That said, the goal of the
nominalist is to offer an account of the entities that are allegedly universal, properties and relations, by appealing only to particular objects.
All knowledge, for
nominalists, depends only on one's individual sensory experience.
Bostock discusses the debate between
nominalists and realists with respect to universals, specifically the Berkeley-Locke controversy and Russell's regress argument.
The austere
nominalist "analysis" has the following form, then: particular individual o is P just means that o is P--nothing more than that can be said.
Universalism in the hands of
nominalists does, indeed, lead to totalizing catastrophe, but semiotic universalism and realism as such, as evolutionary ontology and epistemology, need not do so.
Are general or universal categories in some sense real, as the realists claim in the wake of Plato, Aristotle and Augustine, or are they, as the
nominalists insist, concepts which we ourselves foist upon a world in which whatever is real is irreducibly particular?
Conversely, much of this constructivism, as Ian Hacking has observed, is motivated by an often unstated
nominalist view.
legal realists reconceptualized property into both
nominalist and
a
nominalist about arithmetic would reject the inference on account of her refusal to take number talk at face value.
For Rorty, as a
nominalist, such abstractions are precisely the problem, and Hall's insistence on entertaining them betrays his unwillingness to follow Rorty all the way down the path of nominalism.
Acknowledging food and water security as primary would require shifting focus away from a
nominalist view of security towards strategic essentialism (some security scholars would be more accepting of this than others).
To give but one example, let us consider how Borges in "Examen de metaforas" from Inquisiciones--in other words long before he would come to embrace his much better-known
nominalist critique of language--describes the purpose of words and concepts.
