The world of the Medieval Scholastics was shaken by a great question: nominalist, conceptualist, or realist? To many of us, these terms are strange or oddly placed. ‘Realism’ seems understandable, but what about the other two? Conceptualism and nominalism are recognizable as being composed of elements we know, but they aren’t recognizable in themselves. Worse, ‘realism’ doesn’t mean what it usually means, here; it’s being used as a technical term.

At the base, realism, conceptualism, and nominalism are different positions on the nature of Categories, of Concepts. Now, this seems an odd thing to disagree about, but consider: where do ‘categories’ (concepts) come from? Do I come up with the idea of ‘car’ based on observation or does it pre-exist? Does it have existence in itself, or is it just an epiphenomenon of my mind? Strictly speaking, I must admit that every car is materially different from every other car; even every idea of a car is probably slightly different from every other idea of a car, given that each idea exists in a different set of circumstances, with a different sensory input, often in a different person. How do we connect particulars to categories? How do we generate categories in the first place? “Do genera and species, such as man and lion, justice and equality, really exist in nature or are they only thoughts of one’s mind? And if they really exist, are they separate from things or do they exist in things?” Are they merely words or things in themselves?¹

So this is a debate that reaches back to Plato, in the history of non-Christian philosophy. Plato’s answer was, to put it in the terms used for medieval philosophers, ‘realist.’ He argued that ideas, categories, thoughts are all real things independent of the thinker. These independent existences are the Forms which people bear echoes of, see shadows of (this played into his epistemology). Aristotle disagreed. He posited that Forms were manufactured by men through observation, more or less (it’s been a while since I studied the man), falling in the conceptualist-nominalist realm, though I think closer to conceptualism than nominalism.

In the Medieval era, the realists were following in the footsteps of Augustine, as well as (to a lesser extent) Plato, who was the most remembered philosopher of pre-Christian times (Aristotle persisted as a few works only, and he became popular only shortly before Aquinas- even at Aquinas’s time he was not favored by the majority). They declared that generals (as opposed to particulars) had real, independent existence. There was a Form of a chair, of a table, of a car, of a man, of a tooth, of a teddy bear.² They did not necessarily use that exact terminology, but that was their position overall.

Nominalists, such as Roscellinus and William of Ockham, saw no good evidence for the existence of generals, of categories. Reason allowed men to generalize, certainly, to say that certain collections of traits would be banded together under a general title, but the category had no validity except as a shorthand or convenience. This is similar to the position later espoused by George Berkeley; indeed, as a consequence of their empiricism, the British Empiricists (e.g. Locke, Berkeley, and Hume) were nominalists.

Realism and nominalism both have problems. If realism is true, what are categories? They are obviously not material things (and a materialist cannot be a realist, in this sense), but neither are they purely mental, for that would make them subsidiary. It seems strange to derive the existence of a set of realities entirely from a philosophical notion of them (albeit it’s not too different from positing dark matter as an explanation for gravitational phenomenon).

Meanwhile, if nominalism is true, it self-destructs. After all, in order to group the various traits of various objects together and form categories, I must have the categories to group them. I cannot recognize that two chairs are both brown unless I know what the category of ‘brown’ is; I cannot maintain object permanence unless I can categorize past memories with present memories as being memories of the same object despite their qualitative difference; I cannot even recognize that two different sensations belong to the same object unless I have a category to connect them both to (that ‘brown’ and ‘solid’ both belong to the carboard box in front of me requires me to have a reason to categorize them as belonging to a single identity, rather than as two mutually irrelevant stimuli).³

Nominalism, I think, in large part on the above grounds, is untenable- but that doesn’t mean realism is without issue, as is also noted above. The conceptualists sought to solve the problems of both, to keep the strengths of each. For nominalism has the simplicity of requiring no new genera of substance (besides the spiritual and the physical). Conceptualism proposes that while the categories are derived from the world around them, rather than being its foundation or coequally existent, they have an independent existence as mental constructs. For the Scholastics, moreover, because they were all at least nominal Christians,⁴ conceptualism meant that concepts and categories existed eternally in the mind of God.

The problem, of course, is that Conceptualism still leaves concepts and ideas in the poor position of being assembled from unreality, from observations which have no innate connection. Perhaps this assembly was accomplished in eternity, but that does not remove its irrationality, its causelessness. There is at best an arbitrarity to it- concepts and categories have a proper relationship to particulars of thought and sensation not because of an innate connection but because God decided to pretend they were related in one particular way and that without reason. It offloads the nominalism’s problem of ‘cannot connect things that have no connection’ onto God- which doesn’t make it any better, as it means (read this statement as a logical progression, not a temporal one) God created things without connection and then decided that they would have connection without any respect to their natures.

Now, I’ve gone to all this trouble not just to lay out the issues with these medieval philosophy-factions but to construct the groundwork for my own answer to the affair, a hybrid of theistic conceptualism⁵ and realism. I posit that categories and concepts exist from eternity in the mind of God, including their relation to His creation, and that our use of them is a reflection of their existence therein.

This solves the problem of realism by giving a substance to the concepts-categories: God’s thought and ours. It does this without falling into conceptualism’s failure, however, because instead of being added to or accreted onto the rest of existence, as conceptualism would have it, the concepts and categories are innate to the things they truly belong to (and their negation innate to those they do not belong to). So a chair is innately Chair and equally innately not-Book. It is Matter and Mass, not Spirit. It can relate through thought, however, so that a mental chair and a physical one reference the same category of chair-ness without having to be identical.

My proposition also provides for a solid epistemology as realism, conceptualism, and nominalism don’t. Realism has a decent epistemology, on its surface. The concepts-categories are pre-existent, and man has awareness of them, awareness which allows him to process and categorize reality, as well as recognize truths derivative of the concepts directly. It can, however degenerate into seeking knowledge entirely through internal contemplation, eschewing sensory input, contrary to God’s will (Ps. 8). It can assume that since all the concepts and categories, to exist, must in some way be innately known in order ever to be known at all (remember, we found with nominalism that categories (concepts) can’t be generated from particulars unless they are already known), therefore, all categories and concepts are already known, requiring only internal contemplation to derive.

Conceptualist realism, as I will term my stance, does not fall into this trap. I appeal to Genesis 1:26 and Romans 1:19-21 to declare that man has an innate awareness of God’s nature, an awareness of his own human nature (which, being a reflection of God’s nature, includes and is included in an apprehension of His nature). This understanding is not comprehension; it has a merely finite level of detail and depth. Nevertheless, it is true, and in this basic knowledge the foundation for all other knowledge is found.

By the grace of God, this knowledge of Him and ourselve can be combined with our perceptions to derive and conceive of categories and concepts He created for us to find, as well as of the perversions thereof which we men make not as genuine novelties but as displacements of truth. So man has a priori knowledge from God (unlike Kant’s sourceless, arbitrary knowledge, which sourcelessness leads directly towards solipsism⁶), and this a priori knowledge allows man to categorize and understand what he senses. This innate knowledge is sufficient to that task, of course, because in the nature of God is found all the categories and concepts of reality, whether directly, in reflection, or negatively.⁷

Conceptualism and nominalism, meanwhile, have different epistemological problems: the unreality and impossibility of category, respectively. As stated above, conceptualist realism avoids the unreality and impossibility of category by giving categories innate and independent (but integral) existence. In this way, man has the means to know. This deals with the issue which ought to have plagued Locke and Berkeley much more than it should, the argument which drove Hume to a metaphysical repudiation of metaphysics (for he could not justify causality or morality), the difficulty which Kant pretended to solve by appealing to psychological necessity- as if Hume had not already shown the emptiness of that path to solipsism. Man has the innate knowledge with which to know, and that knowledge is true of what it refers to (contra conceptualism’s possible end-state) while being coequal with it, not determinant (contra Plato’s ‘realism’, if you allow the anachronism).

Conceptualist realism is my proposed solution to this issue. I doubt that it is truly new. Perhaps my precise formulation, my terminology, is new (which is no great achievement, save it prove also the best or most suited), but the ideas I have offered are unlikely to be new, even if I have not found them stated in full elsewhere. The component ideas and even their assembly have probably been conceived of before; doubtless there have been a fair few Christian philosophers (amateur or professional) who could say that their position, whatever they called it, was in large part similar to mine. Nevertheless, I offer it to you as my answer to that old Scholastic controversy, that old problem of philosophy which Plato thought upon and which Isaiah, Moses, or Abraham no doubt had an answer to.

God bless.

Footnotes

1. Quotation and paraphrase from Gordon Clark’s From Thales to Dewey, ch. 6, section “Conceptualism.” ↩︎
2. They didn’t have teddy bears, but their philosophy implies the existence of a Form of one. ↩︎
3. There is suspicion that Roscellinus and possibly Ockham were heretics, as Nominalism breaks the Trinity; as for the rest, they were philosophers in the heyday of the Roman Catholic church and I would not bet for or against their salvation without further study of individuals. ↩︎
4. Non-theistic conceptualism is just nominalism dressed up and pretending its mental constructs are qualitatively different from nominalism’s shorthand-categories (words are mental constructs, mental symbols, albeit with acoustic and visual representations). ↩︎
5. Causality, continuity, truth, identity, logic, time, space, materiality, spirit, thought, infinity, boundary, morality, and all such basic concepts are included in this innate knowledge as awareness of their basic nature, though this awareness can be suppressed or denied, as Romans 1 implies. ↩︎
6. Solipsism is a philosophical position wherein the self is necessarily, presuppositionally, or possibly the determiner of reality in full. A solipsist may hold reality completely determined by the self; he may hold that reality is not provably connected to the self, so that the self’s experience of reality is entirely self-derived; he may hold a position of this sort not as a necessity but as a possibility he cannot disprove. Regardless, reality outside the self is either denied existence or subsumed into the self, with the identical result of making man at once self-god and self-slave, of denying God’s existence or relevance. See Hume on ‘Pyrrhonian skepticism’. ↩︎
7. Technically, the only parts of reality which we find ‘directly’ in God are His own attributes- eternity, omnipotence, Creator-righteousness, etc., all the facets of His unity. All attributes of creation (including the attribute of substance) are reflective attributes, reflecting with more or less obvious difference certain of His attributes- power reflecting omnipotence; creaturely righteousness (to obey God) reflecting Divine righteousness (to obey Himself, God); time, change, causality, and reason reflecting Divine thought-order (logic), etc.  Reflection can be termed as ‘an attribute, but as appropriate to a creature rather than the Creator.’ Negative reflection is the third species, meanwhile; sin is a negative reflection of His righteousness (and a negative of the positive reflection, creaturely righteousness), suffering a negative reflection of joy (I speak loosely), etc. ↩︎