"Meanings are flexible: they are formed out of a process of interpretation in interaction. Society is fluid, dynamic, since people constantly give meaning and base their actions upon those meanings. Blumer thus refutes realism, i.e. attributing meaning to being intrinsic to an object, as well as nominalism, i.e. ascribing meaning to the individual psyche."

http://www.cla.sc.edu/socy/faculty/deflem/zClassics2.html

Confusing ... How is involuntary manslaughter different from friendly fire? People are often prosecuted for the first but rarely for the second (unless they were disobeying a direct order). Interesting how simply changing the word can result in such deception.

Ian Hacking's dynamic nominalism is not nominalism at all. It is linguistic realism.

When the great Sufi mystic, Hasan, was dying, somebody asked "Hasan, who was your master?"

He said, "I had thousands of masters. If I just relate their names it will take months, years and it is too late. But three masters I will certainly tell you about.

One was a thief. Once I got lost in the desert, and when I reached a village it was very late, everything was closed. But at last I found one man who was trying to make a hole in t he wall of a house. I asked him where I could stay and he said 'At this time of night it will be difficult, but you can say with me - if you can stay with a thief'

And the man was so beautiful. I stayed for one month! And each night he would say to me, 'Now I am going to my work. You rest, you pray.' When he came back I would ask 'Could you get anything?' He would say, 'Not tonight. But tomorrow I will try again, God willing.' He was never in a state of hopelessness, he was always happy.

When I was meditating and meditating for years on end and nothing was happening, many times the moment came when I was so desperate, so hopeless, that I thought to stop all this nonsense. And suddenly I would remember the thief who would say every night, 'God willing, tomorrow it is going to happen.'

And my second master was a dog. I was going to the river, thirsty and a dog came. He was also thirsty. He looked into the river, he saw another dog there -- his own image -- and became afraid. He would bard and run away, but his thirst was so much that he would come back. Finally, despite his fear, he just jumped into the water, and the image disappeared. And I knew that a message had come to me from God: one has to jump in spite of all fears.

And the third master was a small child. I entered a town and a child was carrying a lit candle. he was going to the mosque to put the candle there.

'Just joking,' I asked the boy, 'Have you lit the candle yourself?' He said, 'Yes sir.' And I asked, 'There was a moment when the candle was unlit, then there was a moment when the candle was lit. Can you show me the source from which the light came?'

And the boy laughed, blew out the candle, and said, 'Now you have seen the light going. Where has it gone? You will tell me!'

My ego was shattered, my whole knowledge was shattered. And that moment I felt my own stupidity. Since then I dropped all my knowledgeability.

It is true that I had no master. That does not mean that I was not a disciple -- I accepted the whole existence as my master. My Disciplehood was a greater involvement than yours is. I trusted the clouds, the trees. I trusted existence as such. I had no master because I had millions of masters I learned from every possible source. To be a disciple is a must on the path. What does it mean to be a disciple? It means to be able to learn. to be available to learn to be vulnerable to existence. With a master you start learning to learn.

The master is a swimming pool where you can learn how to swim. Once you have learned, all the oceans are yours."

----

Author unknown (posted on an email list

Divine creations are individual. Divine constructions are universals.As constructions, they are names or categories (species, shared purpose, and Assembly, a House of Justice, etc.) which, through dynamic and changing patterns of relationships between particulars, encourage or promote behaviors or events.

Similarly, each of us in an individual (a particular). We are not parts of each other and do not share a substance. We create dynamic constructions (names) which, through the relations of their particulars, generate or promote behavior.

'The fourth of the conflicting trends is Nominalism against the so-called Realism. Now in order to make this very powerful conflict understandable, we must understand the word "realism." If you understand what realism was in the Middle Ages, then simply translate it by "idealism": it was what we call idealism, if idealism is not meant in a moral sense or a special epistemological sense, but if it means that the ideas, the essences, the ousia's of things have reality and power of being. Medieval realism is almost 180 degrees the opposite of what we call realism today, and realism today is almost identical with what the medieval people called nominalism. Now this is very confusing, but you as people who have to learn these things should at least be able to understand this confusion.

'The reason for it is the following: For medieval man, the universals, the essences, the nature of things, the nature of truth, the nature of man, are powers which determine what every individual tree or every individual man always will become when he or it develops. This is, if you want, mystical realism or, if you want, idealism. Universalia realia – this is medieval realism. They are not, of course, things in time and space; that is a misunderstanding, and then it is a little too easy to reject them and say, "I have never seen "manhood," I have only seen "Paul" and "Peter". Of course this is a wisdom the medieval people, also, knew. But they said all Pauls and Peters always have a nose and eyes and feet and language – this is a phenomenon which must be understood, and it can be understood only if it is understood in terms of the universal, the power of being which we call manhood, and which makes it possible for every man again to become a man, with all these potentialities – which may not develop, which may be destroyed; but he has these potentialities. That is what realism means.

'Nominalism is the opposite position which says: only. Peter and Paul, only this tree, at Riverside Drive, at the corner of 116th (the big one there!): that alone exists, and not "treehood," not the power of treehood, which makes it become one and which makes all the small ones develop – if the boys don't destroy them! Here you have an example of the difference in feeling. If you look at a tree, you can feel nominalistically and say, "This is a real thing; if I run against it, I will hurt my head." But you also can look at it and can be astonished, that of all the tree-seeds thrown into the soil, always this structure, shooting up and spreading its branches, etc., develops. And if you do this, then you can see in this big tree "treehood," and not just a big tree. And in Peter and Paul, you can see not only these particular individuals, but also the nature of man, manhood, as a power which makes it possible that all men have this character. The importance of this discussion, which went on in logical terms and is still going on all the time – there's almost no day in which I do not have a fight against nominalism on the basis of my comparatively medieval realistic kind of thinking, which thinks that being is power-of-being. That is a sin against the "holy spirit" of nominalism, and therefore very much against the "unholy" spirit of logical positivism and many other such spirits. But I fight this fight because I believe that although extreme realism is wrong – namely that realism against which Aristotle was fighting in Plato, that the universals are special things somewhere in heaven – of course this has to be denied -- there are structures which actualize themselves again and again against all attempts of boys and stones and climate to make something else of them. They are always carried through. This is what I mean with "realism'"and so I can say, of being always resists non-being. And for this reason I believe that we cannot be nominalists alone, although the nominalist attitude, the attitude of humility towards reality, of not desiring to deduct reality, is something which we must maintain.

'The immediate importance of nominalism was that it disrupted the universals, which were not only understood in terms of abstract concepts but which were also understood in terms of embracing groups – for instance, family, state, a group of friends, of craftsmen – where it is always the group which precedes the individual. Now this was also the danger of medieval realism, that the individual was prevented from developing himself in his potentialities. Therefore nominalism was an important reaction, so important that I would say that without the nominalistic reaction the estimation of the personality in the modern world, (this real basis of democracy), couldn't have developed. And while I usually make scolding remarks against our being nominalists, I now praise it, saying that without the emphasis on the fully developed individual and his potentialities we would have become Asiatics, as we are now in danger of becoming. And in this danger, medieval nominalism must be understood as positively as medieval realism. Medieval realism maintains the powers of being which transcend the individual; medieval nominalism preserves, or emphasizes, the valuation of the individual. The fact that the radical realism of the early Middle Ages was rejected has saved Europe from Asiatization, namely from collectivization. The fact that at the end of the Middle Ages all universals were lost has produced the imposition of the power of the church on individuals, making God Himself into an individual who, as a tyrant, gives laws to other individuals. This was the distortion which nominalism brought with itself, while the affirmation of the personal was its creativity.

'So when you hear about nominalism and realism, and read about it in textbooks of logic, don't be betrayed into the belief that this is in itself a basically logical problem. It is logical, it must be discussed in terms of the science of logic, too, but it is in terms of the attitude towards reality as a whole which expresses itself also in the logical realm.'

http://www.religion-online.org/showchapter.asp?title=2310&C=2326

Hey, man, you're drunk.

No, man, I never drink anything stronger than pop. .... Of course, ol' pop will drink just about anything.

Copyright © 2002- Mark A. Foster, Ph.D. All rights reserved.