Universals are nothing more than signs to Ockham—useful shorthand. They mean nothing in themselves, but as signs they empower us to manipulate concepts and form general hypotheses in our mind, without bothering to refer to every individual who makes up the class, whether it’s men or dogs or meteors or souls. In an important sense, the world we understand through reason is a fiction (at one point in his early writings, Ockham even uses the word). It is a mental construct that we have built up from the raw data supplied by our perception of those individual men and dogs and meteors that form the
...more
