Nominalism and its aftermath. The philosophy of Nelson Goodman (Q5962300)

Nelson Goodman's philosophy is presented as a coherent whole connected to his seminal book ``The structure of appearance'' (1951). The author calls it the fundamental precept of her book ``that Goodman is, more than anything else, a nominalist, granting only entities of the lowest ontological kind, necessitating, for example, a definition of `property' as the typically repeated pattern of qualia exhibited by an object, instead of an essentialist trait'' (p.\ viii). Goodman's position has consequences for his theory of abstract objects, and, with this, of the nature of mathematical objects, as well. The author characterizes the difference between nominalism and realism as a modern variation of the medieval problem of the universals. The question is whether generalities which govern our understanding of particular objects are universals with the status of mind-independent entities. The realist would affirm this, whereas the nominalist only accepts individuals. Goodman's strict version of nominalism starts from ``qualia'', ``the presented particular quality specifying color, place, and time'' (p.~19), as ontological primitives. He denies the existence of abstract objects, classes, properties, meaning accounts, and fictive entities. The author shows that Goodman's constructionalist epistemology can only be understood on the basis of these metaphysical convictions. The same holds for his theory of aesthetics.