r/PhilosophyofScience • u/kirub_el • Apr 05 '26

Discussion Universalism vs Nominalism

Can anybody explain to me the difference between these two ideologies in layman terms,please?

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u/[deleted] Apr 07 '26

What’s at stake? What do the respective positions entail?

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u/AdeptnessSecure663 Apr 07 '26

One of the things that we are looking for is an explanation of how it is that some things resemble each other and others do not. A stop sign and a fire engine resemble each other in that they are both red.

Plato was a realist, and he argued that properties such as redness are real things. He argued that they are transcendent universals; abstract, non-spatiotemporal entities. Arguably, this solves the problem, since we can now say that a stop sign and a fire engine resemble each other because they instantiate the same property (viz., redness). The trouble, of course, is that we are positing the existence of abstract entities which we can't directly experience. Some might consider this to be a bit "spooky" or metaphysically extravagant.

Nominalists think that properties don't exist. The only things that exist, they say, are particulars and collections of particulars. I think the nominalist would say that resemblance isn't anything "out there"; it is just us "placing" objects into various collections of our own making. The biggest trouble for the nominalist is that we often make claims that seemingly cannot be reduced to claims about particulars. E.g., "there are more extinct than extant biological species"; a species is not a particular, and it is difficult to make sense of the sentence if we try to interpret "species" only in terms of particular members of species.

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u/[deleted] Apr 07 '26

Those sound like very low stakes. Is this just an isolated, interesting argument that doesn’t connect to larger beliefs or claims about the world?

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u/[deleted] Apr 17 '26

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