Philosophical Realist, Idealist, or Nominalist

Page 1 of 2 [ 17 posts ]  Go to page 1, 2  Next


Philosophical Realist, Idealist, or Nominalist
Philosophical Realist; Platonic 22%  22%  [ 2 ]
Philosophical Realist; Aristotleian 22%  22%  [ 2 ]
Philosophic Idealist; Kantian 0%  0%  [ 0 ]
Philosophic Idealist; Relativist 11%  11%  [ 1 ]
Philosophic Nominalist; Relativist 11%  11%  [ 1 ]
Philosophic Nominalist; Scientific 33%  33%  [ 3 ]
Total votes : 9

yelekam
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 18 Jan 2013
Gender: Male
Posts: 591

01 Aug 2013, 1:54 am

In Philosophy their is a thing called the problem of universals; the problem is the questions as to whether universals exist
Universals are metaphysical entities that are the essence of a quality, that is the basis for the presence of that trait in various particular objects. Example; if you had a blue chair, a red chair, and a red apple, the two chairs have the quality of chariness, which comes from the universal of chariness, and the red chair and the red apple share the trait of redness
Philosophic realists believe that universals exist in a metaphysical realm independent of human thought. With the aristotleian camp thinking universals depend on particulars, and the platonic camp thinking that particulars depend on universals.
Philosophic idealists believe that universals are the product of human thought and only exist in the mind.
Philosophic nominalists believe that universals do not exit, only particulars exist.
Relativists are both nominalist and a pessimistic sort of idealist. So they will et sections in both and the idealists will have Kantian, for the idealists who believe the idea of universals to have logical roots in objective things, and the nominalist section will have scientific for the nominalist who are grounded in science and economics.
I myself am a Makeleyen Realist, which is a subgroup of the platonic camp of philosophic realists
I am seeking to see what the ideological distribution is like among the autistic community, to see how it compares to the general community.



Shatbat
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 19 Feb 2012
Age: 33
Gender: Male
Posts: 5,791
Location: Where two great rivers meet

01 Aug 2013, 6:58 am

I'm between idealism and nominalism, but I haven't focused my attention on this problem yet. I want to though.


_________________
To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day. - Winston Churchill


neilson_wheels
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 11 Mar 2013
Age: 56
Gender: Male
Posts: 2,404
Location: London, Capital of the Un-United Kingdom

01 Aug 2013, 7:13 am

Putting brackets around yourself is limiting.



ruveyn
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 21 Sep 2008
Age: 89
Gender: Male
Posts: 31,502
Location: New Jersey

01 Aug 2013, 7:37 am

neilson_wheels wrote:
Putting brackets around yourself is limiting.


And putting brackets around yourself is limiting.



yelekam
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 18 Jan 2013
Gender: Male
Posts: 591

01 Aug 2013, 1:07 pm

ruveyn wrote:
neilson_wheels wrote:
Putting brackets around yourself is limiting.


And putting brackets around yourself is limiting.


so you two are relativists? Or are you saying that you know nothing about the nature of reality?
if it is the latter then it is important that you come to see the importance of it?

It is unfortunate that some people do not realize that the most important thing about a person is the world view he has. One needs a sufficiently rational scale of values with which to attach predicates with intelligence. It is the basis for understanding reality, and from which comes ones understanding of the nature and destiny of the world and of man in it. A philosophic ideology is the basis for intelligent analysis in the search of truth; limiting thought to a standard of truth enables one to build concepts that have strength in their ideas.

Now do you see the importance of the matter?



LookTwice
Velociraptor
Velociraptor

User avatar

Joined: 30 Oct 2011
Age: 114
Gender: Male
Posts: 441
Location: Lost, somewhere

01 Aug 2013, 5:03 pm

yelekam wrote:
It is unfortunate that some people do not realize that the most important thing about a person is the world view he has.


How is it important? I'd say being ignorant about one's world view works very well for most people. From a practical perspective, I don't see the advantage of caring about those kinds of things, but plenty of disadvantages (it's pretty hard to think yourself happy, for example). The social and cultural scaffolding is sufficient for most purposes, you don't need much in terms of an understanding of reality or a value system to "successfully" live an "average" life. (too lazy to go into adequate definitions here)

I spent about 30 minutes trying to answer your question for myself, but instead felt more and more unsure about it due to the complexity of underlying questions, so I ended up not answering (I wasn't interested enough to spend more time on the question, also had to work and, more importantly, take a satisfying unphilosophic dump).
Intuitively, I often seem to lean towards relativism (although largely as part of scepticism and critical thinking in general, to counter the tendency of dependency or reliance on external authority) and idealism, but as I said, I'm doubtful this adequately describes my perspective on life or reality.

Do you even have data about the distribution for the general population to make the comparison you talk about?


_________________
What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant. - D.F.W.


Awesomelyglorious
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 17 Dec 2005
Gender: Male
Posts: 13,157
Location: Omnipresent

01 Aug 2013, 5:29 pm

Ok, sure:
Scientific Nominalist.

I had to do some interpretation of the meanings you wanted for idealist, but my understanding of idealism relates back to the 19th century philosophy that reality is composed of mental entities not externally existing physical entities. So, being that I am a physicalist, I am not an idealist in that sense, and as such put myself as nominalist. I think that we do lump things like "chairs" together, but that's just a categorization scheme developed by people for mental short-hand to economize on cognitive resources. It's easier to have a procedure that's triggered upon noticing a chair than to have an incredibly complicated multivariate computation for each and every object. Many of these short-hand categorizations fail to have universal assent on marginal cases, full coherence, or a # of other things.

Our short-hands though are subject to various economic rules and psychological rules though, and fail to be entirely relativist. People do agree on a lot of facts. Categorizations are developed as relatively objective needs exist, not at a whim. So we can really talk about our shared bundlings and the rules governing them, even though these bundlings are not actual depictions of any reality so much as just short-hand. It's easier to say "egg" than to give a technical description of a set of objects.



yelekam
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 18 Jan 2013
Gender: Male
Posts: 591

01 Aug 2013, 8:52 pm

LookTwice wrote:
yelekam wrote:
It is unfortunate that some people do not realize that the most important thing about a person is the world view he has.


How is it important? I'd say being ignorant about one's world view works very well for most people. From a practical perspective, I don't see the advantage of caring about those kinds of things, but plenty of disadvantages (it's pretty hard to think yourself happy, for example). The social and cultural scaffolding is sufficient for most purposes, you don't need much in terms of an understanding of reality or a value system to "successfully" live an "average" life. (too lazy to go into adequate definitions here)

I spent about 30 minutes trying to answer your question for myself, but instead felt more and more unsure about it due to the complexity of underlying questions, so I ended up not answering (I wasn't interested enough to spend more time on the question, also had to work and, more importantly, take a satisfying unphilosophic dump).
Intuitively, I often seem to lean towards relativism (although largely as part of scepticism and critical thinking in general, to counter the tendency of dependency or reliance on external authority) and idealism, but as I said, I'm doubtful this adequately describes my perspective on life or reality.

Do you even have data about the distribution for the general population to make the comparison you talk about?


I will attempt to try to convince you the reason why world view matters. The book Ideas Have Consequences does a good job of explaining the reason why world view matters. And my explanation follows a similar premise. The world of humanity is not the way it is by necessity, but by the choices made by those in it. Those choices are guided by world view. Mans sentiment exists anterior to his reason, he uses his reason to achieve what his sentiment makes him wish to achieve. People's sentiment tell them what the nature of the world is and what mans nature is, as well as what the destiny of the world is and how man's destiny plays into that. From this they gain a metaphysical dream about what they want things to be, and they use and develop their reason and use it to advance that dream. Those who share a similar sentiment and dream join together and form spiritual communities. These spiritual communities take over physical communities and create societies or seek to take over and transform societies. These spiritual communities form the culture that exists in a society. Culture is a shared sentiment refined by reason into a set of formal and informal rules that guide the group identity. And these societies, governments, and other institutions, exist to serve the function of helping achieve the dreams of the ideological group controlling it. The cultural structure and social institutions are formed by views and intents of their creators and operators. So whether one contemplates these matters or not, their life is still effected by them.

And their may indeed be those who would rather not worry about such matters, and in the short run they lessen their worries, but while they avoid the matter, the mechanisms of designs continue, and when these produce conditions undesirable to people, those who did not contemplate find that they lack the knowledge to remedy the problem. while one who contemplates these matters worries and struggles with the battle of conflicting ideologies, he is aware of the weight of the conflict, and is able to spot potential threats approaching, and can acquire insight in how to fix ideologically created problems. The philosopher Plato said that "the only reason a good man seeks political office is out of fear of what would happen if someone worse got the position". If wishing to bring ones metaphysical dream into being is not of ones interest and doesn't motivate one to contemplate philosophical matters, then one should at least be motivated by the reality that such knowledge at least creates protection against the threats of bad sentiment. In the early twentieth century, Germany had a rather apathetic population, who were upset over military defeat in world war I and the economic depression created by the Viemer Government, and a group called the National Socialists with their Nazi Ideology came and offered to give them prosperity and national power and glory, in exchange for giving up their freedom and rights to a totalitarian state, the Third Reich came, and you know the rest. A similar thing occurred in Russia with Bolsheviks, Cambodia with the Khmer Rouge, Iran with the Ayatollah's Islamic Fundamentalist following, Venezuela with the Bolivarian Socialists, etcetera. World view determines the characters of people and societies. So it is important to those who wish to have control over their own character and who care about the fate of society and consequently their own destiny.

And according to my research the general ideological distribution of people is 25% scientific nominalist, 20% relativist of either type, 15% Kantian style Idealist, 22% Aristotelian Realist, and 18% Platonic Realist. These percentages very in different areas, very by age, very by gender, very by religion, and very by profession.



nominalist
Supporting Member
Supporting Member

User avatar

Joined: 28 Jun 2007
Gender: Male
Posts: 2,740
Location: Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas (born in NYC)

01 Aug 2013, 9:13 pm

I am a critical realist. That means that I am ontologically (existence) a realist but epistemologically (knowledge) a relativist.


_________________
Mark A. Foster, Ph.D. (retired tenured sociology professor)
36 domains/24 books: http://www.markfoster.net
Emancipated Autism: http://www.neurelitism.com
Institute for Dialectical metaRealism: http://dmr.institute


nominalist
Supporting Member
Supporting Member

User avatar

Joined: 28 Jun 2007
Gender: Male
Posts: 2,740
Location: Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas (born in NYC)

01 Aug 2013, 9:14 pm

yelekam wrote:
I myself am a Makeleyen Realist, which is a subgroup of the platonic camp of philosophic realists.


What is a Makeleyen realist?


_________________
Mark A. Foster, Ph.D. (retired tenured sociology professor)
36 domains/24 books: http://www.markfoster.net
Emancipated Autism: http://www.neurelitism.com
Institute for Dialectical metaRealism: http://dmr.institute


nominalist
Supporting Member
Supporting Member

User avatar

Joined: 28 Jun 2007
Gender: Male
Posts: 2,740
Location: Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas (born in NYC)

01 Aug 2013, 10:36 pm

Quote:
The Moralist Republic of Allegany was created when the followers of Makeleyen Philosophy took over the Allegany, Chautauqua, Livingston, Steuben, and Wyoming counties, established a moralist republic based in a Emparialist style constitution, lead by an intellectual elite, and set out seeking to improve the character and minds of the people and aiding by the establishment of righteous institutions.

Moralist Republic of Allegany


Isn't that an online role-playing game? (Imperialist is misspelled.)


_________________
Mark A. Foster, Ph.D. (retired tenured sociology professor)
36 domains/24 books: http://www.markfoster.net
Emancipated Autism: http://www.neurelitism.com
Institute for Dialectical metaRealism: http://dmr.institute


sidh
Butterfly
Butterfly

User avatar

Joined: 12 Mar 2011
Age: 72
Gender: Female
Posts: 12

09 Aug 2013, 3:52 am

I think the choices in your poll are too limited, and while I agree that world view is important, I'm not sure I would consider this aspect of world view to be the most important. I consider myself a reluctant idealist, or an altruistic solipsist, by which I mean that I'm not really certain anything exists outside of my own mind but that it might be a very bad idea to behave that way. Kind of my own version of Pascal's bargain. I think the question of whether life has meaning outside of that we create is a better question, and is more indicative of how a person applies their world view to their life. As for economics, it all boils down to one question: how do you get someone to do something they don't want to do?



techstepgenr8tion
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 6 Feb 2005
Age: 46
Gender: Male
Posts: 24,691
Location: 28th Path of Tzaddi

09 Aug 2013, 6:38 am

Apparently there's two 'realism's, I tend slightly toward realism on the realism-idealism continuum and similarly toward nominalism on the realism-nominalism continuum.

At the same time I think a lot of these in a way get tidied up by saying that genre and similar things exist in our minds and hence it doesn't need a preexisting physical reality (ie. horseness doesn't need to exist in the physical for horses to exist, nor does the idea of a horse need to exist before I can see a horse albeit it helps to know what a horse is in identifying it as such).



Cilantro
Velociraptor
Velociraptor

User avatar

Joined: 7 Apr 2013
Age: 37
Gender: Female
Posts: 450
Location: Minnesota, USA

09 Aug 2013, 12:05 pm

neilson_wheels wrote:
Putting brackets around yourself is limiting.


I know, right? I picked one for discussion purposes only to try to change my opinion and add a little extra after thinking some more, and the thought police came knocking on my door to tell me I wasn't allowed to. :(



nominalist
Supporting Member
Supporting Member

User avatar

Joined: 28 Jun 2007
Gender: Male
Posts: 2,740
Location: Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas (born in NYC)

09 Aug 2013, 12:27 pm

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
Apparently there's two 'realism's, I tend slightly toward realism on the realism-idealism continuum and similarly toward nominalism on the realism-nominalism continuum.


A lot more than two. However, the two major realisms are ontological realism and epistemological realism. Roy Bhaskar's Critical Realism is ontologically realist and epistemologically relativist (or constructionist).


_________________
Mark A. Foster, Ph.D. (retired tenured sociology professor)
36 domains/24 books: http://www.markfoster.net
Emancipated Autism: http://www.neurelitism.com
Institute for Dialectical metaRealism: http://dmr.institute


ooOoOoOAnaOoOoOoo
Veteran
Veteran

Joined: 18 Jun 2008
Gender: Female
Posts: 12,265

09 Aug 2013, 12:39 pm

A philosophical minimalist meaning there should be less of it :D