ABSTRACT

This chapter provides an overview of nominalist strategies for making sense of discourse that apparently involves abstract entities. Nominalism could be combined with a vast range of disparate metaphysical views like idealism and solipsism. The chapter presents the radical versions of nominalism that deny Platonist discourse is meaningful or put forward literally. It considers views that deny such claims are true and, in some cases, downplay this violence to commonsense by holding them to be specially related to certain nominalist-friendly truths. The chapter assesses nominalist strategies that uphold the truth and meaningfulness of these claims but deny that their truth requires a commitment to abstract. Nominalist possibilism rejects both the abstract ontology and the primitive modal ideology banned by Harvard nominalism. The chapter concludes by exploring outlying views and their connection to the peculiar doctrine of Harvard nominalism once jointly defended by Goodman and Quine.