Nom Nom Nominalism

Every once in a while, on more philosophically inclined blogs, I read about the evils of nominalism; and since it has a bearing on the Aquinas series I’m posting on Mondays I thought I’d say a few things about it.

According to Thomas and Aristotle, every being has an essence, what it is: a cat, a dog, a rock, a flower, a human being. Thomas and Aristotle agree with Plato that these essences are universals: all cats are cats because they share the single essence “being a cat”. However, Thomas and Aristotle disagree with Plato that universals exist in an independent World of Forms. Rather, a universal exists in reality only as part of the things that share that essence. Catness exists only in cats. (And in the Hunger Games, but that’s another story.)* But universals can also exist as concepts in our intellects, and in a similar way in the mind of God.

Later scholastic philosophers, such as William of Ockham, said no, there are no true universals; rather, there are only shared names. Each thing we call a cat has its own distinct individual essence; but individual cats are similar in non-essential ways and so it’s convenient for us to come up with some shared name, e.g., “cat”.

Later thinkers have run with that idea and extended it to say that, in fact, the names we give things determine reality and that reality is a thing constructed by humans.

I’m probably expressing that badly, because I think it’s nonsense on the face of it, and it’s hard to be fair to something you think is nonsense, even if there’s a core of possible sense in it.

I bring all of this up, because I think there’s a reason why nominalism seems so plausible to so many. I think it’s because most of the objects around us are artifacts, rather than things of nature.

Consider a chair, that artifact par excellence. Does it have an essence? Certainly: it’s a thing that one person can sit on. But it’s also a constructed thing. It has an essence, but it isn’t a substance in the way that a cat is. If you take a cat to pieces, you don’t have a cat any more; you have a mess. But you can take a chair to pieces, repaint it, and then put it back together.

The thing is, the essence of artifacts is often slippery. Consider a couch. Is it a chair? No; it seats more than one. That’s what makes it a couch. It’s chair-like, but not a chair. OK; now consider the seating you usually find in airports: long objects, for seating multiple people, with armrests between each place. Are they couches? No; you can’t lie down on them. Are they chairs? No; they seat multiple people. In a way, they are couch-chairs; or chair-couches. It begins to seem like there’s no universal notion of “chair” or “couch” here; just human choice.

But this isn’t because there are no universals; it’s because these are artifacts, products of human design. A person who designs a chair designs it to a particular purpose; and likely there are many more specific purposes than there are designers. And each of these purposes leads to a slightly different notion of chair, and yes, they are all human-defined and human-constructed.

Artifacts, it turns out, are a lousy basis for the investigation of the deep things of metaphysics, because they are too fuzzy—and not in a good way.

In short, I think that pondering the nature of the essence of artifacts leads one naturally to nominalism in a way that pondering the nature of natural objects like plants and animals does not.

* No, I’m not sorry.