ABSTRACT
Of course, there are red things, but is there redness itself? Some peopleare wise, but does wisdom exist in its own right? Many think theanswer to these questions obvious: No, such wierd entities do not exist. Those who dismiss them are the nominalists at heart. Abstract terms, according to nominalists, are not the names of abstract objects. Redness and wisdom are just words and nothing more – hence ‘nominalism’. As for mathematics, the instinctive nominalist holds that there are no numbers, only numerals. Platonists think that the numeral ‘2’ is the name of the number two, just as ‘Jim’ names me. But, for the nominalist, there are no numbers; the real subject matter of mathematics is numerals, symbols, and words, all of them strictly meaningless – not in the sense of gibberish, but in the sense that there is nothing that they mean, or name, or to which they refer.
