The Department of Logic & Philosophy of Science Colloquium Series presents

“The Collapse of a Nominalist/Realist Distinction”
with Robert Trueman, Postdoc, Stirling University

Friday, October 31, 2014
3:00 p.m.
Social Science Tower, Room 777

Hosted with C-ALPHA

Nominalists and realists disagree over a lot of things. One of the things they disagree about is whether predicates refer, and for the purposes of this talk a nominalist is someone who thinks that predicates do not refer and a realist is someone who thinks they do. Let's call the referents of singular terms "objects", and the referents of predicates "properties". In this terminology, nominalism is the claim that there are no properties. In his "The concept horse with no name" (forthcoming in Philosophical Studies), Trueman argued that there is some truth in nominalism. Speaking loosely: no object is a property. In this talk, he will argue that once this concession to the nominalist has been made, nothing survives of the nominalist/realist distinction.

For further information, please contact Patty Jones, patty.jones@uci.edu or 949-824-1520.