>Yoshie you got it all wrong. I am not a closet idealist - as your comments
>seem to imply - I am a philosophical nominalist. That is, utternaces that
>do not have empirical meanings are mere projections of human emotions and
>attitudes. Moreover, empirical meaning can be deciphered only a
>posteriori, by reference to specific experiences (since being determines
>consciousness), not a priori - by e.g. be reference to a presumed shared
>experience a.k.a "history." "History" is not a narrative (that's
>mythology), but the accumulation of specific experiences. We do not share
>same experiences, hence we do not really know what others are saying if we
>do not know the experiential basis (or lack of it) of these utterances.
>See also my reply to Justin in this thread.
Nominalism? Wojtek, you're taking us all the way back to medievalism and scholasticism! While nominalism was once an innovation preferable to Platonic idealism, nominalism can only take you as far as Hobbes, Hume, etc. War against abstraction as such gets you stuck in empiricism (which is a form of idealism in so far as it is only sustained by the individualism of commodity fetishism). Further, as Terry Eagleton notes, you can always find a more radical nominalist than you are, in that your preferred unit of analysis is, in turn, always subject to a nominalist criticism of abstraction.
We need a distinction of proper and improper abstractions, which can't be found in a purely nominalist thinking.
Yoshie