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    Carmelics

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
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    Home/Original/inverse
    See Original
    Inverse View

    It is not the case that The Quine-Devitt scientific explanation strategy does not resolve the One Over Many problem for nominalists, but merely relocates it.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.If a nominalist explains why object a is F by appealing to the fact that a is G and all Fs are Gs, the nominalist must then explain why a is G without appealing to the property of Gness.
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    • 2.Scientific explanations of predicative facts follow this pattern: explaining that a is F by citing a more fundamental predicate G.
      ?

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    • 3.Each such explanation generates a new instance of the same explanatory demand the nominalist was originally trying to satisfy.
      ?

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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Quine's criterion of ontological commitment requires that predicates appearing in canonical scientific notation carry no ontological weight unless bound by existential quantifiers.
      ?

      Think about whether this reason is strong or weak

    • 2.Yet Devitt's ostrich nominalism must still account for why distinct predicate tokens 'F', 'F', 'F' apply to the same objects—a sameness that is not itself expressible without quantifying over a shared feature.
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      Think about whether this reason is strong or weak

    • 3.This sameness-of-application demand is precisely the One Over Many problem restated in metalinguistic terms, confirming relocation rather than dissolution.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Armstrong's argument in 'Universals and Scientific Realism' demonstrates that any nomological explanation of the form 'a is F because all Gs are F' presupposes a real connection between the properties G and F.
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      Think about whether this reason is strong or weak

    • 2.Nominalist paraphrase strategies that eliminate property-talk from object-level discourse must reintroduce something functionally equivalent at the level of laws or natural kinds to preserve the explanatory structure.
      ?

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    • 3.A problem that must be reintroduced at a higher explanatory level to preserve theoretical adequacy has not been solved but merely displaced upward in the regress.
      ?

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