instrumental nominalism

by Richard Pettigrew

(forthcoming) Review of Symbolic Logic

The Quine-Putnam indispensability argument in the philosophy of mathematics runs as follows: we are justified in... more The Quine-Putnam indispensability argument in the philosophy of mathematics runs as follows: we are justified in believing our best scientific theories; our best scientific theories entail the existence of mathematical entities; therefore, we are justified in believing that mathematical entities exist. The instrumental nominalist denies the first premise. She claims that what we are really justified in believing is the nominalistic content of our best scientific theories; that is, we are justified in believing not that our best scientific theories are true, but that they are nominalistically adequate. However, while there are a handful of attempts to define nominalistic adequacy, none is satisfactory for the nominalist. I give a satisfactory definition here and show that the instrumental nominalist can use it to avoid the Quine-Putnam indispensability argument, as well as Ketland's new indispensability argument based on 'speed-up theorems'. In the process of giving the definition, I introduce two new modal operators, which extend the expressive power of quantified modal logic.

Medieval Nominalism and the Literary Questions: Selected Studies

by Richard Utz

Bibliography co-authored with Terry Barakat.

The process of collecting the titles for the following bibliography was begun during the late 1980s, when I researched... more The process of collecting the titles for the following bibliography was begun during the late 1980s, when I researched the correspondences between late medieval philosophy and literature. This work led to the publication of my doctoral dissertation, Literarischer Nominalismus im Spätmittelalter (1990), the first two essay collections on the topic, Literary Nominalism and the Rereading of Late Medieval Literature (1995), and Nominalism and Literature (1997), and a series of essays and reviews. Like few other topics in the academic study of medieval literature, the search for the possible parallels between philosophical and literary texts reveals the not always peaceful coexistence among the three basic approaches to the study of medieval literature and
culture...

State nouns are K-states

by Antonio Fábregas

With Rafael Marín. Submitted to Selected Proceedings of Going Romance 24.