About Nominalism, Realism, Logic and Linguistic Philosophy

Logicians with linguistic philosophy tend to avoid make errors with words. There are various forms of symbolic logic, like predicate, propositional and term for instance. The entire point about formal logic is that valid statements need be technically supported. Though syllogistic logic isn’t symbolic logic- syllogisms are classical, there are 256 possible forms of syllogism and only 23 are valid forms. With words and thinking with words one realizes that words too need be supported as one considers propositions about things; such as ‘the sky is blue’ or ‘oceans have a lot of water’. A proposition in logic is a statement that is either true or false.

The philosophy of language is a fascinating subject. W.V.O. Quine in Ontological Relativity covered a lot of ground and discussed Saul Kripke’s book ‘Naming and Necessity’. In that book Kripke basically considered the nature of words and their meaning and if names are realist or nominal. That is do names and words have meanings that are just made or created with use and change or disappear over time, or do they have a real meaning independently of the use that lasts. For example will the name Winston Churchill mean anything in 1000 years. Kripke was a neo-realist. I tend to opt for Quine’s view of nominalism. It does make a difference though- Plato’s Republic and the theory of forms was based on realism rather than nominalism. The debate has continued about 2500 years in all sorts of fields and modern ideas about truth values- there actually are several theories of truth formally defining what it is. I tend to like disquotation theory that is a kind of verification paradigm. One says that A is A and one verifies that it is the case that A is A. Language is of practical value in communication and that can just be what is useful. Christian theological ideas are different than secular ideas though. Jesus is Truth because God is the source of everything- so in that context God is the only truth and everything else is contingent or emergent and partial lol.

One other point though- words and language exist in mind rather than in nature. Water doesn’t have a label on its molecules that say hydrogen or oxygen and water doesn’t have an implicit water label on it- people make up those words

I wanted to point out my technical error, that I did correct, in writing noumenal rather than nominal. That was something like a complex typo; I am more used to discussing Kant’s noumenon and phenomenal relationships rather than nominalism. Nominalism versus realism is the language debate. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason began a technical exploration of what it is that one perceives of the world that probably started with Plato. Kant named the things that one perceives phenomenal, and the things that a human cannot ever perceive, noumenal. Sartre made up terms like in-itself, for-itself and for-others etc. And I believe those are consistent with Kant’s categories of noumenon, and phenomenon.