POPc Particpant Alisa:
Alisa’s Post:
I think any conversation about nominalism should begin with cognition and language. The ideas we have *of* objects are a product of the way we represent the world--the ideas we have *about* objects should then be descriptive, not prescriptive. Everything we are able to think is an abstraction: all objects, concrete and not, are abstractions. Some of these are constructed from embodied experience and others through rational deliberation, or even intuition. When we refer, we refer to these ideas we have of things, and not to things-in-themselves.
Shottenkirk’s Reply to Alisa:
Yes, I agree, though it is not the traditional way of doing business. Traditionally, metaphysics (and ontology) were thought to be both separate from and prior to epistemology. So one was to make a commitment to what the world was (e.g., whether there were universals or whether nominalism ruled) and then decide how it was that we got knowledge of that world. I agree with you though (and we are not alone though the club is small!) that one can’t make a commitment to a metaphysics without at the same time employing epistemic processes which are constuctionalist. It is one of the things I think Goodman got right – that fact that we construct reality. I think much else of what he said was just bombastic and didactic, but that’s for another conversation. And speaking of Kant, Goodman did claim it was Kant who originally pulled us to that constructionalist point of view with the Kantian distinction between the thing-in-itself and phenomenal reality. Except that Goodman, like I believe you and certainly me, did not think we were piggy-backing on the ontological foundation of the idealist and fundamentally real thing-in-itself. Yep, I’m with you. We’ve only got what we’ve somehow made.