A Common Sense Defence of Ostrich Nominalism
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A Common Sense Defence of Ostrich Nominalism Jean-Baptiste Guillon 1 Received: 20 September 2019 / Revised: 25 March 2020 / Accepted: 22 April 2020 # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract When the meta-philosophies of Nominalism and Realism are compared, it is often said that Nominalism is motivated by a methodology of ontological economy, while Realism would be motivated by an appeal to Common Sense. In this paper, I argue that this association is misguided. After briefly comparing the meta-philosophy of Common Sense and the meta-philosophy of economy, I show that the core motivation in favour of Realism relies in fact in a principle of economy which violates the methodology of Common Sense. I conclude that Common Sense philosophers should endorse Nominalism (and more precisely Ostrich Nominalism). Keywords Ostrich nominalism . Common sense . Universals . Ockham’s razor .
Ontological parsimony . Grounding
One way to interpret the opposition between nominalists and realists in ontology is to trace it back to a disagreement in philosophical methodology: nominalists, as Quine famously stated it, “have a taste for desert landscapes” (Quine 1953), a certain “aesthetic sense”, which they will usually formulate as a principle of ontological economy, or “Ockham’s razor”. Realists, on the other hand, typically view themselves as starting their arguments with obvious facts, data of common sense, or “Moorean facts”. As Armstrong says, the fact that is central in establishing realism, namely “the fact of sameness of type, is a Moorean fact” (Armstrong 1980, 441), and in distinguishing it from “sameness of token”, “[philosophers] are only formalizing, making explicit, a distinction which ordinary language (and so, ordinary thought) perfectly recognizes” (ibid.). This is also how Quine understood the realist’s motivation; in “On What There Is”, Quine has the realist (McX) say the following: “There are
* Jean-Baptiste Guillon [email protected]
1
Departamento de Filosofia, Universidad de Navarra, 31009 Pamplona, Navarra, Spain
Philosophia
red houses, red roses and red sunsets; this much is prephilosophical common sense in which we must all agree. These houses, roses, and sunsets, then, have something in common; and this which they have in common is all I mean by the attribute of redness.” (Quine 1953, 9–10). And he concludes: “For McX, thus, there being attributes is even more obvious and trivial than the obvious and trivial fact of there being red houses, roses, and sunsets.” (ibid.). To sum up, there are (at least) two different methodologies one can adopt in metaphysics: if you adopt a principle of ontological economy (inspired by Ockham), all chances are that you will want to eliminate universals out of your landscape, and will end up a nominalist; if you adopt a principle of common sense (inspired by Moore), all chances are that you will end up a realist. Or so goes a traditional understanding of the debate. In this paper, I want to challenge this traditional interpretation. First, I will try to show that re
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