Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A believer in nominalism.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun (Metaph.) One of a sect of philosophers in the Middle Ages, who adopted the opinion of Roscelin, that general conceptions, or universals, exist in name only.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun An adherent of any of the various kinds of nominalism.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a philosopher who has adopted the doctrine of nominalism

Etymologies

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Examples

  • (For a good in-depth discussion and critique of the various paraphrase nominalist views, see Burgess and Rosen (1997).)

    Platonism in Metaphysics Balaguer, Mark 2009

  • Thus, if the paraphrase nominalist view is going to be a genuine alternative to fictionalism, it has to involve the thesis that the paraphrases that nominalists are offering capture the real meanings of ordinary mathematical sentences.

    Platonism in Metaphysics Balaguer, Mark 2009

  • More specifically, a paraphrase nominalist would just be a fictionalist who thinks that we ought to alter our mathematical language, or what we mean by our mathematical utterances; or perhaps the claim would simply be that we could alter our mathematical language if we wanted to and that this fact provides fictionalists with a way of responding to certain objections.

    Fictionalism in the Philosophy of Mathematics Balaguer, Mark 2008

  • In sum, then, the idea here is that fictionalists about pure mathematics can endorse a paraphrase nominalist view of mixed mathematical sentences.

    Fictionalism in the Philosophy of Mathematics Balaguer, Mark 2008

  • When he went to New Guinea, Dr. Mayr once explained in an interview with Omni magazine, there was a popular school of thinking known as the nominalist school of philosophy that held that species did not, in reality, exist.

    Archive 2005-02-01 Jenny Davidson 2005

  • When he went to New Guinea, Dr. Mayr once explained in an interview with Omni magazine, there was a popular school of thinking known as the nominalist school of philosophy that held that species did not, in reality, exist.

    It's the detail about eating birds of paradise Jenny Davidson 2005

  • Historians also labeled Gregory a "nominalist," a term so broad and vague when applied to fourteenth-century thinkers that, when it was used without qualification, it tended to mislead and to obscure the differences among them, as for example between Ockham and Gregory.

    Gregory of Rimini Schabel, Christopher 2007

  • If you believe that there are only individual instances and illustrations of various classified emotions and desires and acts, and that abstractions are only the inevitable categories of thought, you would in the Middle Ages have been called a "nominalist".

    The Mind in the Making The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform James Harvey Robinson 1899

  • Even the nominalist must presuppose some form called "frog" to which this frog and that frog are more or less faithful.

    October 21st, 2009 m_francis 2009

  • This puts him squarely in the nominalist camp, which is too bad because nominalism is incoherent.

    October 21st, 2009 m_francis 2009

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