Deflating Existential Consequence: A Case for Nominalism

This was written by a professor of mine at Tufts University. The language is a bit hard to sift through, but the points are very interesting and the arguments quite thorough and compelling. Perfect for the philosopher or philosophy student interested in a real-world sort of nominalism. (Azzouni is pretty much one of the only "true" nominalists out there today.) He is very practical, and wants to get down to the real deal of the way things are; this attitude prevails throughout his book. Basically, the book takes us through a discussion of the commitments of our discourse, first "deflating" Quine's criterion as an accurate tool for telling us what "things" our discourse commits us to. This is a huge move in metaphysics, because so much of the history has relied on Quine's criterion to tell us what we are saying we take to exist. However, Azzouni's move is actually quite simple: the truth of our propositions need not have anything to do with the necessary existence of the "things" we seem to be talking about. Azzouni looks to the language of the lay-person (us normal folk) and explores what might be the true criteria for things we take to exist . . . when we mean to. The thing to remember when reading this book is that Azzouni's idea of existence is quite exclusive--and that is his whole point. The reader who believes in the existence of "Mickey Mouse" (not the cartoon, but the fictional entity) and purple elephants will not find his needs met here. When Azzouni asks if we take something to exist, he MEANS it; there is no room for saying ideas exist, characters exist, or even numbers EXIST, because what Azzouni means by "existence" is a very austere thing, indeed. Truth and applicability are one thing, but existence is quite another. I will leave it for him to tell you just what some criteria for existence might be. His main (and most lofty) objective is, perhaps, to assure us all of the notion that numbers and sets do not exist, although theories about them are most certainly true. This is not an entirely new notion, but it will be most firmly advocated and explored in ever-newer ways in this, his book, right here.