Napoleon Sarony, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
“To be a nominalist consists in the undeveloped state of one’s mind of the apprehension of Thirdness as Thirdness. The remedy for it consists in allowing ideas of human life to play a greater part in one’s philosophy.
Metaphysics is the science of Reality”…
– Charles Sanders Peirce
To apprehend Thirdness as Thirdness means to grasp the reality of the whole, the mediating structures that connect signs, minds, and the world.
“Before the Civil War,every major [American] collegiate intellectual was a disciple of Scottish common sense realism”…
— Robert Curry
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Noting that without Firstness there simply would be nothing [LINK] [LINK] - Being as the Teological Common Ground of Divine and Natural Revelation [LINK].
It is the capacity to recognise that meaning, being and knowing are inherently connected [LINK] via three modes of Being (Peirce - Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness).
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Habits, laws, actions and ideas are real and interdependent.
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“Postmodernism rejects truth and common sense”...
— Robert Curry
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Please also read - How European Elites Embraced Post-Modernism and rejected Reality [LINK]
Peirce viewed a nominalist as someone whose philosophical mind was insufficiently developed [LINK] to recognise the actuality of generality of abstraction.
“In short, there was a tidal wave of nominalism. Descartes was a nominalist. Locke and all his following, Berkley, Hartley, Hume, and even Reid, were nominalists. Leibniz was an extreme nominalist, and Remusat who has lately made an attempt to repair the edifice of Liebnizian monadology, does so by cutting away every part which leans at all towards realism. Kant was a nominalist; although his philosophy would have rendered compacter, more consistent, and stronger if its author had taken up realism, as he certainly would have done if he read Scotus. Hegel was a nominalist of realistic yearnings; I might continue the list much further, Thus, in one word, all modern philosophy of every sect has been nominalistic”…
— Charles Sanders Peirce
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Thirdness can be interpreted as the mediation of both an epistemological and ontological mode of Being ( i.e. one of three modes of Being - Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness - Peirce’s Phenomenological Categories that form a Triadic alongside Aristotle’s Ontological Categories and Kant’s Epistemological Categories).
