Is There a Nomenclature?

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Nominalism is a denial of reality for abstractions that other people might think are real. Certain kinds of nominalists think, if you're going to deny that something exists, you can't say, no, there are blows. I'm not that kind of nominalist. I think you can talk about them. And so there's a very kind of subtle interplay in the language and it's part of the reason why we have distinct words like exist, real and ere is. All those words can be used at times to in a light weight way. But then sometimes when we want to indicate what's real, we use them contrastivly good. That's an illustration

Are numbers real? What does that even mean? You can’t kick a number. But you can talk about numbers in useful ways, and we use numbers to talk about the real world. There’s surely a kind of reality there. On the other hand, Luke Skywalker isn’t a real person, but we talk about him all the time. Maybe we can talk about unreal things in useful ways. Jody Azzouni is one of the leading contemporary advocates of nominalism, the view that abstract objects are not “things,” they are merely labels we use in talking about things. A deeply philosophical issue, but one that has implications for how we think about physics and the laws of nature.

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Jody Azzouni received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the City University of New York. He is currently a professor of philosophy at Tufts University. In addition to his philosophical work, he is an active writer of fiction and poetry.

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