![]() The leading theories of universals -realism, conceptualism, nominalism, and resemblance theories -can best be explained by an examination of the doctrines of the main exponents. Universals are, by tradition, contrasted with particulars, the general contrasted with the numerically unique, and differing theories of universals are differing accounts of what is involved in this generality and in our experience of it. Generality is an essential feature of the objects of experience, recognition of generality is an essential feature of experience itself, and reflection of this generality is shown in the vocabulary of any language, all the words of which (with the exception of proper names) are general. Even if there were only one red object in the world, we would know what it would be like for there to be others, and we would be able to recognize another if we were to meet with it. Whatever we see (to take sight as an example) we see as a something -that is, as an object of a certain kind, as having certain qualities, and as standing in certain relations to other objects -and although every individual object is unique, in that it is numerically distinct from all others, its features are general, in that they are (or might be) repeated in other objects. Not merely is such classification possible, for scientific and other purposes it is unavoidable: All experience is of things as belonging to kinds, however vague and inarticulate the classification may be. In saying of two or more objects that each is a table, or square, or brown, or made of wood, we are saying that there is something common to the objects, which may be shared by many others and in virtue of which the objects may be classified into kinds. They may be indicated (although not defined) by the abstract nouns that we use when we think about, for example, beauty, justice, courage, and goodness and, again, by the adjectives, verbs, adverbs, and prepositions that we use in talking of individual objects, to refer to their qualities and to the relations between them. That in some sense or other there are universals, and that in some sense or other they are abstract objects -that is, objects of thought rather than of sense perception -no philosopher would wish to dispute the difficulties begin when we try to be more precise. No account has yet been propounded that has come near to receiving universal acceptance this reflects not merely disagreement on the answers to be offered but also, and perhaps more importantly, disagreement on exactly what the questions are that we are, or should be, trying to answer. Ever since, except for intervals of neglect, philosophers have been worrying about the nature and status of universals. He proposed a solution to his problem, but he also recognized the objections to his particular solution. Plato believed that the existence of universals was required not only ontologically, to explain the nature of the world that as sentient and reflective beings we experience, but also epistemologically, to explain the nature of our experience of it. ![]() Indeed, Plato may be taken to be the father of this perennial topic of philosophy, for it is in his dialogues that we find the first arguments for universals and the first discussion of the difficulties they raise. It goes back through the universalia of medieval philosophy to Aristotle's τ ὰ κ α θ ό λ ο υ and Plato's ἐ ί δ η and ἰ δ έ α ι. The word universal, used as a noun, has belonged to the vocabulary of English-writing philosophers since the sixteenth century, but the concept of universals, and the problems raised by it, has a far longer history.
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