Platonism and the Objects of Science | Dr. Scott Berman
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 4 ก.ค. 2024
- Science has been exceedingly successful. But can we account for the success and objects of science without Platonism? Dr. Scott Berman, author of “Platonism and the Objects of Science” (2020), doesn’t think so. (Enjoy the bonus soccer, too!)
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Scott’s (2020) book, “Platonism and the Objects of Science”, link: www.bloomsbury.com/us/platoni...
Question: Joe, are you a Platonist?
Answer: No and sort of.
No, in that I don't have a solid position in the debate - the literature is vast and I've mainly looked into the literature on models of God, arguments for/against God, and persistence.
Sort of, in that I slightly lean towards realism about (some) abstract objects, and I also slightly lean towards thinking that [contemporary analytic] Platonism is the best realist view.
OUTLINE
0:00 Intro and Outline
4:00 Definitions and Alternative Views
17:45 The Argument for Platonism
18:55 Contra Nominalism
30:39 Contra Contemporary Aristotelianism
41:07 Contra Constructivism
47:23 Contra Classical Aristotelianism
1:00:17 Platonic Account
1:10:30 Some Objections to Platonism
1:10:46 Platonism is Queer
1:16:15 Epistemic Access
1:24:03 Conclusion
1:25:55 Bonus Soccer!
And the usual links:
My book: www.amazon.com/Majesty-Reason...
My website: majestyofreason.wordpress.com/
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@2:40 "I also wanted to write a book ... not only 10 people would read".
I was so prepared for this:
"I wanted to write a book ... that 11 people would read".
First, as a Platonist myself, I think Dr. Berman's arguments against nominalism, contemporary Aristotelianism, and constructivism/conceptualism are all broadly correct. I also think his argument against classical Aristotelianism is right in one sense: there must be a general sense of "existence" that applies univocally across categories. But according to contemporary defenders of the view he's arguing against, like William Vallicella or Kris McDaniel, such a general, univocal sense of "existence" is perfectly compatible with there being different modes of existence, that is, with things existing in different ways. According to Vallicella, this is because 'sense' is a semantic category, while 'way' or 'mode' of existence is ontological. To miss this is to confuse "existence" with existence. It's unfortunate that Berman's argument in chapter 5 doesn't engage with this claim of compatibility, or with Aristotle's own argument for why Being cannot be a genus, and instead only treats best-explanation-style arguments for "classical Aristotelianism".
Secondly, while I know Berman is more interested in the philosophical question ("are there different types of existence?") than in the exegetical question ("did Plato believe in different types of existence?"), I'm not sure I agree with the characterization of Plato as an "ontological monist", i.e., one who does not think there are varieties of Being. To be sure, Plato would have rejected the claim that Forms exist in a lesser, derivative or diminished sense of "existence" than spatiotemporal particulars, but this is not because he held that Forms exist in the same way as particulars, as Berman insists. Rather, it is because he insisted that Forms enjoy a greater degree of being than spatiotemporal particulars, that the former are "that which completely is" (Rep. 477a3), and that spatiotemporal particulars exist in a lesser sense, "between being and non-being" (Rep.479d). Berman is right when he argues that spatiotemporal particulars are complex dynamical systems that lack essences. Particulars only *are* inasmuch as they *partake* of some Form. Forms, by contrast, just are what they are in virtue of themselves (and ultimately in virtue of the Idea of the Good, which is *not a Form* and which I won't get into). The point is, Plato definitely holds that Forms possess a greater degree of Being than spatiotemporal particulars, from which it follows that the two enjoy different types of existence. (In Aristotle's language, Forms are substances with independent existence, while particulars are not.)
I'm sure Dr. Berman has counterarguments he could give. In any case, I hope his book enjoys a wide audience and helps bring Platonism to the fore as a serious contender in contemporary metaphysics and philosophy of science.
Thank you Joe for having this conversation with Dr. Berman and for sharing with the rest of us!
This is such an interesting issue and this was awesome. Just picked up his book.
Hey Joe. Thanks for the interesting discussion! A really appreciate when you say “for the audience”, because then I know there is an example and a more simplistic explanation coming that I can more easily wrap my head around haha
Fantastic video sir!!!
Just bought his book on Kindle thanks to this video! Only 5 hours estimated time to read. Looking forward to it!
Timeless, spaceless, abstract sets of universals? What are those exactly?
Are all “chairs” based on a timeless spaceless universal chair? There are 1, 3, 4 legged chairs, beanbags, swings, air filled chairs. There is also the philosophical problem of heaps: When does the addition of one more grain of sand to other grains suddenly turn those grains into a heap? Or in the case of chairs, when exactly do chairs become couches, couches become benches or beds? At what exact angle does leaning against something become sitting on something? When does a puddle become a pond, become a lake, become a sea, become an ocean? When would a modern human become an Australopithecus, and an Australopithecus become a modern human, if one continued to swap individual DNA base pairs between the genomes of both species?
Platonism fails to convince because everything is not static and based on spaceless timeless universal archetypes. Instead, imagine a sped up movie of the history of planet earth and its species, notice how things change over time, constant change, along with species arising and dropping out.
Came for legit discussions on Platonism. Stayed for the football.
I have to give props to anyone who cites Jagger and Richards as part of his bibliography for an academic book.
I cite John Cage in all my audio and musical compositions. every one.
But no one hears the citation.
I don't see why abstracta could not be causal. The assumption that all causes should be spatio-temporal is a modern assumption that seems unjustified. Until Kant, amost everyone agreed that causes could exist outside space and time. And if you read the argument of Kant to change that agreement (according to which the order of the causal series depends on, or is just, the order of the time series), it is quite unconvincing.
Read into weak vs strong emergence and the problem of over-determinism that should clarify.
If abstracta had causal power they would not be abstract. They would be concrete.
@@ob4161 It depends what you mean by "abstract". There is no censensus on the definition of abstract objects.
Measured in many ways
Nice soccer 👌
As a programmer, we can translate “being in different senses” to an argument for the impossibility of coercion across types, in the sense of a data type.
This coercion argument then clearly and readily fails because logical coercion is possible in many cases, although not all. In other words being can be used in many ways, but they are often isomorphic to another usage in another logical type.
can you write some more about it, I know what type coercion is but idg the analogy
On the causal contact point. I think that the stronger formulation is that they don't have causal contact with anything that we have causal contact with either.
So it's not only that we don't have a direct perception of them. It's that we don't even perceive anything effected by them or caused by them at all. We can see the effects of electrons quite easily so it feels asymmetrical to me.
Presumably it they are to explain any contrastive facts (like why we think they exist) we should be a able to at least trace the causes back to the facts in some way.
If I say, I know Socrates had an even amount of hairs on his head on his 12th birthday it just sounds like a wild guess. Presumably that's because you can't see a causal connection between that fact and my knowing it. Maybe you'd ask, was this recorded somehow, do we know he suffered from alopecia.
In the same way I would like an account for how the facts of abstract objects could cause my knowledge of them if they truly change nothing in the causal nexus.
Please help me understand something Joe, is the univocity you were discussing the same type of univocity as aspoused by William of Ockham? Or is it more like Duns Scotus (univocity in the concept of being)
Hi Joe , you are really good at this
Also, so the looking up to the universals stuff would be neoplatonism right? With platonius and all of that
Hi Joe, have you read Socratic Logic by Peter Kreeft? If not I highly recommend it.
Every entity in the universe must have oneness itself seeking shared belonging to a greater unity… a greater good.
As for the univocity of being and Aristotle's categories. I thought the argument of the categories wasnt that the categories can't comingle but that you cant find a more primary category which underscores all the others. This goes to the question of to think about being is to separate thinking and being.
I also thought that it wasn't so much that Aristotle didn't believe in univocity but that if univocity exists then it's beyond understanding. However that the categories suggest univocity.
Nice video, Joe UwU
Are you planning to make a review of Feser's "Augustinian Proof"?
Eventually, yes!🥰
I dont think that it would violate trope nominalisum to recognize that every blue trope is accompanied by a trope of wave lenghts of light of around 450 to 495 nanometers. And no non blue tropes are not accompanied by these wavelengths. We can still compair the tropes of an object with another object. Yes every object is a sieres of tropes, but that does not mean we can not look into what a trope is made of or why it interacts in a certain way.
What does it mean for something to be "good independently of our arbitrary desires"?
@37:35 How do we know that the elements we've synthesized have never been produced in nature at some point in the past given the energy levels observed around supermassive black holes and colliding neutron stars etc.
That said, how does an instantiation of a universal create the universal? It seems backwards... the possibility of a thing to existing is a precondition or is necessary for a thing to be instantiated. Perhaps a universal can't be instantiated at a particular point in spacetime but does that license us to say it doesn't exist as an abstract object regardless of whether or not matter-energy modeled/ instantiated/supervened upon by that universal or even whether or not matter-energy existed at all! To be, means that something is a certain way and, by implication, not another way. The essential pattern/algorithm (process) is what it means to be a dog or a star or a mind or a triangle or a number. To be a *material* object does require it to be at a particular place at a particular time, but that's not what were talking about... contemporary aristotelian account seems question begging. Thoughts?
Seeing that trope nominalisum is the sort of nominalisum that shows the greatest promises and is the most widely discussed is it weird that it is left out if the discussions. It feels a little strawman-ish. Like here are to form of nominalisum fewer people defend. It weird when his point about platonisum is that it is often not properly represented or only done so in an exgurated way.
If the justification for the existence of universals is that we need them in order to explain commonalities between things, then (for someone who holds to the credo of "entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity") then what justification do we have (if any) for believing in the existence of any universals that can be expressed as composites of other universals?
Or to put it another way, even assuming Platonism for the sake of argument, how do we know that at least SOME of the things we consider to be instantiations of actually-existing Platonic Forms, are not nominalist extensions atop a smaller set of Forms, that do not specifically have any Forms of their own, since the comparison necessity is already fulfilled?
Say we do believe that there exist a Platonic form of "mammal" and a Platonic form of "red things". Then say I wanted to compare two creatures who fulfilled both conditions of "being a mammal" and "being red". I don't see how the existence of a (separate, actually-existent) Platonic Form of "red mammal" is required to do that, since (even under the Platonist argument) the simpler two Forms, together with logical operators, seem sufficient to accomplish the task of comparison.
And if the Platonic Form of "red mammal" is neither observable, nor necessary for anything that we do... why can't Occam's Razor excise its existence?
Everything has a form and No two things are alike. It literally explains everything. That said, Hylomorphic monism does solve the problem of difference in the world/transcendental unity. Transcendental difference/Unity in the world.
Largely good, but the constructivist convo stepped around divine cognition and atemporal mind
True-there’s a reason for that, though! The reason is that Felipe Leon and I already had a whole episode a few weeks back in divine conceptualism, and so I and Scott decided to discuss other views
@@MajestyofReason excellent! I'll go check it out. I appreciate your work in making these videos! Keep it up!
Seems odd to side-step what is perhaps the most dominant argument against his thesis. Perhaps you might want to revisit this convo with him? Thanks for the video.@@MajestyofReason
Is the aristotelian realists' position really selfreferentially incoherent? You can only judge the sameness of things that fall under the same category. 'is my weight the same as the location of my pc' doesn't make sense. But in order to compare different types of being, it's not so much that all things regardless of their category would have to be comparable, right? This would imply that being is indeed univocal. But what is needed is a category of the different types of being. The being of the different types of being would have to be univocal. But the different types of being having the same kind of existence wouldn't imply that being is univocal, right?
On the subject of contemporary aristotelianism, couldn't you say that when you learn of uninstantiated universals that what you're learning about Is just what would be common between the instantiated and uninstantiated universals? It seems like you're learning about possible universals
See Berman's article "A Platonic Theory of Truthmaking". He argues that commitment to brute possibilities is a worse theory than Platonism, which can ground (explain) modal truths in the actual relations that obtain among Platonic Forms.
Contrary to the claim that “[Naturalism] leaves no room for the acts of knowing or insight on which the whole value of our thinking depends,” cognitive scientists have clearly demonstrated the validity of positing a level of mental representation [which is not necessarily Platonic]. They study “perceptual apparatus, mechanisms of learning, problem solving, classification, memory, and rationality… They conjecture about the various vehicles of knowledge: what is a form, an image, a concept, a word; and how do these ‘modes of representation’ relate to one another… They reflect on language, noting the power and traps entailed in the use of words… Proceeding well beyond armchair speculation, cognitive scientists are fully wedded to the use of empirical methods for testing their theories and hypotheses… Their guiding questions are not just a rehash of the Greek philosophical agenda: new disciplines have arisen; and new questions, like the potential of man-made devices to think, stimulate research.
“Given the most optimistic scenario for the future of cognitive science, we still cannot reasonably expect an explanation of mind which lays to rest all extant scientific and epistemological problems. (After all, “If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldnʼt.”) Still, I believe that distinct progress has been made on the age-old issues that exercised… Plato, Descartes, Kant, and Darwin.”
edwardtbabinski.us/scrivenings/2015/famed-neurobiologists-on-free-will-vs.html
@21:50 about nominalism requiring a sensor for every particular thing in order to evolve a functional perceptual system ...
Nominalism couldn't even allow for sensors...because that would require that the sensors have something in common with each other such that we have the class called sensors, and, moreover, they certainly wouldn't be able to perceive or sense the second photon to hit them since it's different from the first photon that hit it...indeed, we could never even build, much less evolve a sensor or perceptual system without being able to identify what it is we're trying to sense unless it's perceiving/sensing the same kind of thing...is that about right or am I missing something?
The sensor receiving the second photon is just plain old causality. Platonic objects are non-causal, so they don't have any "say" over what the sensor does or doesn't do.
Hi Joe!
Would like to talk with you in email or something, do you have one?
Does pi exist?
17:50
I have a serious objection to the "resemblance requires a thing in common" argument.
I'll explain first with an example, then state it formally. In case the example seems ambiguous, refer to the formal version.
FOR EXAMPLE: say that there's 10 books on the table, 7 are yours and 3 are mine. We have no books in common, our owned property is entirely our own with no common property between us (namely, no book is owned by both of us simultaneously). Now let's say that I construct a scale with a cylinder and a sick. Note that due to my lack of crafting ability that scale isn't an accurate one, if you put exactly a 1kg weight on one arm and another on the other, it will dip in one direction, but we don't know how much exactly this scale is wrongly built nor do we care to find out. We still put your books and my books on the opposite arms and find out that quite surprisingly that scale stands in perfect equilibrium. It will be correct to say that we now resemble each other since we are both owners of an amount of books that can be balanced on that scale. But this happens with exactly no book being shared, no property being shared precisely by each book or set of books. So resemblance doesn't require us to share any thing. The only common descriptor is that we have an amount of books that can be balanced on that scale.
FORMALLY: two entities can be said to resemble each other in a sense if we can define a function that will associate them to the same symbol or entity. Namely if the universe of our discourse is the set {A,B,C,0,1} we can define the function f={(A,0),(B,0),(C,1),(0,A),(1,C)} and thus have f(A)=f(B)=0. This doesn't require that 0 is an entity of a different kind from A or B (they are in the same set!) so we can do this without having a "universal" 0 (I could have used a letter or the statue of liberty itself as an entity instead of 0). In my example me and you are equivalent to A and B, the books and the scale are our f, the inclination of the scale is our 0. Thus is demonstrated that no shared entity is required to define resemblance classes.
Thus one construct resemblance classes out of behaviours and say for example that all those that wake up at morning resemble each other in that they are all "morning people" withouth having to hypothesize a morning-people-ness independently existing in a "nonspatial and nontemporal sense" whatever that might even mean, because all that we did is to define a function out of existing people and labels, based on individual behaviours of individual people.
I'll also add that to me it's quite odd to think that this kind of discourse that only revolves on how we are going to organize concepts in our heads can give us any intel on how reality actually is. You can't do semantics and expect a discovery on reality.
You can even replace "function" with "physical mechanism" (like the scale) to not get bogged down in abstract objects (because the Platonist would take "function" as already requiring an independent abstract object). As long as there exists a physical measurement device that reacts in the same way to two objects, those objects can be said to "objectively resemble" each other, at least in one respect.
Your "morning people" example is very illuminating too: there can be many causal factors which lead one to be a morning person, and two randomly picked morning people can literally _share none of those factors._ But a measurement device (like a clock) still makes measurements of them, which makes them similar.
Another example may be the "yellow vs fake-yellow". One item is emitting the yellow wavelength of light, while another emits a mix of red and green in such a way that they look exactly the same to human eyes. That's still a resemblance: we can objectively demonstrate the resemblance, like in an experiment. But the objects themselves don't really share anything in common. Not that different from a pair of objects which _genuinely emit the same frequencies_ by being made of completely different materials, sharing no molecules in common.
@@user-qm4ev6jb7d thanks mate
I don't quite get the argument against contemporary aristotelian. Why would our ability to accurately predict some properties of not yet existent objects indicate that the 'characteristic feature' all examples of this object would have in common has some sort of existence right now?
He develops the argument in much greater detail in his book, justifying the various steps (including this one) therein. I read it a long while back, so I actually don't remember the details of his justification unfortunately! But if you want, you could email him with your question and I'm sure he'd be happy to respond :)
[ His personal email is: contingently 'at' gmail 'dot' com ]
As far as I understand his argument, I think it rests on the idea that (a) the objects of scientific knowledge are universals (not particulars), and (b) if we have scientific knowledge, then there is some universal that is it's object. Hence, if the universal X doesn't exist, then there is no scientific knowledge of X. On the flipside, if we do have some scientific knowledge of what particular Xs would be like were there to be any, then what we have knowledge of is the nature that such Xs would have if there were any. The fact that that nature is scientifically describable, entails that there is such a nature, even if there are no particulars that have that nature.
@@Bowen12676 yeah. Those are all good *examples* of universals that are the objects of scientific knowledge. More generally, scientific discoveries are discoveries concerning the *natures* of things-e.g., not just what this or that specific force is, but the nature of force as such, or the nature of radiation as such-and all such natures are universals. By "nature" I just mean the "what it is to be", the "whatness" of a given thing. So, for any X (where "X" designates a kind of thing), the sciences are concerned with the nature of X-es, "what it is to be X", or, if you like, "X-ness". To make it more concrete, a scientist studying sickle cell anemia, isn't just interested the particular cells under thier microscope. They're interested in the nature of such cells, what it is to be sickle cell anemia. Scientists studying the properties of liquids are interested not just in the particular five ounces of liquid in thier beaker, but in liquidity, the nature of liquid. And thier discoveries about the properties of liquids are discoveries about the nature of liquidity, which is a universal. So, while force, acceleration, mass, the speed of light and the like are all good examples, this list may be slightly misleading if it is taken to suggest that *only* very abstract concepts of physics are good examples. Quantum spin number, the nature of chemical elements like gold, what it is to be a mollusk, what makes it true that cancer cells are *cancerous* as opposed to non-cancerous, what economic recessions are, and so on, are *all* good examples of universals that are the objects of scientific knowledge.
I absolutely loved this video - very well structured. I tend to agree with Berman that Platonism appears to be the view that presents the best account of scientific reality
Much love❤️
Hey Joe, would you be interested in joining TAP podcast for a chat? Cheers!
That is a very odd definition of nominalism, as far as I know, nominalism is just saying that those properties are not universal/abstract entities, they are just particular/concrete aspect of the physical reality. Is not a negation that particular have common features, just that those features are concrete and not universal/abstract entities
If the nominalist thinks that its possible on thier view for there to be something that is common to numerically distinct particulars, then they are confused. To say that everything is *particular* is just to say that everything is non-repeatable, unique, one-off. So if every feature of A is particular to A, then no feature of A can also be a feature of B. There just is nothing on such a view that could function as a commonality between A and B. For that you need some one, self-same thing that is both a feature of A and a feature of B.
Most nominalists are not so confused, though; they explicitly embrace tbe eliminativism of thier position wrt commonalities and instead translate talk of "sameness" or "common features" into talk of things *resembling* each other, or belonging to a single *class*, or falling under the same *concept*.
@@allenanderson4567 There are at least two issues with what you just describe
First, particular is not the same as uniqueness, for A to be distinguish from B, we only need some features that make the case for those things, for example position, size, color. To say that a feature is particular is to say that is concrete in some X, can X and Y have similar features, for sure, that do not entail that that feature is an universal/abstract thing that exist.
Seconly, calling it concept, class or resembling, is not in contradiction to what I said, so no confusion here
@@diegonicucs6954 "Particular" designates something as incapable of being instantiated. Particulars qua particulars do not (and cannot) have instances; at best, they *are* instances. To be particular is to be non-repeatable, to be a one-off, meaning to be the one and only. This is all I mean when I say that to be particular is to be unique. Of course I don't think something's being particular *means* or *entails* that it can have nothing in common to anything else. As a Platonist, I believe there are things other than particulars, which can thus be instantiated by particulars. But this route is obviously not available to anyone who thinks there are *only* particulars. For such a person, literally *everything* is non-repeatable, one-off. There just is nothing in such an ontology that is capable of having multiple instances. So, not only is A not identical with B, but nothing about A is identical with anything about B. All of A's parts are particular to A. And no feature or aspect of any of A's parts is identical with any feature or aspect of B's parts. On nominalism, there quite literally is nothing that can be the same about A and B. All talk of A and B having anything in common, is fiction.
@@allenanderson4567 It seems to me that are using is some indistinguishable way concepts like, particular, unique, same, common, identical.
I dont see any good reason to take yours "laws". There is nothing problematic for a nominalist to say A and B can have similar features, like color. Why they have similar colors, because there is a concrete physical structure that explain it. Nothing on that account contradicts a nominalist view, and nothing implies the existence of a universal / abstract thing.
In order to get a universal / abstract existence, you need some justification. You can say if you want, that the red of apple A and B are instaciations of a redness, do that entail that the redness is a universal/abstract thing that exists?? No. Is a problem for a nominalism use the same conceptualization?? No.
@@diegonicucs6954 >> there is nothing problematic for a nominalist to say A and B can have similar features, like color. Why they have similar colors, because *there is a concrete physical structure that explains it*.
First! ❤️
Define: Exist
Platonism: Both/And 🤗
Dr. Berman's defense of Platonism against nominalism reminds me quite a bit of Feser's, except that as he mentions (a specific citation from his book is the footnote on 169) he doesn't take God's mind as a solution like Feser does. It might be very interesting to have him take a look at Five Proofs for the Existence of God, from a Platonist but non-Augustinian point of view. In any case, a most excellent interview, thanks as always Joe!
You are a baby philosopher joe 🤣🤣🤣
🅱️lato
Are you roman catholic
Can we prove God’s existence or his non existence only through rational arguments...???
Are you looking to prove the existing God's existence or the platonic transcendental fairy with a beard living in a one-way accessible parallel universe or dimension?
@@bluellamaslearnbeyondthele2456 more like the Kabbalist God...
@@hegel5816 the one behind layers of speculative realms, is that the one? Ain't that abstraction on steroids?
@@bluellamaslearnbeyondthele2456 unproductive way to approach alternative world views. Learn from schmid
@@Biblig you're probably right. I'm just dissapointed with the "fictious only" realm. Some might call that spiritual...?
Constructivism where God's mind is that which create the universals what would be? A kind of idealism. I feel that the critique he offers doesn't work for this view.
Good luck getting more than 5 people to read the book
Objects that are red do NOT have in common that they all reflect the visible light with the longest wavelength. Because there is no such thing, scientifically speaking, there is no exact measurement of such a thing, we can only approximate. Also there are shades of red ... so 2 objects, both red, but with different shades cannot both reflect the same light (the longest wavelength - one of them will reflect more ... redness). Also, what do you call an object that some people think as red and some as orange? What all these objects have in common is a concept, an idea (redness) - that people invented with the help of their language in order to group some objects together for different purposes. The grouping is what they have in common and this is relative to the ones doing the grouping. Concepts are extremely useful in science but I don't think that any scientist will try to prove the existence of redness anymore than they will try to prove the existence of dragons. Imagine human eye could not have ever seen the color that we now call red. At what point would a scientist discover it? And how exactly would he decide the margins for the wavelength in defining what redness is? The color red is a cultural concept, not a scientific one.
But it is possible for two lightwaves to have precisely the same length. At the very least, there's no good argument to the contrary. Nominalism, claims not just that this happens to never occur, but that it is logically impossible. So, even given your point, nominalism is still false.
@@allenanderson4567 No, it is not possible. At least there is no way to prove it. You would have to measure them both and all measurement is relative to a set precision. All we do is create the concept of a precise length and ignore whatever decimals come after our arbitrary setpoint (that is why scientists always measure something with a certain precision). I am not saying that Nominalism is true, maybe it is false. I am just saying that this kind of argument is not correct.
Also, proving that something exists outside of space-time would be a major shift in our understanding of the world - but no one proved it until now. I cannot even imagine what that would mean. I prefer to think that Plato or Aristotle are just using a different meaning for the word "exist" than we do now. It is all a matter of linguistics. For example, do dragons exist? Well they do not exist in space-time but they "exist" in our minds as a thought. Maybe this is the difference.
@@alexdobre4614 you don't need to measure every wave of light to determine whether its possible for two to have precisely the same length. You might need to do that to know whether two waves did in fact have precisely the same length. But all you need for logical possibility is logical consistency. And there is nothing contradictory about two light waves having exactly the same length down to whatever measure of precision you like. The nominalist would have to show that this entails a contradiction. They cannot.
@@allenanderson4567 what I am saying is that nominalism is consistent with science as we understand it today. No one ever measured any 2 things to be the same because it is scientifically impossible. I am not saying that it is logically impossible. But when discussing if something exists or not the burden of proof must be on the side of existence. Because it is logically impossible to prove non-existence. This is why the burden of proof is on religion and not atheism and the same applies to proving universals exist. We have proof all around us that things can be different, but except for the thoughts in our head we have no proof that things can be exactly the same in any way.
What happens is that the world does not contain things that are the same because same-ness is only in our minds. Our brain evolved to think this way because of evolutionary advantages. So "universals" are consistent with our evolved brain, not with reality. Of course Plato had no way of understanding this so long ago, but we do now.
@@alexdobre4614 Nominalism denies the possibility that two numerically distinct things can be the same in any respect. Not only is this demonstrably false-e.g., I am a mammal. My cat is a mammal in the exact same sense and to the exact same degree. I.e., neither of us is only approximately a mammal. We both have the exact same property of mammality in common-it is also impossible to defend. It is essentially the claim that every numerical difference entails a qualitative difference. This is not an empirical claim. It is a metaphysical claim for which there can be no good argument.
Plato is the most overrated philosopher of all time
How so?