Universals, particulars, and the relation between external things and our ideas of external things
Thursday, June 29th, 2006I have been reading Coppelston’s History of Philosophy in the Medieval Era, and was reading through the section on the Medieval fascination with the problem of universals. The problem as simply stated as I can get it is as follows:
We no doubt have knowledge of particular things in the world. Thus on a walk to the park one day, we may see a particular dog or a particular child. But it is also evident that we have a more general or broader knowledge. For instance, we may take a walk to the park on another day and see a different dog or a different child. And though very different, we know the one dog is similar to the first dog. They are both dogs. Similarly, we know the child, though different, is similar to the first child. They are both children.
We call these concepts, dogs and children, general abstract concepts. What exactly this is was a matter of huge debate in the middle ages. Does the general concept refer to some entity “dogs”, which contains the essential nature of “dogness” (naive realism), or is the general concept merely a linguistic entity (extreme nominalism) - simply a word we’ve created to help us see the similarity between particular instances of dogs (the two different days at the park)? Or perhaps general concepts are something between these two extreme positions (i.e. trope theory)?
I don’t intend to solve this problem right here and now. Hopefully the above paragraph is sufficient to understand the main problem. This is one of the major problems that was the fascination of medieval philosophers, so much so that John of Salisbury (c. 1115-1180) remarked that with this problem of universals the world had grown old, as more time was spent on the question of universals than the time it would take for the Caesars to conquer and govern the world (Policraticus 7, 12; found on Coppelston II p. 153).
One comment I have about this is that the question of universals and particulars is entirely too complicated - this is evident even on a gloss over some of the terminology coined to study this problem. However, we need not take this step until we’ve satisfied ourselves with another step: clarifying the relation between the world and our idea of the world. One of the major problems with the universals dispute is that the general/universal abstract term is entirely dissimilar to the particular thing in the world. Thus, “dogs” is completely different than the particular dog we saw in the park. “Dogs” has no name, doesn’t have a body, etc, since it’s abstact. Part of the problem with universals is this dissimilarity, but we see that this dissimilarity need not require universal and particular terms.
All that is needed is one particular instance. Say, the dog I saw in the park today. Already, when I’m talking about the dog I saw in the park, I’m using words to stand in for the dog itself, since I don’t have access to it when I’m talking about it later on in the day. In short, I’m using the concept of the dog. But surely the concept of the dog isn’t the dog itself - after all, it’s only for referring to the actual living, breathing dog in the external world. And as it turns out, we again run into the dissimilarity problem: my concept of the dog doesn’t wag its tail because concepts have no tails - in fact it has no body, since concepts have no bodies. How then could my idea of the dog, which has no body, resemble to actual dog, which has a body and in fact can wag its tail perfectly fine?
So we see that the fundamental problem of universals, i.e. the dissimilarity between abstract/universal terms and the particular terms, can actually be examined without the use of abstract/universal terms, and simply with particular terms (and particular things in the world).