by Immanuel Kant

Created on: February 07, 2007   Last Updated: May 08, 2007

To answer the above question one must first define a "nominalist" and a "realist" and delve into the overall problem that they both contribute to.
Both nominalism and realism arose as a reaction to the problem known as "the problem of the universals". This problem refers to a big collection of unsolved puzzles within the realms of cognitive psychology, epistemology, philosophy of language and ontology. This whole problem may have been started with a man in ancient Greece, known as Heraclitus. Heraclitus said that "we never step twice in the same river" and sure enough by the time we have moved our rear foot into the river, the water from before has rushed by the banks have been eroded a bit more. He concluded that as nothing is the same from time to time then all knowledge we have may be obsolete before we acquire it. He also said that names are an artificial way of stabilizing an unstable reality (by calling this a "river" I believe it to be one entity). Thus Heraclitus was the first ever nominalist.

A nominalist is one who thinks that the universals are only a group of names we give to groups of individuals. For example, Klose and Owen are both dogs. For a nominalist the word "dog" is just a word which has no real existence beyond the capabilities of our mind whilst the opposite thought would say that an "Ideal Form" of a dog exists somewhere in an abstract realm. This opposite school of thought is known as realism. A philosopher who supported the nominalistic viewpoint is Aristotle.
A realist is one who thinks that the universals are "real" and exist somewhere "out there" in an abstract realm full of the Ideal Forms of everything we experience on Earth. The basis of this school of thought is Plato's famous "Simile of the Cave" which can be found in his most famous dialogue "The Republic". A philosopher who supported the realist school of thought was Plato.
Now that we have firmly established our definitions and have seen the argument to which both these schools of thought contribute, let us endeavor to answer the question posed to us. The nominalist argument, at first, seems to be a more convincing explanation of epistemology to every extent but once we delve deeper and ask more questions the nominalist monopoly seems to loosen. Let us first talk about the nominalist monopoly before we go on to loosen it. The saying, "you learn from your mistakes" would meet with approval from philosophers in the nominalist trend. It can be seen that when a child is learning

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