A Metaphysics of Psychopathology

3. Instrumental Nominalism

3 Instrumental Nominalism 3.1 Overview of Nominalism Before explicating a nominalist approach to thinking about philosophical concepts, I would like to address the a priori skepticism toward nominalism that some readers may harbor. This skepticism is understandable given claims such as: the only feature that unites the different animals we call dogs into a single kind is the name “dog.” This literal definition of “name-ism” represents a simplification of nominalism that is often put forward by its opponents. I do not defend such a doctrine, nor do I argue that all classifications , concepts, and kinds are only arbitrary collections of particulars. One contrast to nominalism is called essentialism. Essentialism was first articulated by Plato, whose dialogue Meno begins with the characters of Meno and Socrates discussing the nature of virtue. Meno claims that the qualities of a virtuous man will differ from those of a virtuous woman. The same is true he says for free person versus slave and young versus old. Meno is in effect claiming that different social roles in a society are associated with different standards of competence. It is like saying that what we expect of a “responsible adult” differs from what we expect of a “responsible child.” Socrates in response claims that because the various behaviors enumerated by Meno all share the name “virtue” there must be some single thing that they all have in common. To further explain himself, Socrates says that many different sizes and shapes of bees make up a swarm, but as bees, they all share a single nature (or essence). Pressing the analogy, he says that if one were to list different virtues such as temperance, justice, and courage, they too are all alike as virtues in sharing the same nature. In comparison to Socrates, nominalists advocate for an anti-Platonic attitude about abstract philosophical concepts such as virtuous, true, good, and free. Consider the concept of true. From a nominalist perspective, the 42 Chapter 3 class of true statements forms what Nelson Goodman (1966) called an imperfect community—meaning that there is no property or set of properties that all members share. To be a nominalist is to harbor skepticism about claims such as “there is a single essence of truth that can be inferred from a set of many true statements.” Those nominalists who believe that there is nothing important that particular true statements have in common can be considered austere particularists . To assert, as they do, that only particulars exist, van Fraassen (2002) suggests, is too metaphysical a claim. A less austere, more instrumental, nominalism acknowledges the usefulness of grouping particulars together under a single name. It recognizes the value of conceptualizing what groups of true statements such as “plate tectonics explains continental drift” and “the number of atoms in 12 g of carbon is 6.02 × 1023 ” might have in common . According to instrumental nominalism it is potentially informative to develop a plurality of conceptual notions about groups of true statements, but as these groups become more inclusive and abstract—approaching a Platonic concept of the Truth, they become increasingly empty.1 3.2 Concepts Within, Not Beyond, Experience My explication of nominalism proper commences with a look at a difficultto -comprehend essay titled “The evolution of self-consciousness,” written by Chauncey Wright in 1872 at the request of Charles Darwin. The purpose of the essay was to show how qualitatively unique human traits such as self-consciousness are continuous with animal cognition and can come to exist as a result of natural processes, but philosophically the essay did more than that. Wright argues that the experiences (or capacities) out of which self-consciousness arises are shared by humans and other animals, particularly the capacity to intuit within experience the connections between experiences. For example, a perception of the similarities between squirrels leads to the vague notion of a collection or a group. Infants and animals have such experiences. As they grow older, humans can become (meta-cognitively) aware of how a general notion is connected to a particular event (this squirrel running around a tree trunk) and to a name (e.g., “squirrel”). As our cognitive abilities increase we can attend to the vague notion and to the more concrete event simultaneously, thereby intensifying the vaguer notion. We Instrumental Nominalism 43 are then even more aware of the now intensified “general” notion of kindhood . The particular squirrel is subsequently experienced as...