I think the properties of objects are conceptual abstractions we formulate to better account for our shared sensory experiences, but I think that's equally true of objects themselves and everything we call "material" (try to get a cursory view of fundamental physics and see if you can maintain a commonsense understanding of what "an object" or "matter" even is). I have no idea if that makes me a realist or a nominalist honestly.
I actually think a classically realist position is easier to support when you get down to the fundamental-physics level. It's pretty easy to say that something is a "cat" or a "dog" or a "chair" or a "religion" based more on the way it makes the most sense for humans to classify it than on what it actually, substantially is. It's a lot harder to say that about something being a "charm quark" or a "Higgs boson" or a "neutrino," or a "wave" for that matter. I suppose in a way the argument I'm making here is sort of like Russsell's argument that if nothing else is a universal then "similarity" has to be, only with types of more-or-less-physical entities rather than with an abstract concept.
Is the law real or nominal?
Nominal, but you'll REALLY go to jail if you break it too egregiously.
While that clarifies everything. You do know I viscerally loathe philosophy, right? What a useless and potentially mischievous endeavor. It's like voodoo. God I hated my classes in it in college. I still have nightmares about it.
My initial response to you was tongue-in-cheek but it also is actually part of my response to the Richard Weaver book I made fun of with the poll title. Ideas do have consequences, but because those consequences are experienced very much as "real" you really can't say that some abstruse Scholastic debate has actually rewritten normal people's minds to make them less based and tradpilled or whatever. It doesn't matter if you see your society as composed of universals or particulars to the extent that you still have to live in it. The examples given in Ideas Have Consequences are if anything less structured, systematized, and based on rigid application of principles than are the socialist ideas Weaver is complaining about; his analysis of private property falls apart the instant you apply it to any historical case of land reform, to name the most glaring case of this.
Weaver does seem like an absolute mess. I just read in wiki he disliked empiricism, as opposed to a priori absolutism. The tragedy of the commons seems like an empirical concept to me. Idiot. The key thing to learn is the concept of economic externalities (play that card and the whole libertarian house of cards collapses before their very eyes in one fell swoop as if built be a Russian oligarch who who used rubber rather than steel), when it comes to the intersection of law and economics and public policy. The rest is noise, e.g. almost everything that comes out of the mouths of philosophers. They may be even worse than theologians, who are bad enough.
Anyway, beating up on this pathetic creature is a form of bullying. Pick on folks your own size.
Poll
