nominalism
1
9.9
- noun
- /ˈnɑːmɪnəlɪzəm/
- Formal
:
nominalismo
- The doctrine of nominalism asserts that universals exist only as names for groups of individual objects.
- nominalism and realism
Examples
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Such is nominalism as traditionally understood in Western philosophy.
Academic text (2001) -
But I also would guess that nominalism doesn't play into this at all.
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So there are various brands of nominalism, as you know.
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The philosophical position that he took was a form of nominalism.
Academic text (2012) -
Among other harms, this nominalism encourages a purely political relation to contested views.
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You don't have to believe in nominalism or General Semantics to see when arguments about words aren't getting anywhere.
Blog text (12) -
The structure of the disciplines' argument is a form of moderate nominalism, which sees knowledge as a creation of human intelligence as much as the apprehension of an objective reality.
Academic text (1992) -
As they have noted, the most distinctive traits of Mauthner's ideas about language are his nominalism and his epistemological skepticism.
Academic text (2003) -
In the years immediately preceding the convocations at Trent, nominalism was rampant in the theological disciplines.
Academic text (1991) -
In American feminism, what I would call a near-Hobbesian stance of nominalism is captured by Gayatri Spivak when she argues in "Feminism and Critical Theory" that "no rigorous definition of anything is ultimately possible;" definitions are always provisional.
Academic text (2001)
Surface Forms
Morphology
nominalism = nominal (opaque) = nomin + al + ism
Although the word is formally built from 'nominal' + '-ism', the philosophical sense is specialized and not fully predictable from the base word alone.
Etymology
The word nominalism comes from the Latin root nomen, which means 'name', and the ending -ism, meaning 'belief'. So, nominalism is the idea that general things like 'redness' are only names and not real things on their own.