The Problem of Universals

[AHunter3]

Universals are great! Being able to reference global values that span all records in one table from another table via a universal relationship saves so much time, letting you write once, deploy everywhere…ouch! ouch! stop! ok ok!

Oh all right. Universals in the sense you speak of them are generalizations. There is an art to making a generalization from a set of particulars (to use your term). Not a science, not a definitive act founded on epistemological and metaphysical purities, but an art. Seeing the place in the woodwork where the grains all run the same and pointing to it and saying so. (Artistic license saving you from having to defend your generalization in the face of the little whorl down there at the botton in that plank yonder where the grain runs perpendicular then bends away backwards. If we don’t see it, you aren’t a good artist, but if we look and see it too, you don’t have to prove anything).

A lot of human perception is artistic, rather than scientific. We go with shorthand models, symbolic representations, sketches of reality, because they fit elegantly, they pleasantly reverberate with our experiences of the real, which are in turn interpreted in part though the veil of those shorthand models, yet enough raw experience persists on its own to critique them and allow us to appreciate better descriptions when they come along.

[Sam_Stone]

I think more can be gained by approaching the issue from a linguistic, logical, and mathematical viewpoint. Universals like ‘whiteness’ are simply mental constructions that we have devised and labelled because we have discovered that they help us communicate with others. To be able to communicate at all, you have to have the ability to create a ‘shorthand’ for what you experience. We’ve discovered a word called ‘whiteness’ which we have found can fairly accurately represent an experience that we share with others.

Certainly atoms exist, but they look and act very different depending on the scale at which they are viewed. A sheet of paper being cut into smaller pieces stops being a ‘piece of paper’ as soon as the size of the pieces drop below the threshold at which the term ‘piece of paper’ has any real meaning for us. But that doesn’t change the fundamental nature of reality.

[Spiritus_Mundi]

Of course one can specify a particular. Whether the object is a “piece” or “paper” are separate issues. Those are universal labels that we apply to particulars in order to categorize/generalize/abstract/etc.

We use universals to specify qualities of particulars. This is the quality “predicable” mentioned in erl’s OP. Thus, universals are exactly those words we use to describe a particular.

It seems to me that some folks can’t see the trees for the forest.

epolo

My point was that as long as we define “white” carefully, and we demonstrate that it can manifest (in the form of white paper) then “white” exists.

I agree with you that white manifests. I am not a nominalist. I just find your test for existence to be troublesome and arbitrarily applied.

I’m pretty sure that any sentence about the existence of “nonexistence” breaks some rule about valid sentences.

I don’t see why. It is a word which communicates specific information about reality, which was the test you proposed for existence.

I still don’t understand. I don’t see how you can specify a particular.

The same way that you specify all of those precise communications about the real world you find in universals. The piece on square B6, for instance. The shoe covering your right foot. The beam sticking out of your eye.

The words are simply shorthand for the phenomenological object, just as universals are shorthand for a conceptual object. You accept the arbitrariness and uncertainty of boundary conditions in “white” yet rebel against the same qualities in “this piece of white paper”. that I don’t understand.

AHunter3

There is an art to making a generalization from a set of particulars (to use your term). Not a science, not a definitive act founded on epistemological and metaphysical purities, but an art.

I disagree. some generalizations are founded upon science. Some are founded upon epistemological or metaphysical purities. Some are founded upon human phenomenology. Artistic interpretation may perhaps have a place in all three, but it is primarily associated with the third. Some examples:[ul]
[li]hydrogen, vertebrate, rotational symmetry[/li][li]equivalence, truth, consistency[/li][li]song, color, joyous[/li][/ul]
Sam Stone

Universals like ‘whiteness’ are simply mental constructions that we have devised and labelled because we have discovered that they help us communicate with others.

So you are a nominalist? You believe that there is no reality behind the universal? Do you believe “size” is simply a mental construction? How about rotational symmetry?

Certainly atoms exist

Yes (well, for now ;)), but does “hydrogen” exist?

[DSeid]

An objective reality exists. Patterns exist. “Universals” do not. The meaning of these patterns is a construct of the mind. Meaning does not exist in isolation of minds.

By the standards of the initial quote I must be a nominalist, but I don’t believe what Spiritus says nominalists believe. Hmmm.

So called “universals” and so called “particulars” are both our models of the world formed from our the filtered products of our perception. Ways to classify our perceptions of reality.

Length? We percieve length with our senses - sight, touch. We infer from past experience that a set of perceptions will change in this dimension in predictable ways. This inference is a model of the world and has been a reliable one, I entirely expect it to continue to be so, but that does not make it a “universal”.

AHunter and Sam express it well. I’d change AHunter’s a little. “Universals” are inferential from particulars, not deductive. I think that he must associate inference with art and deduction with science, but both are involved in each. Other than math, science leans to the inferential side, if anything.