r/Plato • u/Agreeable_Natural_36 • 21d ago

Question Nominalism

Recently discovered nominalism through one person who wrote he is one in a comment section of a video.

After a quick search nominalism seemed like an enemy of Platonism.

I want to know what are their objections and arguments and more importantly what are the responses and arguments from the side of platonism.

Sorry if this is a bit too off topic.

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u/Nicoglius 21d ago

I did a bit about this during my UG so I am a bit rusty.

Basically, the idea is that there are no real "properties" and that the world is just full of particulars. The Unique Selling Point of nominalism is that it is meant to be more parsimonious than platonism: No abstract entities (e.g. "red" "love" "7" "softness") are required to explain the universe. Instead, a bunch of things happen to fall under this label.

One of the main objections is called something like the "sky blue museum", which is a thought experiment imagining if somebody managed to curate every sky blue object into a single museum. It would be weird to suggest blueness and being in this museum are somehow the same.

I also vaguely remember I was quite proud of my own original objection I came up with (which is why I consider myself platonist today), which went something like: Nominalism can't really capture transitive relations without adding in extra rules which ontologically being just as costly as platonism, at which point, you may as well just be platonist.

Also, worth noting that some property nominalists are platonistic about numbers (even though, we may think of numbers as another related, abstract object) e.g. Quine

Also Also worth noting that most contemporary philosophers (particularly in the anglosphere) who call themselves platonist won't really support a world of the forms etc. and it is this modern, small-p platonism which is the rival of nominalism.