ABSTRACT
There is an error originating from mediaeval nominalism which likes to represent general concepts and names as mere devices in an economy of thinking, devices which will spare us the individual consideration and naming of all individual things. The function of concepts, it is said, is to enable the thinking mind to transcend the limits set it by the unsurveyable multiplicity of individual singulars; their economizations of thinking enable the mind to reach its goal of knowledge indirectly, as it could never have reached it directly. General concepts make it possible for us to treat things in bundles as it were, to make assertions about whole classes of objects at a single ‘go’; we can therefore talk about countless objects, instead of conceiving and judging each object ‘on its own’.
