Meaning (frag) 1909

1.27      G-1909-1
5.385n*

  27. Many philosophers call their variety of nominalism,
"conceptualism"; but it is essentially the same thing; and
their not seeing that it is so is but another example of that
loose and slapdash style of thinking that has made it possible
for them to remain nominalists. Their calling their
"conceptualism" a middle term between realism and nominalism is
itself an example in the very matter to which nominalism
relates. For while the question between nominalism and
realism is, in its nature, susceptible of but two answers: yes and
no, they make an idle and irrelevant point which had been
thoroughly considered by all the great realists; and instead of

 * From " Essays on Meaning, " June, 1909.
|p9

drawing a valid distinction, as they suppose, only repeat the
very same confusion of thought which made them nominalists.
The question was whether all properties, laws of nature, and
predicates of more than an actually existent subject are,
without exception, mere figments or not.* The conceptualists seek
to wedge in a third position conflicting with the principle of
excluded middle. They say, " Those universals are real,
indeed; but they are only real thoughts." So much may be
said of the philosopher's stone. To give that answer
constitutes a man a nominalist. Are the laws of nature, and that
property of gold by which it will yield the purple of Cassius,
no more real than the philosopher's stone? No, the
conceptualists admit that there is a difference; but they say that the
laws of nature and the properties of chemical species are
results of thinking. The great realists had brought out all the
truth there is in that much more distinctly long before modern
conceptualism appeared in the world. They showed that the
general is not capable of full actualization in the world of
action and reaction but is of the nature of what is thought, but
that our thinking only apprehends and does not create thought,
and that that thought may and does as much govern outward
things as it does our thinking. But those realists did not fall
into any confusion between the real fact of having a dream and
the illusory object dreamed. The conceptualist doctrine is an
undisputed truism about thinking, while the question between
nominalists and realists relates to thoughts, that is, to the
ob.jects which thinking enables us to know.

  * It must not be imagined that any notable realist of the thirteenth or
fourteenth century took the ground that any "universal" was what we in English
should call a " thing," as it seems that, in an earlier age, some realists and some
nominalists, too, had done; though perhaps it is not quite certain that they did
so, their writings being lost. Their very definition of a "universal" admits that
it is of the same generic nature as a word, namely, is: "Quod natum optum est
paedicari de pluribus." Neither was it their doctrine that any "universal"
itself is real. They might, indeed, some of them, think so; but their realism did
not consist in that opinion, but in holding that what the word signifies, in
contradistinction to what it can be truly said of, is real. Anybody may happen
to opine that "the" is a real English word; but that will not constitute him a
realist. But if he thinks that, whether the word "hard" itself be real or not,
the property, the character, the predicate, hardness, is not invented by men, as
the word is, but is reaUy and truly in the hard things and is one in them all,
as a description of habit, disposition, or behavior, then he is a realist.