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    Made withinDC&Austin
    Nominalists can reject the One Over Many argument regardl... — Carmelics
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    Home/Skepticism
    HistoryEditSee Inverse

    Nominalists can reject the One Over Many argument regardless of which nominalist view they adopt

    Skepticism
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    2 reasons for
    1 reason against

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Quine and Goodman's nominalist program shows predicate application can be explained purely through syntactic and mereological relations without abstract entities.
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    • 2.If nominalists can give a complete account of predicate-sharing through physical or linguistic structure alone, the Platonist explanatory appeal to universals becomes redundant rather than informative.
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    • 3.An explanation is uninformative precisely when it posits entities whose explanatory role can be fully discharged by the explanandum's own structural features, as Occam's razor demands.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Rodriguez-Pereyra's resemblance nominalism demonstrates that the One Over Many can be dissolved by grounding predicate application in primitive resemblance relations among particulars.
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    • 2.If primitive resemblance among concrete particulars is itself no more mysterious than the primitive instantiation relation Platonists must posit, the Platonist explanation offers no genuine explanatory gain.
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    • 3.Any nominalist view that identifies an equally fundamental but ontologically cheaper base for predication thereby removes the explanatory asymmetry the One Over Many argument requires.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
    ?
    • 1.The One Over Many argument claims that (P) explains (N)
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    • 2.The Platonist explanation (P) is uninformative as an explanation of (N) on any nominalist view
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    • 3.Even fictionalist nominalists who deny that (P) is equivalent to (N) can still charge the explanation with being uninformative
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    Connections

    1 topic

    Natural Theology1 linked

    Related

    An explanation is uninformative precisely when it posits entities whose explanat...Any nominalist view that identifies an equally fundamental but ontologically che...Even fictionalist nominalists who deny that (P) is equivalent to (N) can still c...If nominalists can give a complete account of predicate-sharing through physical...
    +5 moreShow less
    If primitive resemblance among concrete particulars is itself no more mysterious...Quine and Goodman's nominalist program shows predicate application can be explai...Rodriguez-Pereyra's resemblance nominalism demonstrates that the One Over Many c...The One Over Many argument claims that (P) explains (N)The Platonist explanation (P) is uninformative as an explanation of (N) on any n...

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    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: platonism
    View source passageHide passage
    Whichever view nominalists adopt here, they can respond to the One Over Many argument — i.e., to the claim that we can explain (N) by endorsing (P) — in the same way, namely, by pointing out that as an explanation of (N), (P) is completely uninformative. Even if nominalists endorse a fictionalist view according to which (P) is not equivalent to (N), they can still say that the above explanation is uninformative, because it really just says that gluons are G because they possess a nature that mak
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (2 for, 1 against)
    Edits
    1 edit