Nominalism, Realism, Conceptualism

These terms are used to designate the theories that have been proposed as

solutions of one of the most important questions in philosophy, often referred to

as the problem of universals, which, while it was a favourite subject for

discussion in ancient times, and especially in the Middle Ages, is still prominent

in modern and contemporary philosophy. We propose to discuss in this article:

I. The Nature of the Problem and the Suggested Solutions;

II. The Principal Historic Forms of Nominalism, Realism, and

Conceptualism;

III. The Claims of Moderate Realism.

I. THE PROBLEM AND THE SUGGESTED SOLUTIONS

The problem of universals is the problem of the correspondence of our intellectual

concepts to things existing outside our intellect. Whereas external objects are

determinate, individual, formally exclusive of all multiplicity, our concepts or

mental representations offer us the realities independent of all particular

determination; they are abstract and universal. The question, therefore, is to

discover to what extent the concepts of the mind correspond to the things they

represent; how the flower we conceive represents the flower existing in nature; in

a word, whether our ideas are faithful and have an objective reality.

Four solutions of the problem have been offered. It is necessary to describe them

carefully, as writers do not always use the terms in the same sense.

A. Exaggerated Realism

Exaggerated Realism holds that there are universal concepts in the mind and

universal things in nature. There is, therefore, a strict parallelism between the

being in nature and the being in thought, since the external object is clothed with

the same character of universality that we discover in the concept. This is a

simple solution, but one that runs counter to the dictates of common sense.

B. Nominalism

Exaggerated Realism invents a world of reality corresponding exactly to the

attributes of the world of thought. Nominalism, on the contrary, models the

concept on the external object, which it holds to be individual and particular.

Nominalism consequently denies the existence of abstract and universal

concepts, and refuses to admit that the intellect has the power of engendering

them. What are called general ideas are only names, mere verbal designations,

serving as labels for a collection of things or a series of particular events. Hence

the term Nominalism. Neither Exaggerated Realism nor Nominalism finds any

difficulty in establishing a correspondance between the thing in thought and the

thing existing in nature, since in different ways, they both postulate perfect

harmony between the two. The real difficulty appears when we assign different

attributes to the thing in nature and to the thing in thought; if we hold that the one

is individual and the other universal. An antinomy then arises between the world

of reality and world as represented in the mind, and we are led to inquire how the

general notion of flower conceived by the mind is applicable to the particular and

determinate flowers of nature.

C. Conceptualism

Conceptualism admits the existence within us of abstract and universal concepts

(whence its name), but it holds that we do not know whether or not the mental

objects have any foundation outside our minds or whether in nature the individual

objects possess distributively and each by itself the realities which we conceive

as realized in each of them. The concepts have an ideal value; they have no real

value, or at least we do not know whether they have a real value.

D. Moderate Realism

Moderate Realism, finally, declares that there are universal concepts

representing faithfully realities that are not universal.

How can there be harmony between the former and the latter? The

latter are particular, but we have the power of representing them to

ourselves abstractly. Now the abstract type, when the intellect

considers it reflectively and contrasts it with the particular subjects

in which it is realized or capable of being realized, is attributable

indifferently to any and all of them. This applicability of the abstract

type to the individuals is its universality. (Mercier, "Critériologie",

Louvain, 1906, p. 343).

II. THE PRINCIPAL HISTORICAL FORMS OF NOMINALISM, REALISM, AND

CONCEPTUALISM

A. In Greek Philosophy

The conciliation of the one and the many, the changing and the permanent, was

a favourite problem with the Greeks; it leads to the problem of universals. The

typical affirmation of Exaggerated Realism, the most outspoken ever made,

appears in Plato's philosophy; the real must possess the attributes of necessity,

universality, unity, and immutability which are found in our intellectual

representations. And as the sensible world contains only the contingent, the

particular, the unstable, it follows that the real exists outside and above the

sensible world. Plato calls it eîdos, idea. The idea is absolutely stable and exists

by itself (óntos ón; autá kath' autá), isolated from the phenomenal world, distinct

from the Divine and human intellect. Following logically the directive principles of

his Realism, Plato makes an idea entity correspond to each of our abstract

representations. Not only natural species (man, horse) but artificial products

(bed), not only substances (man) but properties (white, just), relations (double,

triple), and even negations and nothingness have a corresponding idea in the

suprasensible world. "What makes one and one two, is a participation of the

dyad (dúas), and what makes one one is a participation of monad (mónas)in

unity" (Phædo, lxix). The exaggerated Realism of Plato, investing the real

being with the attributes of the being in thought, is the principal doctrine of his

metaphysics.

Aristotle broke away from these exaggerated views of his master and

formulated the main doctrines of Moderate Realism. The real is not, as Plato

says, some vague entity of which the sensible world is only the shadow; it

dwells in the midst of the sensible world. Individual substance (this man, that

horse) alone has reality; it alone can exist. The universal is not a thing in itself;

it is immanent in individuals and is multiplied in all the representatives of a

class. As to the form of universality of our concepts (man, just), it is a product

of our subjective consideration. The objects of our generic and specific

representations can certainly be called substances (ousíai), when they

designate the fundamental reality (man) with the accidental determinations

(just, big); but these are deúterai ousíai (second substances), and by that

Aristotle means precisely that this attribute of universality which affects the

substance as in thought does not belong to the substance (thing in itself); it is

the outcome of our subjective elaboration. This theorem of Aristotle, which

completes the metaphysics of Heraclitus (denial of permanent) by means of

that of Parmenides (denial of change), is the antithesis of Platonism, and may

be considered one of the finest pronouncements of Peripateticism. It was

through this wise doctrine that the Stagyrite exercised his ascendency over all

later thought.

After Aristotle Greek philosophy formulated a third answer to the problem of

universals, Conceptualism. This solution appears in the teaching of the Stoics,

which, as is known, ranks with Platonism and Aristoteleanism among the three

original systems of the great philosophic age of the Greeks. Sensation is the

principle of all knowledge, and thought is only a collective sensation. Zeno

compared sensation to an open hand with the fingers separated; experience or

multiple sensation to the open hand with the fingers bent; the general concept

born of experience to the closed fist. Now, concepts, reduced to general

sensations, have as their object, not the corporeal and external thing reached

by the senses (túgchanon), but the lektóon or the reality conceived; whether

this has any real value we do not know. The Aristotelean School adopted

Aristotelean Realism, but the neo-Platonists subscirbed to the Platonic theory

of ideas which they transformed into an emanationistic and monistic

concepton of the universe.

B. In the Philosophy of the Middle Ages

For a long time it was thought that the problem of universals monopolized the

attention of the philosophers of the Middle Ages, and that the dispute of the

Nominalists and Realists absorbed all their energies. In reality that question,

although prominent in the Middle Ages, was far from being the only one dealt

with by these philosophers.

(1) From the commencement of the middle ages till the end of the 12th

century.--It is impossible to classify the philosophers of the beginning of the

Middle Ages exactly as Nominalists, Moderate and Exaggerated Realists, or

Conceptualists. And the reason is that the problem of the Universals is very

complex. It not merely involves the metaphysics of the individual and of the

universal, but also raises important questions in ideology--questions about the

genesis and validity of knowledge. But the earlier Scholastics, unskilled in

such delicate matters, did not perceive these various aspects of the problem.

It did not grow up spontaneously in the Middle Ages; it was bequeathed in a

text of porphyry's "Isagoge", a text that seemed simple and innocent, though

somewhat obscure, but one which force of circumstances made the necessary

starting-point of the earliest medieval speculations about the Universals.

Porphyry divides the problem into three parts:

Do genera and species exist in nature, or do they consist in mere

products of the intellect?

If they are things apart from the mind, are they coporeal or incorporeal

things?

Do they exist outside the (individual) things of sense, or are they

realized in the latter?

"Mox de generibus et speciebus illud quidem sive subsistant sive in nudis

intelluctibus posita sint, sive subsistentia corporalia sint an incorporalia, et

utrum separata a senaibilibus an in sensibilibus posita er circa haec

subsistentia, decere recusabo." Historically, the first of those questions was

discussed prior to the others: the latter could have arisen only in the event of

denying an exclusively subjective character to universal realities. Now the first

question was whether genera and species are objective realities or not: sive

subsistant, sive in nudis intellectibus posita sint? In other words, the sole point

in debate was the absolute reality of the universals: their truth, their relation to

the understanding, was not in question. The text from Porphyry, apart from

the solution he elsewhere proposed in works unknown to the early

Scholastics, is an inadequate statement of the question; for it takes account

only of the objective aspect and neglects the psychological standpoint which

alone can give the key to the true solution. Moreover, Porphyry, after

proposing his triple interrogation in the "Isagoge", refuses to offer an answer

(dicere recusabo). Boëthius, in his two commentaries, gives replies that are

vague and scarecely consistent. In the second comentary, which is the more

important one, he holds that genera and species are both subsistentia and

intellecta (1st question), the similarity of things being the basis (subjectum)

both of their individuality in nature and their universality in the mind: that

genera and species are incorporeal not by nature but by abstraction (2nd

question), and that they exist both inside and outside the things of sense (3rd

question).

This was not sufficiently clear for beginners, though we can see in it the basis

of the Aristotlean solution of the problem. The early Scholastics faced the

problem as proposed by Porphyry: limiting the controversy to genera and

species, and its solutions to the altenatives suggested by the first question: Do

objects of concepts (i.e., genera and species) exist in nature (subsistentia),

or are they mere abstractions (nuda intelecta)? Are they, or are they not,

things? Those who replied in the affirmative got the name of Reals or Realists;

the others that of Nominals or Nominalists. The former or the Realist, more

numerous in the early Middle Ages (Fredugisus, Rémy d'Auxerre, and John

Scotus Eriugena in the ninth century, Gerbert and Odo of Tournai in the

Tenth, and William of Chapeaux in the twelfth) attribute to each species a

universal essence (subsistentia), to which all the subordinate individuals are

tributary.

The Nominalists, who should be called rather the anti-Realists, assert on the

contrary that the individual alone exists, and that the universals are not things

realized in the universal state in nature, or subsistentia. And as they adopt the

alternative of Porphyry, they conclude that the universals are nuda intellecta

(that is, purely intellectual representations).

It may be that Roscelin of Compiègne did not go beyond these energetic

protest against Realism, and that he is not a Nominalist in the exact sense we

have attributed to the word above, for we have to depend on others for an

expression of his views, as there is extant no text of his which would justify us

in saying that he denied the intellect the power of forming general concepts,

distinct in their nature from sensation. Indeed, it is difficult to comprehend how

Nominalism could exist at all in the Middle Ages, as it is possible only in a

sensist philosophy that denies all natural distinction between sensation and the

intellectual concept. Futhermore there is little evidence of Sensism in the

Middle Ages, and, as Sensism and Scholasticism, so also Nominalism and

Scholasticism are mutually exclusive. The different anti-Realist system anterior

to the thirteenth century are in fact only more or less imperfect forms of the

Moderate Realism towards which efforts of the first period were tending,

phases through which the same idea passed in its organic evolution. These

stages are numerous, and several have been studied in recent monograph (e.g.

the doctrine of Adélard of Bath, of Gauthier de Mortagne, Indifferentism, and

the theory of the collectio). The decisive stage is marked by Abélard,

(1079-1142), who points out clearly the role abstraction, and how we

represent to ourselves elements common to different things, capable of

realization in an indefinite number of individuals of the same species, while the

individual alone exists. >From that to Moderate Realism there is but a step; it

was sufficient to show that a real fundamentum allows us to attribute the

general represention to individual thing. It is impossibe to say who was the

first in the twelfth century to develop the theory in its entirety. Moderate

Realism appears fully in the writing of John of Salisbury.

C. From the thirteenth Century

In the thirteenth century all the great Scholastics solved the problem of the

universals by the theory of Moderate Realism (Thomas Aquinas,

Bonaventure, Duns Scotus), and are thus in accord with Averroes and

Avicenna, the great Arab commentators of Aristotle, whose works hasd

recently passed into circulation by means of tranlations. St. Thomas

formulates the doctrine of Moderate Realism in precise language, and for that

reason alone we can give the name of Thomistic Realism to this doctrine (see

below). With William of Occam and the Terminist School appear the strictly

conceptualist solution of the problem. The abstract and universal concept is a

sign (signum), also called a term (terminus; hence the name Terminism

given to the system), but it has no real value, for the absract and the universl

do not exist in any way in nature and have no fundamentum outside the mind.

The universal concept (intentio secunda) has as it object internal

representations, formed by the understanding, to which nothing external

corresponding can be attributed. The role of the universals is to serve as a

label, to hold the place (supponere) in the mind of multitude of things which it

can be attributed. Occam's Conceptualism would be frankly subjectivistic, if,

together with the abstract concepts which reach the individual thing, as it

exists in nature.

D. In Modern and Contemporary Philosophy

We find an unequivocal affirmation of Nominalism in Positivism. For Hume,

Stuart Mill, Spencer, and Taine there is strictly speaking no universal concept.

The notion, to which we lend universality, is only a collection of individual

perceptions, a collective sensation, "un nom compris" (Taine), "a term in

habitual association with many other particular ideas" (Hume), "un savoir

potentiel emmagasiné" (Ribot). The problem of the correspondence of the

concept to reality is thus at once solved, or rather it is suppressed and

replaced by the psycological question: What is the origin of the illusion that

induces us to attribute a distinct nature to the general concept, though the

latter is only an elaborated sensation? Kant distinctly affirms the existence

within us of abstract and general notions and the distinction between them and

sensations, but these doctrines are joined with a characteristic Phonmenalism

which constitutes the most original form of modern Conceptualism. Universal

and necessary representations have no contact with external things, sinct they

are produced exclusively by the structual functions (a priori forms) of our

mind. Time and space, in which we frame all sensible impressions,cannot be

obtained from expierence, which is individual and contigent; they are

schemata which arise from our mental organization. Consequently, we have

no warrant for establishing a real correspondence between the world of

reality. Science, which is only an elaboration of the data of sense in

accordance with other structural determinations of the mind (the categories),

becomes a subjective poem, which has value only for us and not for a world

outside us. A modern form of Platonic or Exaggerated Realism is found in the

ontologist doctrine defended by certain Catholic philosophers in the middle of

the nineteenth century, and which consist in identifying the objects of universal

ideas with the Divine ideas or the archetypes on which the world was

fashioned. As to Moderate Realism, it remains the doctrine of all those who

have returned to Aristotleanism or adopted the neo-Scholastic philosophy.

III. THE CLAIMS OF MODERATE REALISM

This system reconciles the characteristics of external objects (particularity)

with those of our intellectual representations (universality), and explains why

science, though made up of abstract notions, is valid for the world of reality.

To understand this it suffices to grasp the real meaning of abstraction. When

the mind apprehends the essence of a thing (quod quid est; tò tí en eînai), the

external object is perceived without the particular notes which attach to it in

nature (esse in singularibus), and it is not yet marked with the attribute of

generality which reflection will bestow on it (esse in intellectu). The abstract

reality is apprehended with perfect indifference as regards both the individual

state without and the universal state within: abstrahit ab utroque esse,

secundum quam considerationem considerattur natura lapidis vel cujus

cumque alterius, quantum ad ea tantum quæ per se competunt illi naturæ (St

Tomas, "Quodlibeta", Q. i, a. 1). Now, what is thus conceived in the absolute

state (absolute considerando) is nothing else than the reality incarnate in any

give individual: in truth, the reality, represented in my concept of man, is in

Socrates or in Plato. There is nothing in the abstract concept that is not

applicable to every individual; if the abstract concept is inadequate, because it

does not contain the singular notes of each being, it is none the less faithful, or

at least its abstract character does not prevent it from corresponding faithfully

to the objects existing in nature. As to the universal form of the concept, a

moment's consideration shows that it is subsequent to the abstraction and is

the fruit of reflection: "ratio speciei accidit naturæ humanæ". Whence it follows

that the universality of the concept as such is the work purely of the intellect:

"unde intellectus est qui facit universalitatem in rebus" (St. Thomas, "De ente

et essentia," iv).

Concerning Nominalism, Conceptualism, and Exaggerated Realism, a few

general considerations must suffice. Nominalism, which is irreconcilable with a

spiritualistic philosophy and for that very reason with scholasticism as well,

presupposes the ideological theory that the abstract concept does not differ

essentially from sensation, of which it is only a transformation. The

Nominalism of Hume, Stuart Mill, Spencer, Huxley, and Taine is of no greater

value than their ideology. The confound essentially distinct logical

operations--the simple decomposition of sensible or empirical representations

with abstraction properly so called and sensible analogy with the process of

universalization. The Aristotleans recognize both of these mental operations,

but they distinguish carefully between them. As to Kant, all the bounds that

might connect the concept with the external world are destroyed in his

Phenomenalism. Kant is unable to explain why one and the same sensible

impression starts or sets in operation now this, now that category; his a priori

forms are unintelligible according to his own principles, since they are beyond

experience. Moreover, he confuses real time and space, limited like the things

they develop, with ideal or abstract time and space, which alone are general

and without limit. For in truth we do not create wholesale the object of our

knowledge, but we beget it within us under the causal influence of the object

that reveals itself to us. Ontologism, which is akin to Platonic Realism,

arbitrarily identifies the ideal types in our intellect, which come to us from the

sensible world by means of abstraction, with the ideal types consubstantial

with the essence of God. Now, when we form our first abstract ideas we do

not yet know God. We are so ignorant of Him that we must employ these first

ideas to prove a posteriori His existence. Ontologism has lived its life, and our

age so enamoured of observation and experiment will scarcely return to the

dreams of Plato.

Maurice De Wulf

Transcribed by Drake Woodside, Atom M. Eckhardt, and Yaqoob Mohyuddin

The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume XI

Nihil Obstat, February 1, 1911. Remy Lafort, S.T.D., Censor

Imprimatur. +John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York

The Catholic Encyclopedia: NewAdvent.org