Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism by Paul Forster (review)

This book is remarkable for what it does not do. It purports to be about Peirce's opposition to nominalism, but it never states clearly what nominalism is and says little about Peirce's realist alternative. It contains no historical discussion of nominalism and thus does not explain the relation of Peirce's idiosyncratic use of that term to its original meaning. It ignores the secondary literature on that topic and does not even list Rosa Mayorga's highly relevant 2007 book, From Realism to Realicism [sic], in its Bibliography. Nor, despite nominalism's alleged 'threat,' does it make reference to such important recent nominalists as Nelson Goodman or W.V.O. Quine. Indeed, after page one, there is hardly any reference to actual nominalists. It also ignores changes in Peirce's own views, most importantly the gradual deepening of his realism and broadening of his conception of nominalism. On such matters as on all others, the author ignores the secondary literature.

The book is equally remarkable for the way it does what it does do. Despite many hundreds of citations of—but sparse quotations from—Peirce's writings, it presents an argument against nominalism purportedly Peirce's that is not an argument that Peirce ever made. The alleged views of nominalists, their alleged responses to Peirce's argument, and Peirce's alleged ripostes to those responses are similarly fictional. The exposition is clotted with 'Peirce thinks,' 'Peirce says,' 'Peirce holds,' 'nominalists hold,' 'nominalists object,' etc., with little evidence that Peirce or any nominalist ever thought or said any such things.

In Chapter 2, there are about 120 citations of Peirce's writings appended to claims made about what he thought of nominalism; in none of the citations that I looked up—and I looked up about 50—does the word 'nominalist' or any cognate or equivalent term occur. Instead, the passages pertain to ideas that the author attributes to nominalists. Citing those passages in that way begs every question about what Peirce thought of nominalism.

The author attributes a 'theory of meaning' or of 'general concepts' to nominalists (pp.42-3, 60-1, 64, 72-7, 106), which Peirce is supposed to refute, but in reality nominalists typically reject talk of meaning and of concepts as being nonsense. Quine held that a purely extensional theory of reference suffices for the analysis of language, and William of Ockham's theory of suppositio is to similar effect. Neither doctrine is mentioned. The central chapters of the book portray a fictional battle between fictional opponents.

Most of the book is an attempt to derive a refutation of nominalism, qua metaphysical doctrine, from Peirce's theory of inquiry, qua logical doctrine, on the ground that Peirce said that metaphysics should be based on logic (pp.13-14, 42, 232, 246). He did say so. But in what way should it be based on logic? There is no discussion of that question, and it is wrongly assumed that Peirce thought that a theory of inquiry must be a priori. That overlooks everything he said on the topic from 1877 onward. The last half of Chapter 2 is on Peirce's diagrammatic theory of reasoning, which is assumed to ground an a priori theory of inquiry, but that theory is not a theory of empirical inquiry. Anyway, it is happily forgotten in later chapters.

The refutation of nominalism, after wending its way through chapters of questionable relevance, finally fizzles to a conclusion in a section of less than two full pages (pp.177-9) containing a perfunctory discussion of Peirce's well-known argument in which he held a stone aloft and told his audience that they all believe it will drop when released. That argument cries out for explication. Is it dialectical—or what? No such help is to be found here, even though it is what the book's account of a refutation of nominalism comes down to. This disappointing section is surprisingly lodged in the first of...