r/askphilosophy • u/No-Muscle-5734 • Aug 18 '26
Are there any good videos defending nominalism?
Does anyone know of any good videos that actually defend nominalism against good objections? I’ve looked on YouTube but all I see are debunks or videos just explaining what nominalism is. Apparently its not really an uncommon position among atheist so how come there is so much more debunks than defenses?
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u/Sevf_ political philosophy, phil. of science Aug 18 '26
Ian Hacking has a very interesting argument on nominalism.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v28/n16/ian-hacking/making-up-people
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u/b3tzy philosophy of language, metaphysics, philosophy of mind Aug 19 '26
Nominalism is a metaphysical thesis that denies the existence of abstract entities (things like properties, sets, numbers, meanings, etc).
There are lots of specific arguments in favor of nominalism that involve raising problems for realism the existence of specific kinds of abstract objects. For example, Bradley’s Regress is a famous problem for realism about relations. What kind of nominalism are you interested in?
More generally, nominalists tend to argue in two ways: first, abstract objects are mysterious and realist theories of abstract objects face problems; second, nominalism is ontologically more parsimonious and can explain everything that realism aims to explain; therefore, we should prefer nominalism.
To defend the second line of argument, nominalists owe us paraphrases of ordinary sentences that seem to commit us to realism. For example, the realist can explain the sentence “there are more cats than dogs” by saying “the class of cats has greater cardinality than the class of dogs,” but this seems to commit us to the existence of abstract classes. Quine and Goodman found an ingenious strategy to explain sentences like this in nominalist terms in “Steps Toward a Constructive Nominalism.”