Ostrich Nominalism

Speaker: Michael Devitt

Host: LI Zhongwei

Venue: Room 429, Building 4, Chengjun Court, Zijingang Campus

Abstract: The ostrich nominalism is a derogatory term coined by Armstrong (1978) for Quine's response to the ancient one over many problem. Different from realists and traditional nominalists, ostrich nominalists do not attempt to solve this problem but dismiss it as a pseudo-problem. This lecture will explore the early responses to Armstrong in the academic community. These responses target Armstrong's requirements for ontological commitment. And Armstrong's truthmaker requirement - this requirement has dominated the later discussions. Truthmaking is usually semantically understood as a version of the correspondence theory, but it can also be understood from a metaphysical perspective. From a semantic level, ostrich nominalists believe that Armstrong's requirement is an attempt to wrongly infer metaphysics from semantics. When considered as an appeal to grounding from a metaphysical level, ostrich nominalists reject it again, arguing that this is another non-natural metaphysical appeal. This lecture will defend this rejection stance through the discussions by Rodriguez-Pereyra (2000, 2005). This lecture will also examine the priority nominalism proposed by Imaguire (2018).