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Ockham’s Nominalism
Ockham’s
Nominalism
A Philosophical Introduction
C L AU D E PA NAC C IO
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Panaccio, Claude, 1946–author.
Title: Ockham’s nominalism : a philosophical introduction /Claude Panaccio.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2023. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022027373 (print) | LCCN 2022027374 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190078980 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190079000 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: William, of Ockham, approximately 1285-approximately 1349. |
Nominalism. | Philosophy, Medieval.
Classification: LCC B765.O34 P363 2023 (print) | LCC B765.O34 (ebook) |
DDC 189—dc23/eng/20220805
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022027373
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022027374
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190078980.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Ockham’s Writings: Abbreviations ix
Introduction 1
1. Nominalism 8
A proposed definition 9
Six Ockhamist theses 17
Outline of a nominalist program 27
2. Against Realism 31
Universals 31
The argument from numerical unity 32
The argument from separability 33
The argument from mereology 36
The argument from the indiscernibility of identicals 37
Relations 41
The argument from infinite regress 42
The Razor argument 47
Quantities 53
Extension 54
Numbers 57
3. Ontology 63
Individuals 63
Substances and qualities 63
The composition of material substances 70
Intensive qualities 76
Artifacts 79
An ordered world 81
Motion, space, and time 81
Inherence and information 84
Essential similarity 86
Causation 90
Possible beings 96
vi Contents
4. Semantics 101
Natural kind terms 101
Signification 102
Supposition 105
Truth-conditions 109
Relational terms 119
Connotation 120
Relations as signs 122
Relational statements 125
Quantitative terms 128
Propositions connoted 129
Pseudo-names 132
Collective terms 136
5. Epistemology 142
Cognitive acts 142
Intuition 144
Abstraction 149
Connotative concepts 153
Judgement 156
Mental language 159
Grammar 160
Natural signs 164
Syncategorematic terms 168
Knowledge 172
Evident cognition 174
Demonstration 177
Induction 180
Sciences 184
Conclusion 188
Bibliography 195
Ockham’s works 195
On Ockham and medieval philosophy 196
Other works cited 201
Name Index 207
Subject Index 211
Ackowledgments
I was greatly helped by a number of persons in the preparation of this

book. First and foremost, I want to thank Jenny Pelletier, who kindly
accepted to look at it with the critical eye of a native speaker of English.
Her many judicious suggestions had a significant effect on both the
form and the substance of the work.
I also wish to express my gratitude to Susan Brower-Toland, Calvin
Normore, Robert Pasnau, and an anonymous reader for OUP, who all
generously made me benefit from their precise comments, questions,
and objections on partial or complete preliminary versions. Almost all
of their remarks led me to rewrite some passages here and there, some-
times importantly.
Martin Pickavé was the spark for this book since he first
recommended me to OUP for an introduction to Ockham, and Peter
Ohlin acted from then on as my guide and my contact with the pub-
lisher with great efficiency and kindness. I am very grateful to the two
of them.
Although I have been officially retired since 2016, the University
of Quebec at Montreal and its department of philosophy have kindly
offered to keep me around by generously granting me the status of
emeritus professor along with certain academic facilities. I want to ac-
knowledge the significant support that this has brought to my work.
My greatest debt in the end is to my wife, Claude-Élizabeth, for her
daily and affectionate care, especially in the pandemic period, during
which most of this book was written.
Ockham’s Writings: Abbreviations
All references to Ockham’s writings will be to the St. Bonaventure crit-

ical edition of the Latin text of his philosophical and theological works:
Opera philosophica. Ed. Gedeon Gal, et al. St. Bonaventure, NY: The
Franciscan Institute, 7 vols., 1974–1988 (henceforth: OPh).
Opera theologica. Ed. Gedeon Gal, et al. St. Bonaventure, NY: The
Franciscan Institute, 10 vols., 1967–1986 (henceforth: OTh).
When an English translation is available, the reference will also
be given.
For individual works, the following abbreviations will be used:

Brev. summ. libr. Phys. Brevis summa libri Physicorum [A Short Summa on
the Books of The Physics]
Exp. in libr. Perih. Expositio in librum Perihermenias Aristotelis
[Commentary on Aristotle’s On Interpretation]
Exp. in libr. Phys. Expositio in libros Physicorum Aristotelis
[Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics]
Exp. in libr. Porph. Expositio in librum Porphyrii de praedicabilibus
[Commentary on Porphyry’s On Predicables]
Exp. in libr. Praedic. Expositio in librum praedicamentorum Aristotelis
[Commentary on Aristotle’s On Categories]
Exp. sup. libr. Elench. Expositio super libros Elenchorum [Commentary on
Aristotle’s On Sophistical Refutations]
Ord. Ordinatio [Commentary on Book I of Peter
Lombard’s Sentences] (NB: This huge work is divided
into 48 parts called “Distinctions,” each one being
subdivided in turn in a number of “Questions”)
Quaest. in libr. Phys. Quaestiones in libros Physicorum Aristotelis
[Questions on Aristotle’s Physics]
Quaest. var. Quaestiones variae [Various Questions]
Quodl. Quodlibeta septem [Quodlibetal Questions]
Rep. Reportatio [Questions on Book II, III and IV of Peter
Lombard’s Sentences]
x Ockham’s Writings: Abbreviations
SL Summa logicae [Summa of Logic]

Summ. phil. nat. Summula philosophiae naturalis [Summa of Natural
Philosophy]
Tract. de corp. Christi Tractatus de corpore Christi [Treatise on the Body
of Christ]
Tract. de praedest. Tractatus de praedestinatione et de praescientia
Dei respectu futurorum contingentium [Treatise on
Predestination, God’s Foreknowledge and Future
Contingents]
Tract. de quant. Tractatus de quantitate [Treatise on Quantity]
Introduction
This book is about William of Ockham’s views on universals, rela-

tions, and quantities. The underlying conviction is that his ideas on
these matters are still of interest for today’s philosophical discussions
and that taken together they constitute a rich network of positions
and arguments that deserve to be taken into consideration in meta-
physics, epistemology, and philosophy of language. Ockham indeed is
a towering figure. He is arguably the most important Western thinker
between Aquinas in the thirteenth century and Descartes in the sev-
enteenth. Although most of his non-political works were written in
the span of about a decade, between 1315 and 1325 or so, his thought
quickly spread across Europe and was both highly controversial and
exceptionally influential for more than two centuries. Significant
traces of it are found in Descartes and Leibniz, for example. Yet, his
fame progressively faded in the early modern period. By the early
twentieth century, whatever was kept alive from the medieval Latin
scholastic period was confined to Catholic milieus, where Thomism
was triumphant, and Ockham was no longer seriously studied.
Nowadays, although his way of philosophizing bears important affini-
ties with contemporary analytic approaches, most of his works remain
untranslated into any modern language; for those that are translated,
such as the Summa of Logic and the Quodlibetal Questions, their tech-
nicality is an obstacle that dissuades casual readers who are primarily
interested in philosophy, as they heavily combine the vocabularies of
Aristotelianism and medieval logic with scholastic modes of exposi-
tion that now seem rather odd. This is why an introduction is needed.
The focus will be on three central Ockhamist theses that can be
brought together under the label of “nominalism.” Here they are in
preliminary formulations:
Ockham’s Nominalism. Claude Panaccio, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190078980.003.0001
2 Ockham’s Nominalism
(1) Everything in the world is singular; generality is a semantic fea-

ture, not an ontological one: universals are nothing but signs.
(2) Relations are not a special kind of beings; relational signs are
special indeed, but this is a matter of the distinctive ways in
which they refer to non-relational things.
(3) Quantities, such as numbers and geometrical dimensions, are
not a special kind of beings either; quantitative signs are special,
but this is also a matter of the distinctive ways in which they
refer to things in the world.
These theses are logically independent of each other. One could be a

nominalist with respect to universals while accepting singular rela-
tions or singular quantities in one’s ontology. Conversely, one might
want to countenance universals, but only non-relational ones, or non-
quantitative ones. But we can prima facie detect a common inspiration
for all three ideas: Ockham wanted to keep the ontology as simple as
possible. As we shall see, he did maintain a real distinction between
singular substances and singular qualities, but he firmly rejected any
additional multiplication of entities. The conjunction of theses (1), (2),
and (3) is basically what I call Ockham’s “nominalism”—although he
himself never used the term.
Ockham did not mean these theses to invalidate our usual ways
of speaking: general predication in his view is a perfectly legitimate
tool for describing the world; and relational as well as quantitative
statements can be mind-independently true. The challenge, then, is to
hold all of this together in a systematic, coherent, and plausible theory
without falling into extreme skepticism and relativism. This is pre-
cisely what Ockham strives to accomplish. My aim is to explain how
he does it, and thus to outline a fascinating nominalist system that is
liable, I hope, to enrich the current philosophical conversation.
That this book is an introduction means in particular that it will
avoid detailed discussions of interpretation. The exact nature of
Ockham’s positions on various subjects has given rise to many a schol-
arly controversy—which I have at times contributed to—but I will
be content here to present my own understanding of his ideas with
references to the main Ockham passages where they are developed and
a few occasional quotations. On each particular topic, I will mention
Introduction 3
along the way a limited number of salient studies that the reader can
turn to for further analysis and bibliographical references, and I will
often take the liberty of referring to previous writings of mine in which
I have more fully argued in support of some of my interpretations.
That this introduction is intended as a philosophical one means that
it aims to bring out the significance of Ockham’s thought for philo-
sophical debates that are still on-going about universals, relations, and
mathematics. It is in this spirit that the non-Ockhamist term “nom-
inalism” occurs in the title of this book: it points both to the cluster
of recent discussions which I think Ockham can fruitfully contribute
to and to the school of thought he belongs to. A historian of philos-
ophy always reformulates the doctrines he or she is talking about to
some extent. Such reformulations are heavily constrained by a strong
requirement of historical accuracy: we do not care much for a pseudo-
Ockham! Historical accuracy, however, leaves room for wide variety in
the modes of presentation according to what the historian is interested
in in the works of the past, to the intended audience, and to the project
the historian is engaged in. We always make selections in the original
material, and we have significant leeway as to the vocabulary and cat-
egories that we use for describing the ideas we want to draw attention
to.1 Although I will not be comparing in any detail Ockham’s positions
with those of recent philosophers, I want to stress the aspects of his
thought that I take to be relevant today and to present them accord-
ingly. And I will occasionally develop certain ideas that are not explicit
in Ockham but that he is committed to or that are strongly suggested
by what he says. In such cases, I will make it clear that this is what is
going on.2
I will mostly leave aside, on the other hand, the theological aspects
of Ockham’s thought. This is not innocuous, admittedly. Ockham was a
Franciscan and one of the great theologians of his time. He was deeply
and sincerely concerned with theological issues such as the Divine
Trinity and the Eucharist, and many of his works are of a theological
1 I develop this point in Panaccio 2019a.

2 For references to contemporary philosophy, I will often be content to cite encyclo-
pedia entries, where the reader will find good general presentations of relevant issues
and debates and more bibliographical references.
nature. Even in philosophy proper his positions often had religious

motivations, and he regularly made use of theological arguments,
having to do most saliently with God’s omnipotence.3 His ideas about
universals, relations and quantities, however, are interesting inde-
pendent of this theological context and can be detached from it to a
large extent. Indeed, Ockham himself thought of philosophy as ca-
pable of standing by itself, independent of one’s religious convictions,
and he considered that Aristotle—as he interprets him—mostly had
it right despite not being a Christian. The theological arguments and
examples Ockham used in logic, physics, and epistemology were usu-
ally treated by him as persuasive means given his intended audience,
rather than as indispensable parts of these philosophical disciplines.
I am not suggesting that he did not take them seriously. He did. And
I will mention some of them along the way. But much of his nomi-
nalism is of philosophical value without them.
Here is how I will proceed. Chapter 1 introduces the general no-
tion of “nominalism” that I will be using and shows how it applies
to Ockham’s positions on universals, relations, and quantities.
Chapter 2 discusses some of Ockham’s main arguments against the
corresponding forms of realism. Chapter 3 offers a sketch of Ockham’s
positive ontology, with only singular substances and singular qualities
in it. Chapter 4 expounds the semantic theory that Ockham devises to
support his nominalist claims about general terms, relational terms,
and quantitative terms. Chapter 5, finally, shows how he accounts for
human knowledge with a theory of mental acts and an elaborate con-
ception of thought as mental language (oratio mentalis).
Before we get to the heart of the matter, a few words must be said
about Ockham’s life, works, and intellectual environment. This will
help to better understand what he was up to. As far as we know, he was
born around 1287 in the village of Ockham, some twenty-five miles
southwest of London, and he was entrusted to the Franciscan Order in
his childhood. His school curriculum as an adolescent included a lot of
Aristotelian philosophy, especially logic, in which he was to eventually
become a prominent expert. He was ordained subdeacon in 1306 and
3 For detailed presentations of Ockham’s theology, see in particular Adams 1987: 901–
1347, and Maurer 1999: 157–292.

Introduction 5
began his theological studies in Oxford shortly thereafter. This was a

time of rivalry between the Franciscans and the Dominicans for in-
tellectual leadership in Christian theology. The Dominicans already
had a well-established hero, Thomas Aquinas, who died in 1274. On
the Franciscan side, the best candidate during Ockham’s youth was the
British philosopher and theologian John Duns Scotus. When Ockham
was studying theology, Scotus had just died (in 1308), and Ockham ea-
gerly scrutinized his writings. As it happened, though, Ockham found
himself in disagreement with much of what Scotus thought.
Before receiving their doctoral degree, advanced medieval students
in theology were required to teach a one-or two-year course that
consisted in commenting on the standard textbook of theology at the
time, Peter Lombard’s Sentences, a treatise in four books dating from
the twelfth century. This was their occasion to develop their own
thoughts by discussing a wide variety of questions directly or indirectly
raised by this textbook. Ockham did this in Oxford between 1317 and
1319, and his first major work, accordingly, is a huge commentary on
the Sentences. The part that deals with Book One is by far the most im-
portant. It occupies four volumes in the modern critical edition, with
a total of more than 2,300 pages. Because it was carefully revised by
the author himself for distribution, it is referred to as the Ordinatio.
The other three books circulated only as student transcriptions of the
original lectures (approved by Ockham, however), and they are collec-
tively known as the Reportatio. Throughout this commentary, Ockham
systematically developed keen criticisms of both Aquinas and Scotus,
among others, and put forward his own views on a great number of is-
sues, philosophical as well as theological. On the matters of universals,
relations, and quantities, in particular, he sharply broke with the domi-
nant realist consensus and defended strong nominalist positions.
This got him into trouble. His doctrines were suspected of having
unorthodox theological consequences, and before he could receive his
doctoral degree (which he never obtained in the end), he was trans-
ferred by the Franciscans to their London college, where he taught
logic and natural philosophy from 1320 to 1324. In connection with
this teaching he wrote detailed commentaries on Porphyry’s famous
treatise on universals, the Isagoge (the Greek word for “introduction”);
on Aristotle’s logical treatises On Categories, On Interpretation, and
Sophistical Refutations, and on Aristotle’s Physics; as well as two system-

atic treatises in natural philosophy, the Short Summa on Physics and
the Summa of Natural Philosophy; plus a lengthy series of Questions on
Aristotle’s Physics. Even though he did not teach theology during this
period, he did not drop it altogether. For one thing, he wrote two short
works to defend himself against the suspicion that his views on quan-
tity had unacceptable consequences for the Christian doctrine of the
Eucharist: On Quantity and On the Body of Christ. And he participated
in biannual public events, during which he answered a wide variety
of questions about his innovative positions in both philosophy and
theology, thus progressively bringing about one of his most important
works, the Quodlibetal Questions (literally: Questions on any subject
whatsoever).
Hostility did not calm down, however. In 1324, Ockham was
summoned to the papal court in Avignon under suspicion of heresy.
A special committee was appointed by Pope John XXII to investigate
a list of fifty-one theses allegedly endorsed by Ockham. The work of
the committee lasted a few years, during which time Ockham stayed
at the Franciscan convent in Avignon. It is probably in this period that
he wrote—or at least completed—his magisterial compendium, the
Summa of Logic.4 The committee eventually concluded that some he-
retical doctrines had indeed been defended by Ockham, but the offi-
cial papal condemnation never came, as Ockham ran into even more
serious trouble in the meanwhile by getting involved in a raging con-
troversy between John XXII and the Franciscan Order over Apostolic
poverty. The dispute reached such heights that at one point in 1328,
the General of the Franciscan order, Michael of Cesena, was placed
under house arrest along with Ockham and three other Franciscans.
The five friars came to fear for their lives and daringly escaped from
4 According to Ockham’s modern editors, the Summa was written in London in the
summer of 1323, but their arguments are not conclusive. It is a lengthy treatise (some 850
pages in the Saint-Bonaventure edition) and a very carefully crafted one, which could
hardly have been produced in such a short time, especially given the impressive amount
of other works Ockham is thought to have authored during his London period. The
Avignon enforced stay, on the other hand, would have been an ideal occasion for him to
systematically develop his logical views.
Introduction 7
Avignon on the night of May 26, 1328. They were excommunicated

shortly thereafter.
The small group found refuge in Pisa with the army of Emperor
Louis of Bavaria, who had his own political disagreements with John
XXII, and from there they were taken to Munich, where Ockham spent
the rest of his life extensively writing on political issues until his death
on April 10, 1347. Because of the works he then produced, Ockham
stands out as one of the founders of modern political theory.5 This as-
pect of his thought, however, will be left aside in the present book. My
focus here is on doctrines that he developed before his Munich period
and to which he never returned.6
5 For an overview of Ockham’s political thought, see McGrade 1974.

6 For general introductory presentations of Ockham’s life and thought, see Spade
1999, Keele 2010, Spade and Panaccio 2019.
1
Nominalism
The term “nominalists” (nominales in Latin) was introduced in philos-

ophy in the second half of the twelfth century to designate the followers
of Peter Abelard (1079–1142). The appellation had to do with their
solution to the famous problem of universals: species such as man or
tulip and genera such as animal or flower were held by them to be mere
names (nomina). Their opponents, by contrast—of which there was
quite a variety—were called “realists” (reales) because they took species
and genera to be real things out there in the world (res).1 By Ockham’s
time, a century and a half later, the term had been all but forgotten, and
he never used it himself. It only reappeared in the early fifteenth cen-
tury, sometimes under the slightly revised form “nominalistae,” as the
need was felt again for a taxonomy of the schools of thought that were
competing with one another across Latin Europe. And again, although
several theses were ascribed to the nominalists both in philosophy and
in theology, the label was mostly evocative of their distinctive posi-
tion that universals are signs rather than external things.2 Nowadays,
the term is common in philosophy, but it has gained a wider variety
of uses. It is necessary therefore to explain in some detail what will be
meant here by “nominalism” and how the label applies to Ockham.
1 This is what I take to be the main conclusions of an interesting discussion among
specialists that took place in Madison, Wisconsin, in the early 1990s about the origin
and scope of the word “nominales” in the twelfth century. See the papers assembled in
Courtenay 1992.
2 See Kaluza 1988; Biard 2010, 2017. Kaluza, in particular, identifies three main
schools of thought that were recognized as such in the fifteenth century: the peripatetici
(followers of Albert the Great and Aquinas), the formalizantes (followers of John Duns
Scotus), and the nominales, and he insists that “even though the subjects of disagree-
ment between the schools were numerous, one of them was certainly predominant over
all the others and was at the origin of the threefold division of the schools: the topic of
universals” (Kaluza 1988: 22; my transl.).
Ockham’s Nominalism. Claude Panaccio, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190078980.003.0002
Nominalism 9
A proposed definition
Nominalism is often defined as the thesis that every real thing is par-
ticular, or singular. In his groundbreaking 1978 book on universals,
the Australian philosopher David Armstrong, for example, writes that
“the fundamental contention of Nominalism is that all things that exist
are only particulars.”3 This is a useful characterization and I have fre-
quently used it myself in previous writings. It makes it clear that we
are dealing with an ontological doctrine, a position that has to do with
what kinds of things there are, and more precisely with what the most
general kinds of things are. Thus understood, nominalism comes out
as a position about the so-called problem of universals, just as it was
taken to be in the twelfth and fifteenth centuries: Do universals exist
out there in the world? If you say “yes,” you are a realist; if you say “no,”
you are a nominalist.
Then again, there are those who prefer to say that nominalism is the
refusal to countenance abstract entities in the ontology. And some pur-
ported abstract entities, they point out, might not be universals: num-
bers, for example, or the null set, the one and only set that, according
to standard mathematical theory, has no member at all. Think of
the opening declaration of Nelson Goodman and W. V. O. Quine’s
joint paper “Steps toward a constructive nominalism,” published in
1947: “We do not believe in abstract entities. [ . . . ] We renounce them
altogether.”4 Others, such as Keith Campbell, define nominalism as
the denial of properties.5 In this sense the so-called trope-theorists,
including Campbell himself, are not to be called “nominalists,” since
they accept the reality of what they call tropes, which they take to be
properties, albeit singular properties such as this particular patch of
redness.
Now consider those who want to exclude relations from the on-
tology. Can’t they be counted as nominalists, too, in a certain sense?
One is tempted to say at this point that such philosophers are
nominalists with respect to relations. My first suggestion is that this
3 Armstrong 1978, vol. I: 12 (with Armstrong’s italics).

4 Goodman and Quine 1947: 105.
5 Campbell 1990: 1.
relativizing strategy should be extended to the other characterizations

I previously mentioned. We would thus have: nominalism with re-
spect to universals, nominalism with respect to abstract entities, nom-
inalism with respect to properties, as well as nominalism with respect
to relations, each one of them being independently opposed to a corre-
sponding form of realism.
Should we choose one of these or even a fifth one as the right way,
or the privileged way, of applying these old labels? Any such choice,
I am afraid, is bound to be unduly restrictive. This is best seen in the
case of properties. If “nominalism” is taken to be the refusal to coun-
tenance properties, then even William of Ockham will be denied the
label, since he admitted singular qualities in his ontology in addition
to singular substances. And similar inconveniences will follow if we
pick the denial of universals or the denial of abstract entities or the
denial of relations as the single primary mark of nominalism. A more
fruitful approach, I submit, is to take “nominalism” and the corre-
sponding opposite term “realism” as relational terms. A doctrine will
be said to be nominalist or realist with respect to something, rather than
merely nominalist or realist, period. This makes room for important
distinctions between various forms of nominalism and realism while
stressing the prima facie connection between these positions: they all
have to do with accepting or not accepting certain sorts of entities in
the ontology.
This is only a first step, though. As Quine has famously remarked,
a philosopher who wants to deny the reality of a certain sort of enti-
ties cannot simply say that there are certain things that do not exist.6
What the philosopher has to do is to introduce a description of the
purported entities and then deny that such a description applies to an-
ything. Nominalism with respect to universals, say, must provide a rea-
sonably informative description of what a universal is supposed to be.
Nominalism with respect to abstract entities must provide a reason-
ably informative description of what an abstract entity is supposed to
be, and so on. But new difficulties arise at this point.
6 See Quine 1963: 1.

Nominalism 11
Take universals. In the medieval period, a universal was defined as

what can be predicated of many. Yet several medieval authors who do
not normally count as nominalists, such as Aquinas and Duns Scotus,
were quite ready to grant that universals in this sense do not exist in
the extramental world. Predication, they reasoned, occurs only in
propositions, and propositions occur only in language or in thought;
universals, therefore, occur only in language or in thought. Both
Aquinas and Scotus, on the other hand, admitted mind-independent
common natures within the external things themselves.7 Are we to
say that Aquinas and Scotus were realists with respect to common
natures, but nominalists with respect to universals? This would be mis-
leading. Things seem to turn out this way only because of the tech-
nical sense of the term “universal” (universale) in the Middle Ages, but
surely the philosophically interesting feature of Aquinas’s and Scotus’s
solutions to the problem of universals is that they countenanced
mind-independent common natures even if they did not call them
“universals.”
If we want to devise a useful taxonomy of nominalist approaches
across the history of philosophy, we should use our own vocabulary
and investigate how well it retrospectively applies to certain doctrines
of the past. This is not an easy task, either. In the Nominalism entry of
the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra,
for example, stipulates that something is a universal if and only if it can
be instantiated.8 “Instantiation,” however, is itself a term of art, albeit in
recent analytic philosophy rather than in medieval philosophy, and it
is not immediately clear what it means and how it can be transposed to
medieval philosophy. Professional historians of philosophy often insist
that the theoretical vocabularies of distant periods in the history of the
discipline are incommensurable with one another in a great number
of cases.
What are we to do? On the one hand, we have arrived at the con-
clusion that the term “nominalism” should be a relational one. We
want to speak of nominalism with respect to something or other. On
7 See, e.g., Aquinas, On Being and Essence 3. For an introduction to Scotus on
universals and common natures, see Noone 2003.

8 See Rodriguez-Pereyra 2016.
the other hand, we would like, if possible, to provide descriptions of

these “somethings” independent of the technical vocabularies of the
doctrines we are thus classifying and in such a way that we could de-
tect from the outside, as it were, what these doctrines have to say about
them. But we must be careful not to presuppose in doing so that the
things the nominalists want to reject do exist after all.
The key to this conundrum is to be found, unexpectedly, in a short
text from the fifteenth century, known today as Defense of Nominalism,
in which a group of Parisian philosophers apologetically reacted to
a decree issued in 1473 by the King of France, Louis XI, prohibiting
the teaching of nominalism at the University of Paris, a doctrine that
the King himself traced back to Ockham.9 At the very beginning of
this text, the authors propose a definition of what they take nomi-
nalism to be:
Those doctors are called nominalists [nominalistae] who do not mul-

tiply things that are principally signified by terms according to the
multiplication of terms. Realists, on the other hand, are those who
contend that things are multiplied with the multiplication of terms.
[ . . . ] Also, nominalists are called those who apply diligence and
study to know all the properties of terms from which depend the
truth and falsity of speech, and without which there can be no per-
fect judgment of the truth and falsity of propositions.10
This characterization of nominalism has two parts to it. First, it says,

in substance, that the nominalists do not take it that a distinct category
of things in the world corresponds to every distinct category of terms
in language.11 And second, the nominalists typically apply great care to
the study of semantics. As laconic as it is, the first clause is the one that
will especially inspire us. The second clause hardly sorts out a distinc-
tive feature of nominalists. Even in Ockham’s time, there were realist
9
An English translation of this text can be found in Thorndike 1944: 355–360.
10 Ibid., 355–356.
11 Note indeed that, strictly speaking, what the medieval as well as the contempo-
rary nominalists refuse to multiply is not the singular things, but the categories of things.
Ockham, for instance, considered that there are as many singular rednesses in the world
as there are singular red objects, but he rejected any fundamental distinction between
universal things and singular things.
Nominalism 13
philosophers who did apply diligence and care to the study of seman-
tics. Walter Burley is a salient case in point.12 And of course this is still
true of many of today’s realists. This second clause is not to be ignored,
as we will see, but it is of interest to us only in virtue of its connec-
tion with the first one: insofar as nominalists refuse to multiply things
according to the multiplicity of terms, they have to provide some ap-
propriate semantic account for those categories of terms that do not
correspond in their view to special categories of things. Nominalists,
then, will typically care for semantics even if they are not the only ones
to do so. Their distinctive characteristic, however, has to do with the
refusal to construe the ontology by projecting the structure of lan-
guage into it.
This is still too rough, though. Few philosophers ever wanted to
multiply things according to the multiplicity of terms. Even among
realists with respect to universals, most of them would deny that there
is a distinct universal for every linguistic predicate. David Armstrong,
for one, subscribes like many others to what he calls a “sparse” theory
of universals, which does not, as he puts it himself, make an “uncritical
use of predicates” to pick out which universals there are.13 The idea that
the distinctive feature of nominalism is that it does not posit a category
of things for each category of terms requires some refinement if it is to
be of any help. A first step is to take “nominalism” as a relational term
as proposed earlier and to speak of “nominalism with respect to some-
thing” rather than of nominalism tout court. But here comes a second
proposal, inspired by the fifteenth-century Parisian doctors: what
nominalism should be relativized to are linguistic categories. We will
cash out the idea that nominalists do not multiply entities according to
the multiplicity of terms by defining a nominalist position with respect
to a certain group of linguistic units as that position according to which
there are no special entities corresponding to such linguistic units. This is
the definition I will be working with from now on.
It significantly differs from what we had been considering so far.
Instead of speaking of nominalism with respect to universals, or with
12 Burley was a bit older than Ockham and he significantly influenced him, especially
in semantic theory. On this important author, see Conti 2016.

13 Armstrong 2010: 18. This use of “sparse” in ontology comes from Lewis 1986: 59–60.
respect to relations, or with respect to numbers, as I was informally doing,

what will now be required to complete the phrases of the form “nomi-
nalism with respect to __” is a reference to certain linguistic items. We
will speak of nominalism with respect to general terms (or a subgroup
of them), or nominalism with respect to relational terms, or nominalism
with respect to quantitative terms, and so on.
There are several advantages to this approach. First, “nominalism” now
comes out as a genuinely relational term. It relates certain philosophers
with certain linguistic units, regardless of whether those linguistic units
have external referents or not. Should we keep saying that a philosopher
is a nominalist with respect to numbers, for example, we would have to
understand the term “number” as a shorthand for a description. And
even if we agreed on a particular description of what a number would be
if it existed—which might not be an easy task—we should be prepared to
admit that this description might apply to nothing in the world, just as
the nominalist claims. If so, saying that a philosopher is a nominalist with
respect to numbers would not relate the philosopher in question with an-
ything at all and it would not, consequently, be very informative. It would
not tell us what the philosopher’s claim is about. By contrast, saying that
this philosopher is a nominalist with respect to numerical terms does re-
late the philosopher with certain real things—namely numerical terms—
and tells us what his claim is about: it is about numerical terms.
A second advantage is that what this relational characterization of
nominalism relates the philosopher to—namely, linguistic items—is
in all cases something that we are familiar with independent of any
philosophical theory, whether our own or those of the philosophers
we are talking about. The categorization of linguistic items might re-
quire a minimum of theoretical framework, admittedly, but very little
of it is needed for sorting out the varieties of nominalism we might
be interested in. Whether on the basis of their syntax or of their most
conspicuous semantic features, we usually have no trouble identifying
general terms or relational terms or numerical terms in our language
or in the language of the philosophers of the past.14 Describing a given
14 To be sure, identifying the category of abstract terms might be a bit more difficult.
Ockham at any rate uses for this a purely morphological feature; see below, pp. 23–26.
Nominalism 15
doctrine as denying (or asserting, for that matter) that a special cat-
egory of real things corresponds to general terms, or to relational
terms, or to numerical terms is prima facie more manageable than
saying that it denies (or asserts) the reality of universals or relations
or numbers.
Furthermore, the philosophers we are dealing with were also quite
familiar with linguistic units of the said categories. There were ge-
neral terms, relational terms, and numerical terms in Greek, Latin,
and Arabic, just as there are in English, French, Italian, and German.
I am not claiming that such terms are to be found in all past, present,
and possible future human languages. But they certainly are present in
the languages of the philosophers we want to classify as nominalists or
realists in the relevant respect. And these philosophers are (or were)
usually aware that their theses—the theses at least that we want to
stamp as nominalist or realist—had to do with such terms somehow.
It was clear to Abelard, Scotus, and Ockham, as much as to Locke,
Hume, and Russell, or to Nelson Goodman, David Armstrong, and
Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra, that their positions on “universals” cru-
cially required an account of how general terms work. And it was clear
to Ockham and to Leibniz as much as to Russell and Moore or to E. J.
Lowe and Peter Simons that their theory of “relations” crucially re-
quired an account of how relational terms work. They might not have
thought that providing such accounts was the primary goal of their re-
spective doctrines, but they all more or less self-consciously knew or
felt that it was a requirement they had to fulfil. Defining the different
varieties of nominalism and realism by reference to linguistic catego-
ries thus allows us to pinpoint a common object for all of these theo-
ries from different periods in the history of philosophy and a common
requirement with respect to which their degree of success can be
evaluated.
This is not to reduce the question of universals, or relations, or
numbers merely to a matter of philosophy of language. A satisfactory
account of general, or relational, or numerical terms must involve met-
aphysics and epistemology as well as semantics. And we should not
presume that semantics is necessarily predominant. The structure
of the various theories we are interested in can vary indefinitely. But
insofar as they can be labeled as nominalist or realist, they must deal

with language at some point. Identifying the particular categories of
linguistic units these theories are concerned with provides an efficient
way of classifying them and of comparing them with one another.
There is indeed a case for the much stronger claim that the dis-
tinctive phenomena a philosophical doctrine should account for are
mostly of a logico-linguistic character, that is, that they are in ge-
neral linguistic phenomena liable to affect the validity of inferences,
arguments, or justifications.15 Ethics, for example, centrally deals with
a special kind of evaluative statement, such as “A ought to do P” or “P is
the right thing to do.” Philosophy of mind deals with typical linguistic
structures, such as “A believes that p” or “A desires that p,” where the
p-clauses have special logical properties. Even metaphysics can illumi-
natingly be seen as an attempt to say how the world has to be for certain
types of linguistic statements to be legitimate, statements involving ge-
neral terms, for instance, or relational terms, and so on. If this is cor-
rect, the relational definitions I am proposing do not merely hit upon
some derivative feature of nominalism and realism that would happen
to be useful for classificatory purposes, they draw attention to a central
aspect of these doctrines, a privileged dimension along which they can
best be evaluated as good or bad philosophical theories. According to
this view, the philosophical value of a certain variety of nominalism
depends on how well it accounts for a given sort of linguistic item by
providing an ontology, a semantics, and an epistemology. Although
this is not the right place to defend this view in any detail, it is the per-
spective that guides my approach to Ockham’s doctrines in the pre-
sent book.
It is by no means necessary, however, to endorse this general con-
ception of philosophy in order to appreciate the usefulness of adopting
the proposed relational characterizations of nominalism and realism
as working definitions. They provide a unified way of identifying var-
ieties of nominalism and realism while relating each of them to rec-
ognizable objects—linguistic units, namely—that we are familiar with
independent of our philosophical preferences and that we know the
15 The point is developed in Panaccio 2019a.

Nominalism 17
philosophers we want to study were interested in as well. A doctrine,

then, will be said to be nominalist with respect to a certain category
of linguistic items insofar as it incorporates in some way or other the
claim that no special sort of entities corresponds in reality to this cat-
egory of linguistic items. In this sense, a nominalist position with
respect to general terms, for example, claims that nothing special is re-
ferred to by general terms in addition to what is referred to by singular
terms; a nominalist position with respect to relational terms claims
that nothing special is referred to by relational terms in addition to
what is referred to by non-relational terms; and so on. This still leaves
a choice between two possible nominalist approaches with respect to
any given linguistic category: either to say that nothing in the world
corresponds to it; or to say that it does require the real existence of
some entities, but only of those that are independently required by the
other terms of the language. The latter approach is what we will mostly
be interested in here.
Six Ockhamist theses
I introduced this book as being about Ockham’s theories of universals,

relations, and quantities. As we now realize, this was not clear enough.
We can hardly consider universals, relations, and quantities as com-
monly recognizable objects and ask what Ockham has to say about
them. In accordance with the strategy proposed in the previous sec-
tion, we must reconstruct the Ockhamist doctrines we are interested
in by relativizing them to linguistic categories. This yields three central
nominalist theses that can be attributed to Ockham:
N1 -Nominalism with respect to general terms: there is no special

sort of entities that corresponds to general terms.
N2 -Nominalism with respect to relational terms: there is no special

sort of entities that corresponds to relational terms.
N3 -Nominalism with respect to quantitative terms: there is no spe-

cial sort of entities that corresponds to quantitative terms.
In all three cases, Ockham’s position instantiates the second of the

nominalist approaches distinguished at the end of the previous sec-
tion: general terms, relational terms, and quantitative terms all refer
to real things for him, but these are not extra objects in addition to
the things that are referred to by non-general, non-relational, and
non-quantitative terms. He thus needs a basic category of referential
linguistic items that are altogether singular, non-relational, and non-
quantitative. Ockham also defended nominalist positions with respect
to syncategorematic terms such as prepositions and conjunctions, with
respect to abstract terms, and with respect to sentences in general.
I will come back to these shortly, but let us focus first on N1–N3.
A singular term for Ockham is a sign that is supposed to designate
a single thing.16 He distinguishes three kinds of singular terms: (1) de-
monstrative pronouns such as “this” or “that”; (2) proper names such
as “Socrates” or “Plato”; and (3) complex expressions formed with a
demonstrative and a general term such as “this man,” “this red thing,”
etc. Although Ockham is not explicit about it, the category of demon-
strative pronouns is the most basic one for him: everything that can
be designated by a proper name or by a complex phrase of the form
“this F” can be designated by a demonstrative pronoun alone.17 What
thesis N1 comes down to, therefore, is that only those things that can
be designated by a demonstrative pronoun should be accepted in the
ontology in order to give a correct account of general terms. The para-
digmatic instances of such things are ordinary perceivable objects such
as a human being, a tree, a fire, or a house, but Ockham is ready to
include mental states and immaterial individuals such as God and the
angels. God and angels, admittedly, cannot be pointed at here below,
but he believed that they could be in the afterlife, at least mentally.
In terms of Ockham’s theory of cognition, a thing that can be desig-
nated by a demonstrative pronoun is any object that can be directly
apprehended in such a way that the knower can thereby be certain that
this very thing presently exists. Such an apprehension is what Ockham
16 SL I, 19, OPh I: 65–67 (transl. Loux 1974: 90–92).

17 See Panaccio 1980, 2004: 13–15.
Nominalism 19
calls an “intuitive cognition.”18 Thesis N1, then, is the claim that a cor-
rect account of general terms does not require the ontological admis-
sion of anything other than singular objects capable in principle of
being directly and independently intuited by some mind or other.
Ockham was very much aware that the problem he was discussing
in relation with what he called “universals” (universalia) crucially had
to do with linguistic items. He endorsed the common definition of a
universal as what is capable in principle of being predicable of many.19
But anything that is predicable, he thought, has to be a sign, since it
has to be able to occur in a predicative sentence and represent some-
thing other than itself in that sentence. The term “horse,” for example,
is predicable of many in the sense that it can be the predicate term of
many true sentences with different subject terms. In particular, it can
be the predicate of many true sentences the subject terms of which are
demonstrative pronouns designating different singular objects, such as
“this is a horse,” “that is a horse,” etc. The predicate in such sentences
cannot merely represent itself: “this is a horse” does not normally mean
that this thing here is the term “horse” itself; the predicate “horse” has
to function as a sign for something else. Ockham admits of two kinds
of such general signs: linguistic ones and mental ones. Only the former,
however, are immediately given to our common experience. Mental
signs have to be postulated, Ockham thought, for a correct under-
standing of our intellectual capacities and accomplishments, but what
he treats in practice as the primary objects that a theory of universals
has to deal with are the general terms of our public languages.20 His
contention, then, is that the things these linguistic items represent can
all be intuitively apprehended and singularly designated by demon-
strative pronouns.
Yet further specifying what these things are is not a merely logical
or linguistic matter for him. The medieval problem of universals was
18 Ockham’s theory of intuitive cognition is laid out in Ord., Prologue, q. 1 (transl.
Boehner 1990: 18–25) and Quodl. V, 5 (transl. Freddoso 1991: 413–417). A detailed pre-
sentation is to be found in Adams 1987: 495–530. More on this in c hapter 5.
19 SL I, 14, OPh I: 47–49 (transl. Loux 1974: 77–79).
20 See, e.g., Ord., dist. 2, q. 4, especially OTh II: 134–137 (transl. Spade 1994: 136–138).
In order to determine the structure of our mental language, Ockham turns to the lin-
guistic categories that are semantically indispensable in spoken languages; see SL I, 3
(transl. Loux 1974: 52–54) and Quodl. V, 8–9 (transl. Freddoso 1991: 424–432).
commonly discussed in connection with three questions that the Greek

philosopher Porphyry had raised in his Isagoge, also known as the trea-
tise On the Predicables, which had become one of the basic textbooks of
logic in Boethius’s Latin translation. In this work, Porphyry provided
a classification of the different sorts of predicates one has to deal with
in logic, the two most salient of which are genera such as “animal,” and
species such as “horse.”21 Before addressing the logical issues directly,
though, Porphyry listed three “profound” questions: Do genera and
species exist in themselves or only in the mind? Are they corporeal or
incorporeal? And do they exist apart or in sense objects? This was tan-
tamount to asking whether anything corresponds to general terms out
there in the world and, if so, what their ontological status is. Porphyry,
however, refrained from discussing these questions himself, because
they require, he said, a more detailed examination than what is pos-
sible in an introductory booklet. Ockham in commenting on this pas-
sage is explicit that Porphyry’s questions do not pertain to logic but to
metaphysics.22 And he takes this very seriously. Metaphysics for him
is a bona fide discipline concerned with the basic structure of reality.23
In Ockham, then, the problem of universals is to determine whether
there is a special kind of beings in the world that corresponds to our
general terms in addition to the singular objects that can be pointed at.
His answer is no, which is precisely why he counts as a nominalist in
our sense. But in his view this ultimately is a metaphysical issue, not a
merely logical one.
The situation is similar with thesis N2. “Relation” (relatio) was
known to medieval philosophers as one of the four major categories
identified by Aristotle in his treatise On Categories, the others being
substance, quality, and quantity.24 But what these categories are sup-
posed to be categories of was the object of an age-old controversy in
21 The other three Porphyrian predicables are differentiae (such as “rational”), propria
(such as “capable of laughing”), and accidental predicates (such as “white” or “seated”).

22 Exp. in libr Porph., Prologue, 2, OPh II: 10.
23 On Ockham’s conception of metaphysics, see Pelletier 2013.
24 Aristotle’s list of categories has ten items in it, but the other six (action, affec-
tion, position, time, place, and habitus) are dealt with by him very briefly and they
continued to be considered of a lesser interest throughout the Middle Ages. For ex-
cellent presentations of the medieval debates over relations, see Henninger 1989 and
Brower 2018.
Nominalism 21
the Aristotelian tradition: are they categories of things, of words, or

of something else? Ockham’s position is straightforward: the main
goal of Aristotle’s On Categories “is to discuss certain words that sig-
nify things.”25 The items included in each category are not the external
things themselves, but terms that refer to external things somehow.
What belong in the category of relation, in particular, are but rela-
tional terms.
A relational term is defined by Ockham as a nominal term that
cannot be truly predicated of anything unless it is possible in principle
to add another nominal phrase to it.26 “Mother,” for example, is a re-
lational term because although it can correctly be said of somebody
that she is a mother without further specification, this cannot be true
unless it is possible to add a nominal phrase indicating whose mother
she is. Ockham’s nominalist position is that such relational terms refer
in general to external things, but that their referents are not different
from those of non-relational terms. The difference is in the mode of
signification, not in the nature of the external referents.27 We will dis-
cuss the semantics of these terms in chapter 4, but the point now is that
for Ockham the truth of an affirmative sentence with a relational term
in it such as “Eve is a mother” or “Eve is the mother of Abel” requires
the existence of the mother and the child, and maybe of some singular
qualities inhering in them, but no extra “little thing” is needed in be-
tween the relata.28 Ockham thought that Christian theology requires
the admission of some relational entities in order to account for Divine
Trinity and Incarnation in particular,29 but I will leave this aside here.
Ockham is explicit that philosophy proper can and should do without
such entities.30 In his view, whatever exists in the natural world is an
“absolute” thing, that is, a singular substance or a singular quality, such
as can be referred to by standard non-relational terms.
25 Exp. in libr. Praedic., Prologue, OPh II: 135–136.

26 See SL I, 52, OPh I: 172 (transl. Loux 1974: 171).
27 See in particular: Ord., dist. 30, q. 1– 3, Quodl. VI, 16–20 (transl. Freddoso
1991: 539–559), and SL I, 52 (transl. Loux 1974: 171–174).
28 Ockham frequently uses the phrase “parva res” (little thing) in Quodl. VI to charac-
terize the special objects that realists postulate as referents for relational terms.
29 Ord., dist. 30, q. 4, OTh IV: 366–374.
30 Ord., dist. 30, q. 2–3, OTh IV: 320–365.
“Quantity” was also one of Aristotle’s four main categories.

Considered as such, it includes only significative terms for Ockham.31
Thesis N3 is the claim that these terms refer to substances and quali-
ties, but in some special way. In one sense indeed, the term “quantity”
(quantitas) is applied by Ockham to the external things themselves.
Quantities in this sense do exist in the outside world for him, but they
are nothing but singular substances or qualities: Socrates or a given
patch of redness can truly be said to be a quantity (or a quantum), and
so do the twelve Apostles taken as a group. A quantity in general is de-
fined as something that has parts which are external to one another,
“parts outside of parts,” as Ockham puts it.32 Following Aristotle, he
distinguishes two main kinds of quantities: continuous and discrete.
A continuous quantity is a single extended entity with spatiotem-
porally contiguous parts, while a discrete quantity is a collection of
countable singular entities. Two sorts of terms, then, are to be included
in the corresponding Aristotelian category: geometrical terms, on the
one hand, such as “point,” “line,” “surface,” and “volume” or “body,”
that can be used to provide information as to how the contiguous
parts of something are spatiotemporally arranged with respect to each
other; and numerical terms, on the other hand, such as “one,” “two,”
“three,” that can be used to count the members of a collection. Thesis
N3 says that all such terms can occur in true descriptions of the very
same things that non-geometrical and non-numerical terms refer to
without additional ontological commitment. All material substances
truly are bodies, for instance, insofar as they are three-dimensional.
And any collection of singular entities, whether substances or quali-
ties, can truly be numbered. As in the other cases, the basic ontology
is a matter for metaphysics to determine, but how it is that quantita-
tive terms can be true of anything without the ontology being enriched
pertains to semantics.
31 Ockham’s main developments on quantity are: Exp. in libr. Praedic. 10–11, Quodl.
IV, 23–33 (transl. Freddoso and Kelley 1991: 336–383), Tract. de quant. as a whole
(transl. Birch 1930—but not quite reliable), and SL I, 44–48 (transl. Loux 1974: 142–
158). See on this Adams 1987: 169–213.
32 Quodl. IV, 23, OTh IX: 407 (transl. Freddoso and Kelley 1991: 336).
Nominalism 23
N1–N3 will be discussed in some detail in the remaining chapters

of this book. But three other nominalist claims in Ockham must be
briefly mentioned. The first is:
N4 -Nominalism with respect to syncategorematic terms: there is no

special sort of entities that correspond to syncategorematic terms.
The distinction between categorematic and syncategorematic terms

is a basic one in Ockham. The former are all of those terms that refer
somehow (or purport to refer) to something in the world, such as
“man,” “animal,” “red,” “redness,” and so on. Syncategoremata, on the
other hand, are the connectors, quantifiers, negations, and prepositions
of a given language, such as “if,” “no,” “every,” “some,” “with,” “of,” “ex-
cept,” “insofar,” etc. “None of these,” Ockham says, “has a definite and
determinate signification, nor does any of them signify anything dis-
tinct from what is signified by categorematic terms.”33 The point is that
syncategorematic terms do not refer to anything at all. Ockham’s ap-
proach to these terms is an instance of the first nominalist strategy we
identified at the end of the previous section: nothing corresponds to
them in the world. This is not to say that they are meaningless (in our
sense of the word). They do have crucial semantic functions insofar as
they affect the truth-conditions of the sentences in which they occur.
What they do not have is a designative function. The sentences “All
horses are white” and “Some horses are white” have different truth-
conditions because their quantifiers differ, but neither of the two
requires the existence of anything but what the categorematic terms
“horse” and “white” directly or connotatively refer to.
Another one of Ockham’s theses that can be counted as nominalist
according to our criterion is:
N5 -Nominalism with respect to abstract terms: there is no special

sort of entities that correspond to abstract terms.
33 SL I, 4, OPh I: 15 (transl. Loux 1974: 55).

In Ockham’s way of speaking, the distinction between abstract and

concrete applies only to terms: external things are neither concrete nor
abstract. The distinction, moreover, is first and foremost a morpho-
logical matter for him. Abstract and concrete terms, he says, “have the
same stem but different endings,” and the abstract ones usually (but
not always) have more syllables than their concrete counterparts.34
Typical examples of, respectively, concrete and abstract terms are
“just” and “justice,” “red” and “redness,” “philosopher” and “philos-
ophy,” “animal” and “animality,” etc. Semantically, this is not a homoge-
neous distinction. Ockham lists four cases. Sometimes, one of the two
terms refers in some way to something that the other in no way refers
to. “Red,” for example, refers to red substances while connoting their
rednesses, but “redness” refers only to the individual qualities of red-
ness and in no way to their underlying substances. Sometimes, the ab-
stract and the concrete terms are strictly synonymous with each other.
This is so, Ockham thinks, with “animal” and “animality,” at least in one
sense of these words. Since being an animal does not involve any extra
property in addition to the substance of the animal itself, Brunellus
the donkey can—in a contrived way of speaking, admittedly—be said
to be an animality as well as an animal. A third possibility—and an
especially intriguing one—is that both terms refer either directly or
connotatively to the same things in the world, but one of them implic-
itly incorporates some syncategorematic or adverbial determination.
“Horseness,” for example, might be taken as an abbreviation for some-
thing like “a horse necessarily” or “a horse insofar as it is a horse.” It
then refers to nothing but singular horses, but it is not substitutable in
all contexts for its concrete counterpart “horse.” Saying that “horseness
is some sort of animality” thus comes down to saying that horses nec-
essarily are animals. In such cases, the explicit reformulation with only
concrete terms and syncategorematic or adverbial terms would typi-
cally require a rephrasing of some other part of the sentence as well, as
in the example above where the predicate “is some sort of animality”
34 SL I, 5, OPh I: 16 (transl. Loux 1974: 56). Ockham’s views on abstract terms are
expressed in SL I, 5–9, OPh I: 16–35 (transl. Loux 1974: 56–69) and Quodl. V, 9, OTh
IX: 513–518 (transl. Freddoso 1991: 429–432).
Nominalism 25
is replaced by “are animals.”35 The fourth case, finally, is when the con-
crete term refers to certain individuals while the abstract one refers to
several of these taken together. An example of this in English would be
“associate” and “association,” if the latter is taken to collectively refer to
a group of associates.
In none of these cases, according to Ockham, does the abstract term
normally import anything that is not somehow referred to by the corre-
sponding concrete one. In some instances of the first case, admittedly,
the abstract term is semantically simpler than its concrete counterpart.
“Redness,” for example, is a simple natural kind term—an “absolute”
term, in Ockham’s terminology—as it refers only to singular qualities
of redness without connoting anything else; “red,” on the other hand,
is semantically more complex as it denotes the red substances and
connotes their singular rednesses. This is generalizable to all cases in
which the abstract term stands for certain qualities while the concrete
one stands for the substances having these qualities. Yet even then, the
abstract word does not designate anything that is not in some way re-
ferred to by the concrete one, be it connotatively.36 As we will see in
detail in chapter 3, Ockham’s ontology does countenance indeed two
sorts of basic entities: singular substances and singular qualities, but
since a concrete qualitative term such as “red” denotes substances and
connotes qualities while the abstract counterpart “redness” refers only
to qualities, it turns out that everything that is referred to by the ab-
stract term is also referred to somehow by the concrete term.
In the second and third ways of distinguishing concrete and abstract
terms, the referential equivalence between them is straightforward. It
holds in virtue of the definitions of what semantic relations hold be-
tween the two terms in such cases: plain synonymy in case number
two and mere syncategorematic or adverbial difference in case number
three (which, as we saw, involves no additional entities according to
N4). The referential equivalence between the concrete and the abstract
terms might seem less obvious in the fourth case, in which one of them
refers to a collection while the other refers to separate individuals.
35 More on this in the section on pseudo-names in chapter 4 below, pp. 132–136.

36 Ockham’s idea of connotation will be further explained in chapter 4.
Modern philosophers indeed often consider a collection of individuals

to be a distinct entity with respect to its members.37 But Ockham does
not. For him, a group is nothing, ontologically, but its members. Yet,
he believes, we can speak of them collectively, if we wish, rather than
distributively.38
A last Ockhamist claim I want to mention is:
N6 -Nominalism with respect to sentences: there is no special sort of

entities that corresponds to whole sentences.
There is no such thing in Ockham’s ontology as an event or a state of

affairs. An affirmative or negative assertive sentence—a “proposition”
(propositio) in Ockham’s vocabulary—is a grammatically well-formed
combination of categorematic and syncategorematic terms that has a
truth-value. It has truth-conditions, consequently, and Ockham is very
explicit about them, discussing at length “what is necessary and suffi-
cient for the truth of propositions.”39 But sentences (or propositions)
have no significates of their own. Ockham’s semantics is atomistic
and it is based on what we today call the principle of composition: the
truth-conditions of a sentence are a function of the signification of
its categorematic terms as determined by whatever syncategoremata
the sentence includes. As in the case of N4, his approach to sentences
illustrates the first of our two nominalist strategies. While Ockham
says that universal, relational, or quantitative terms signify certain
things in the world, he never says so for sentences. Whether or not a
sentence as a whole designates some special entity became the object
of an interesting debate later on in the fourteenth century, and some
authors indeed were realists about that,40 but Ockham himself does not
yet treat the point as controversial. He simply avoids saying that a sen-
tence signifies anything, except in a very loose sense of “to signify.”41
37 See, for example, Goodman 1956.

38 On collective terms in Ockham, see below, pp. 136–138.
39 SL II, 1, OPh I: 241 (transl. Freddoso and Schuurman 1980: 79). Ockham’s
theory of truth-conditions is set out in SL II, 2–20 (transl. Freddoso and Schuurman
1980: 86–154).
40 See, e.g., Nuchelmans 1973, Cesalli 2016.
41 On the various senses of “to signify,” see SL I, 33 (transl. Loux 1974: 113–114).
Nominalism 27
The ontological commitment associated with a given sentence reduces

to what its component terms must refer to for the sentence to be true.
Outline of a nominalist program
If it is to be tenable, a nominalist theory should be able to accomplish

(at least) four tasks with respect to the category of linguistic items it
deals with: refute the corresponding form of realism and produce
an ontology, a semantic theory, and an epistemology. The remaining
chapters of this book will be dedicated to showing how Ockham’s
doctrine purports to do so with respect to general terms, relational
terms, and quantitative terms. But in order to appreciate Ockham’s
contributions to these issues, it must be understood at the outset why
these requirements arise for any nominalist approach whatsoever.
The first thing to realize is this: for any recognizable linguistic cat-
egory, the unreflective presumption is that it corresponds to some
special kind of things. Realism is the default position with respect to
any category of linguistic items. One reason for this is that whatever
these linguistic items are, they should be meaningful in order to play
a distinctive role in language, and it seems, therefore, that they should
mean something distinctive. Thus Fredegisus of Tours argued in his
“Letter on Nothingness and Shadow,” written in the early ninth cen-
tury, that since the word “nothing” means something, nothingness
must exist.42 A second apparent reason is that existential generaliza-
tion in some form or other usually seems to be a valid form of infer-
ence. Socrates is a human being and Plato is a human being, therefore,
one might spontaneously reason, there is something that they both
are; there is something, in other words, that is common to the two of
them. Or again: Socrates is Plato’s teacher, therefore there exists a cer-
tain relation between them. And so on. If one is to resist transforming
such facile inferential moves into specific ontological claims, one has
to show first why the result is unsatisfactory. In reply to Fredegisus, for
example, one might point out that his admittance of nothingness as a
42 An English translation of this text is to be found in Jun 2003.

distinct entity leads to a contradiction: saying that there is nothing in

a certain box would entail that there is something in this box after all.
This is generalizable: since realism rests on apparently natural modes
of inference from language to reality, nominalism with respect to a
given category of linguistic items is committed to showing why the re-
alist interpretation of these items is to be rejected, or at least called into
question.
Second, what about ontology? If a nominalist chooses to say that
the terms she is interested in refer to nothing whatsoever, she might
manage to dispense with ontology altogether. She might be content
with showing that no ontological commitment is brought about by
the correct use of these terms. But nominalists, as we saw, often adopt
a different strategy by claiming that the linguistic items they want to
deal with do refer to something, albeit to the very same objects that
are referred to by some more basic units. This is Ockham’s approach
to general terms, relational terms, and quantitative terms. Ontology,
then, becomes inevitable. It must be explained to some extent what
these objects are, how they are structured (or not), and how many basic
categories of them are to be countenanced. The approach, otherwise,
would not be informative enough. Even for a nominalist, a referential
account of a certain category of linguistic items requires a metaphys-
ical basis.
Third, a crucial part of any nominalist doctrine, obviously, is to pro-
pose a semantic account of the linguistic items it is interested in. Even if
it claims that these items do not convey any ontological commitment,
it should explain what their roles are in our languages and in partic-
ular how they affect (or not) the meaning of the linguistic expressions
and sentences in which they occur. Ockham, for example, does this in
some detail for propositional quantifiers and negations, which he takes
to be non-referential units.43 If a nominalist holds, on the other hand,
that the terms he focuses on do have some ontological import, he must
explain how it is that no special entity is needed. This might be done, as
Ockham does, by distinguishing various ways in which different lin-
guistic units refer to the very same things in the world without being
43 This is part of his theory of truth-conditions in SL II, 2–20 (transl. Freddoso and
Schuurman 1980: 86–154). More on this in c hapter 4.

Nominalism 29
synonymous, various “modes of signification,” as Ockham says. Or

it might be done by distinguishing a variety of semantic dimensions
for the linguistic units under consideration, sense and denotation, for
example, as Frege did. This is not to say that the nominalism versus
realism issue is merely a linguistic matter. The kind of semantics that
nominalism calls for is strongly constrained by the ontology that one
adopts, and this ontology might be motivated by all sorts of reasons,
including scientific, metaphysical, or religious ones. But the point now
is that no nominalist position can dispense with semantics.
Fourth and last, the semantic theory, as Donald Davidson empha-
sized, must be compatible with the learnability of the linguistic items it
deals with.44 Given his parsimonious ontology, the nominalist philos-
opher needs some account or other of how we can master a language
with such items in it. A theory of mind and cognition is required. Part
of it might come from empirical psychology or cognitive science, but
philosophy of mind and epistemology are also called for to help pro-
vide a coherent description of the relevant cognitive structures. This
is especially true if one considers that specific mental states corre-
spond to the linguistic units in question. We regularly use general, rela-
tional, or quantitative terms, for example, for stating the content of the
thoughts we attribute to each other. I can attribute to Mary, say, the ge-
neral belief that donkeys are stubborn, or the relational belief that Eve
was the mother of Abel, or the quantitative belief that twenty is greater
than ten. How can such belief-attributions be correct if their most im-
portant component terms do not refer to any distinctive objects that
Mary could grasp? Along with many other philosophers and cogni-
tive scientists, Ockham assumes that what is needed here is a theory
of concepts considered as combinable mental units, but whether the
nominalist takes this route or not, she owes us some explanation of the
cognitive processes involved in our ability to use and to understand the
terms she deals with. And she must explain how these cognitive pro-
cesses allow human beings to know anything about the world.
Taken together, these four tasks give rise to a comprehensive pro-
gram for any nominalist doctrine. We will now ask Ockham how he
44 See Davidson 1984b.

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PLATE CCLXXXIII.
POGONIA GLABRA.
Smooth-leaved Pogonia.
CLASS V. ORDER I.
PENTANDRIA MONOGYNIA. Two Chives. One Pointal.
ESSENTIAL GENERIC CHARACTER.
Corolla monopetala; tubus ad faucem pilosus. Stamina supra medium

corollæ inserta. Stigma concavum, declinatum. Nux quadrilocularis.
Blossom one petal; tube hairy at the mouth. Chives inserted into the
middle of the blossom. Summit concave, declined. Nut four-celled.
SPECIFIC CHARACTER.
Pogonia foliis eliptico-lanceolatis, glabris; floribus pendulis, minutis,

albis.
Pogonia with leaves eliptically lance-shaped, smooth; flowers hanging
down, small and white.
REFERENCE TO THE PLATE.
1. The Empalement, magnified.

2. A Blossom cut open, with the Chives in their place.
3. A Chive, magnified.
4. The Pointal and Seed-bud, natural size.
5. The same magnified.
This plant from New Holland, is rather more delicate than most of those we
possess from that country; as it is apt to lose its leaves if exposed either to
damps, or much cold. It was first raised in the year 1790, by the late Mr.
Robertson, of Stockwell; is easily propagated by cuttings, and flowers in
January, or February. The other species figured in this work, Plate 212, and
our present plant, are the only two yet known of this genus. They require a
very light sandy loam, or peat soil, to make them flourish. The P. glabra does
not grow more than three feet high and flowers the first year from cuttings.
Our figure was taken at the Hammersmith Nursery.
PLATE CCLXXXIV.
CHIOCOCCA RACEMOSA.
Opposite-leaved Snowberry-tree.
CLASS V. ORDER I.
PENTANDRIA MONOGYNIA. Five Chives. One Pointal.
GENERIC CHARACTER.
Calyx. Perianthium quinquedentatum, superum, persistens.

Corolla monopetala, infundibuliformis; tubus longus, patens; limbus
quinquepartitus; laciniis æqualibus, acutis, reflexis.
Stamina. Filamenta quinque, filiformia, longitudine corollæ. Antheræ
oblongæ, erectæ.
Pistillum. Germen inferum, subrotundum, compressum. Stylus
filiformis, longitudine staminum. Stigma simplex, obtusum.
Pericarpium. Bacca subrotunda, compressa, coronata calyce, bilocularis.
Semina duo, subrotunda, compressa, distantia.
Empalement. Cup five-toothed, above and remaining.
Blossom one petal, funnel-shaped; tube long, spreading; border five
divided; segments equal, pointed and reflexed.
Chives. Five threads, hair-like, the length of the blossom. Tips oblong,
upright.
Pointal. Seed-bud beneath, roundish, flattened. Shaft thread-shaped, the
length of the chives. Summit simple, blunt.
Seed-vessel. A roundish berry, flattened, crowned with the permanent
cup, two-celled.
Seeds two, roundish, flattened, and at a distance from each other.
SPECIFIC CHARACTER.
Chiococca foliis oppositis, ovatis, acuminatis; ramis horizontalibus;
floribus racemosis, pendulis.
Snowberry-tree with opposite leaves, egg-shaped, tapered; branches grow
horizontal; flowers grow in bunches hanging down.
1. The Empalement, natural size.

2. The same, magnified.
3. A Flower.
4. The Chives and Pointal, natural size.
5. The same magnified.
The Snowberry-tree is a native of Jamaica, and some of the other West India
islands; requiring the temperature of the hothouse to preserve it; growing to
the height of four or five feet; but the stem being too weak to support itself,
must be assisted. It is propagated by cuttings, and delights in a rich soil. We
are informed in Miller’s Dictionary, treating of this plant, that it was
introduced to us, in the year 1729, by Mr. Warner, of London; and that it was
cultivated, in the garden of Mr. Sherard, at Eltham, about that time. The root
of this plant is used medicinally, and has a very bitter, acrid taste. It is a very
free blowing plant, flowering the first year from the cuttings; but never
produces its fine white berries in this country, which constitute its greatest
beauty, and whence its generic title. Our figure was made from a plant in the
Hammersmith Collection. Flowers in September.
PLATE CCLXXXV.
FERRARIA VIRIDIFLORA.
Green-flowered Ferraria.
CLASS XVI. ORDER I.

MONADELPHIA TRIANDRIA. Threads united. Three Chives.
Monogyna. Spathæ unifloræ.

Petala sex, undulato-crispata. Stigmata cucullata. Capsula 3-locularis,
infera.
One Pointal. Sheaths one-flowered.
Petals six, waved and crisped. Summits cowled. Capsule three-celled
beneath.
See Ferraria pavonia, Pl. CLXXVIII. Vol. III.
SPECIFIC CHARACTER.
Ferraria foliis distichis, vaginantibus, costatis; petalis lanceolatis

æqualibus, interioribus immaculatis, angustioribus, virescentibus.
Ferraria with leaves pointing opposite ways sheathing the stem and
ribbed; petals lance-shaped, equal, the inner ones without spots, narrower
and greenish.
1. The Seed-bud, Chives and Pointal.

2. One of the Chives, a little magnified, as seen from the inside.
3. The same seen from the outside.
4. The Seed-bud, Shaft and Summits, the Chives removed.
5. One of the Summits magnified.
Our figure represents the Moræa Ferrariola of Jacquin’s Collectanea 4. p.
141; but, as we conceive Ferraria a good, and distinct genus, we have not
followed either him, or Thunberg, who has likewise thrown these plants to
Moræa. At first sight we did not think this plant possessed of sufficient
distinctive character to be treated as a different species from the F. undulata;
but upon closer inspection found it to vary nearly in every part; in the shape
of the flower, the leaves and the root. The singular character of this, and the
other Cape Ferrarias, of making but one growth in two, and sometimes three
years; is hardly to be traced in any other plants, but constantly so in these.
They produce their flowers about July, the season of their flowering; the
flowers are as transitory as those of the F. pavonia; that is to say, the duration
of about six hours. Our figure was taken from a plant in the Hibbertian
Collection, which flowered in the month of July 1802. The Ferrarias all
propagate by the root; and should be planted in sandy peat mixed with a
small portion of loam.
PLATE CCLXXXVI.
HIBISCUS PATERSONIUS.
Norfolk Island Hibiscus.
CLASS XVI. ORDER VI.

MONADELPHIA POLYANDRIA. Threads united. Many Chives.
Calyx duplex; exterior polyphyllus. Stigmata 5. Capsula 5-locularis,

polysperma.
Empalement double; outer one many-leaved. Five Summits. Capsule
five-celled, many-seeded.
See Hibiscus mutabilis, Pl. CCXXVIII. Vol. IV.
SPECIFIC CHARACTER.
Hibiscus foliis acuminato-lanceolatis, coriaceis, supra punctatis, subtus

tomentosis: floribus axillaribus; calycibus monophyllis, quinquedentatis.
Hibiscus with tapering lance-shaped leaves, leathery, dotted above and
downy underneath; flowers grow from the insertion of the leaves; cups one-
leaved, five-toothed.
1. The Cup with its foot-stalk.

2. The columnar part of the Chives cut open, the pointal taken
away.
3. The Pointal.
4. A skinny membrane, which surrounds the seed-bud at the base.
5. A ripe capsule, with the enlarged cup attached.
6. The same, cut through the middle horizontally.
7. A ripe seed.
The Norfolk Island Hibiscus is a tender greenhouse plant; was introduced to
Britain, in the year 1792, having been raised from seeds communicated by
Col. Paterson, then stationed on that Island. It attains the height of 13 feet, or
more, becoming a small tree; may be increased readily from cuttings, and
should be planted in a mixture of loam and sandy peat. Our figure is from a
specimen received from the Right Hon. Lord Viscount Courtenay, in whose
collection at Powderham, near Exeter, it flowered for the first time in the
year 1800; and where also the seeds ripened.
We have no doubt but this plant belongs to the Genus Lagunæa, of
Schreber; but as he proposes himself, and as L’Heritier as justly observes,
the simplicity of the cup is not a sufficient ground, on which to found a new
genus; so we have rather given our present subject, the name under which it
is in general known, than adopt a title for it which is acknowledged by the
author, as rather unwarrantable.
PLATE CCLXXXVII.
STYPHELIA PARVIFLORA.
Small-flowered Styphelia.
CLASS V. ORDER I.
PENTANDRIA MONOGYNIA. Five Chives. One Pointal.
Calyx imbricatus. Corolla tubulosa.

Stamina fauci inserta. Drupa quinquelocularis. Semina bina.
Empalement tiled. Blossom tubular.
Chives inserted into the mouth of the blossom. A five celled berry. Seeds
by twos.
See Styphelia triflora, Pl. LXXII. Vol. I.
SPECIFIC CHARACTER.
Styphelia foliis lanceolatis, oppositis; floribus capitatis terminalibus;

corollis minutis, albis.
Styphelia with lance-shaped, opposite leaves; flowers terminate the
branches in heads; blossom small and white.
1. The Empalement magnified.

2. A Flower, natural size.
4. A Blossom, cut open, with the Chives attached.
5. The Pointal, natural size.
This Styphelia, as are all the known species of the genus, is a native of New
Holland, and was amongst the first plants which were raised from seeds
from that country. It is a hardy greenhouse plant; grows very bushy,
handsome in its foliage, and seldom exceeds two feet in height. It is
propagated by cuttings, made from the tender shoots, about the month of
April; and treated as directed for other plants natives of the same clime.
Should be planted in sandy peat earth.
Our figure was taken from a specimen communicated by Mr. Cuff, from
his select collection at Teddington, Middlesex; where it flowered, we
believe, for the first time in England, last year, in the month of August, 1802.
PLATE CCLXXXVIII.
PROTEA CYNAROIDES.
Artichoke-like-flowered Protea.
CLASS IV. ORDER I.

TETRANDRIA MONOGYNIA. Four Chives. One Pointal.
Corolla quadrifida seu quadripetala. Antheræ lineares, insertæ petalis

infra apicem. Calyx proprius nullus.
Semina solitaria.
Blossom four-cleft or four petals. Tips linear, inserted into the petals
below the point. Empalement proper none.
Seeds solitary.
See Protea formosa, Pl. XVII. Vol. I.
SPECIFIC CHARACTER.
Protea foliis suborbiculatis, glaberrimis; petiolis longissimis; squamulis

calycinis lanceolatis, apice carinatis.
Protea with nearly orbicular leaves, and very smooth; footstalks very
long; scales of the cup lance-shaped, keeled at the point.
1. A Floret spread open, with the Chives in their places.

2. The Pointal and Seed-bud.
To the Right Hon. the Earl of Coventry we are indebted for the figure of this
superb plant; it having flowered in his Lordship’s rich, and extensive
collection at Croome, Worcestershire, this present February, 1803, for the
first time, in England; his Lordship did us the favour to order the flower to
be cut, and sent to London; where it arrived, without the least injury, and
continued in perfection many days.
The magnificence of this species of Protea, can be but poorly expressed
within the limited bounds of our publication; we have, nevertheless,
endeavoured to do it all the justice within our grasp. A considerable part of
the lustre of the flower is lost, from the small portion of the leaves which
could be introduced; as the contrasted beauty of the fine broad shining
leaves, which form, as it were, a nidus, or ground wood for the blossom,
contribute, so much, to heighten the beauty of the whole.
The Protea cynaroides is a hardy greenhouse plant, was introduced to
Britain, in 1792, by Messrs. Lee and Kennedy, Hammersmith, from the Cape
of Good Hope. May be increased by cuttings, taken off the lower part of the
plant; where they shoot out in clusters to the length of an inch or more, and
must be treated as has already been directed for Proteas in general. The
plant, even at the Cape, seldom grows higher than 18 inches, or two feet.
INDEX
TO THE PLANTS CONTAINED IN VOL. III.

Plate 145 Hillia longiflora Long-flowered Hillia H. H. Shrub. February.
146 Psoralea aculeata Prickly Psoralea G. H. Shrub. August.
147 Gladiolus Spear-spotted G. H. Bulb. May.
cuspidatus Gladiolus
148 Lachenalia Four-coloured G. H. Bulb. December.
quadricolor Lachenalia
149 Struthiola ciliata Fringed-leaved G. H. Shrub. August.
Struthiola
150 Geranium Bitten-leaved H. H. Shrub. March.
præmorsum Geranium
151 Pittosporum Thick-leaved G. H. Shrub. May.
coriaceum Pittosporum
152 Geranium Spathula-leaved G. H. Shrub. April.
spathulatum Geranium
153 Viola pedata Bird’s-foot-leaved Har. Herb. May.
Violet
154 Echium argenteum Silvery-leaved G. H. Shrub. July.
Viper’s Bugloss
155 Ixia polystachia Many-spiked Ixia G. H. Bulb. May.
156 Banksia ericæfolia Heath-leaved G. H. Shrub. March.
Banksia
157 Cordia Sebestena Rough-leaved Cordia H. H. Shrub. April.
158 Geranium Prickly-stalked H. H. Shrub. March.
echinatum Geranium
159 Ixia capitata, Var. Bunch-flowering G. H. Bulb. May.
flo. albo, fundo Ixia. Var. white fl.
nigro black bottom
160 Aristea major Spike-flowered G. H. Herb. July.
Aristea

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I was greatly helped by a number of persons in the preparation of this

All references to Ockham’s writings will be to the St. Bonaventure crit-

For individual works, the following abbreviations will be used:

SL Summa logicae [Summa of Logic]

This book is about William of Ockham’s views on universals, rela-

(1) Everything in the world is singular; generality is a semantic fea-

These theses are logically independent of each other. One could be a

1 I develop this point in Panaccio 2019a.

nature. Even in philosophy proper his positions often had religious

1347, and Maurer 1999: 157–​292.

began his theological studies in Oxford shortly thereafter. This was a

Sophistical Refutations, and on Aristotle’s Physics; as well as two system-

Avignon on the night of May 26, 1328. They were excommunicated

5 For an overview of Ockham’s political thought, see McGrade 1974.

The term “nominalists” (nominales in Latin) was introduced in philos-

1 This is what I take to be the main conclusions of an interesting discussion among

3 Armstrong 1978, vol. I: 12 (with Armstrong’s italics).

relativizing strategy should be extended to the other characterizations

6 See Quine 1963: 1.

Take universals. In the medieval period, a universal was defined as

7 See, e.g., Aquinas, On Being and Essence 3. For an introduction to Scotus on

universals and common natures, see Noone 2003.

the other hand, we would like, if possible, to provide descriptions of

Those doctors are called nominalists [nominalistae] who do not mul-

This characterization of nominalism has two parts to it. First, it says,

in semantic theory. On this important author, see Conti 2016.

respect to relations, or with respect to numbers, as I was informally doing,

insofar as they can be labeled as nominalist or realist, they must deal

15 The point is developed in Panaccio 2019a.

philosophers we want to study were interested in as well. A doctrine,

Six Ockhamist theses

I introduced this book as being about Ockham’s theories of universals,

N1 -​Nominalism with respect to general terms: there is no special

N2 -​Nominalism with respect to relational terms: there is no special

N3 -​Nominalism with respect to quantitative terms: there is no spe-

In all three cases, Ockham’s position instantiates the second of the

16 SL I, 19, OPh I: 65–​67 (transl. Loux 1974: 90–​92).

18 Ockham’s theory of intuitive cognition is laid out in Ord., Prologue, q. 1 (transl.

commonly discussed in connection with three questions that the Greek

(such as “capable of laughing”), and accidental predicates (such as “white” or “seated”).

the Aristotelian tradition: are they categories of things, of words, or

25 Exp. in libr. Praedic., Prologue, OPh II: 135–​136.

“Quantity” was also one of Aristotle’s four main categories.

N1–​N3 will be discussed in some detail in the remaining chapters

N4 -​Nominalism with respect to syncategorematic terms: there is no

The distinction between categorematic and syncategorematic terms

N5 -​Nominalism with respect to abstract terms: there is no special

33 SL I, 4, OPh I: 15 (transl. Loux 1974: 55).

In Ockham’s way of speaking, the distinction between abstract and

1347, and Maurer 1999: 157–292.

N1 -Nominalism with respect to general terms: there is no special

N2 -Nominalism with respect to relational terms: there is no special

N3 -Nominalism with respect to quantitative terms: there is no spe-

16 SL I, 19, OPh I: 65–67 (transl. Loux 1974: 90–92).

25 Exp. in libr. Praedic., Prologue, OPh II: 135–136.

N1–N3 will be discussed in some detail in the remaining chapters

N4 -Nominalism with respect to syncategorematic terms: there is no

N5 -Nominalism with respect to abstract terms: there is no special

35 More on this in the section on pseudo-names in chapter 4 below, pp. 132–136.

N6 -Nominalism with respect to sentences: there is no special sort of

Schuurman 1980: 86–154). More on this in c hapter 4.