Qualities, or why I will never be a nominalist
Wednesday, April 24th, 2002 02:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robinturnerFirst, a quick definition for philosophy newbies ....
Nominalism is the position in metaphysics that qualities have no real existence. Thus there is no "blueness", there are only things that we happen to call "blue".
This view strikes me as linguistically naive. It's what in Lojban we call "malglico" ("Bloody English") thinking - assuming that the way the English language works is the way that every language works, or indeed, that the entire universe works. We could imagine speakers of a different language, maybe one that had no nouns, saying something that might with some difficulty be translated as "There are no blue 'things', only various incidences of blue."
What got me thinking about this (again) was thinking about my father's death (again). I was talking to my boss about why we grieve, and how we get over it. The first stage is to realise that you are not grieving for the person who has died, but for yourself. From his or her point of view, there is nothing to grieve about, because either there is some kind of life after death, in which case they are busy having new experiences, or there isn't, in which case it's stupid to feel sorry for someone who doesn't exist (as Epicurus says, "Where I am, death is not; where death is, I am not").
What makes us sad when someone dies is really the thought that they are gone, that we will never see them again. This is natural, and I would be worried by anybody who felt absolutely no sorrow on hearing that a person they (supposedly) loved had just died. But there is rational sadness and pathological misery. To feel bad because we can no longer see a person we love is an appropriate response. To scream, tear our hair, rail at God and Nature, or fall into depression is stupid. Anyone who argues with the laws of physics loses. The first example of a syllogism in innumerable logic textbooks is: "All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal."
To come back, rather circuitously, to my argument against nominalism ...
If we love a person, we love them for cetain qualities they possess: beauty, intelligence, kindness or whatever. It may even be something as fleeting as a crooked grin. The point is that these qualities always exist, and a quality is as real as a table. These qualities never die; they are continually reinstantiated (wow - I just invented a long word!). Mohammed once said that if a man desires a woman who is "haram" (not permitted to him), he should turn to his own wife, and, if he looks hard enough, he will see the qualities that he desired in her too. The same applies to dead people - what we loved in them continues, so we have not really lost anything.
Nominalism is the position in metaphysics that qualities have no real existence. Thus there is no "blueness", there are only things that we happen to call "blue".
This view strikes me as linguistically naive. It's what in Lojban we call "malglico" ("Bloody English") thinking - assuming that the way the English language works is the way that every language works, or indeed, that the entire universe works. We could imagine speakers of a different language, maybe one that had no nouns, saying something that might with some difficulty be translated as "There are no blue 'things', only various incidences of blue."
What got me thinking about this (again) was thinking about my father's death (again). I was talking to my boss about why we grieve, and how we get over it. The first stage is to realise that you are not grieving for the person who has died, but for yourself. From his or her point of view, there is nothing to grieve about, because either there is some kind of life after death, in which case they are busy having new experiences, or there isn't, in which case it's stupid to feel sorry for someone who doesn't exist (as Epicurus says, "Where I am, death is not; where death is, I am not").
What makes us sad when someone dies is really the thought that they are gone, that we will never see them again. This is natural, and I would be worried by anybody who felt absolutely no sorrow on hearing that a person they (supposedly) loved had just died. But there is rational sadness and pathological misery. To feel bad because we can no longer see a person we love is an appropriate response. To scream, tear our hair, rail at God and Nature, or fall into depression is stupid. Anyone who argues with the laws of physics loses. The first example of a syllogism in innumerable logic textbooks is: "All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal."
To come back, rather circuitously, to my argument against nominalism ...
If we love a person, we love them for cetain qualities they possess: beauty, intelligence, kindness or whatever. It may even be something as fleeting as a crooked grin. The point is that these qualities always exist, and a quality is as real as a table. These qualities never die; they are continually reinstantiated (wow - I just invented a long word!). Mohammed once said that if a man desires a woman who is "haram" (not permitted to him), he should turn to his own wife, and, if he looks hard enough, he will see the qualities that he desired in her too. The same applies to dead people - what we loved in them continues, so we have not really lost anything.
