PAUL FORSTER, Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2011. 259 pp.

Over the years of his philosophical ambitions, Peirce has expressed time and again some very emotional reactions against nominalism. This is the theme, that Paul Forster’s ambitious book Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism (2011) promises to tackle. In the context of his first chapter entitled “Nominalism as Demonic Doctrine”, Forster lists some of Peirce’s provocative statements on nominalism, as e.g. “Nominalism is of all the philosophies the most inadequate, and perhaps the most superficial, one is tempted to say the silliest possible” (2). The reader is by now curious to know what exactly made nominalism so dangerous and stirring for Peirce and in which ways Peirce’s thought developed accordingly. Surprisingly, perhaps, since his enterprise seems to depend so heavily upon it, Forster takes the distinction between Peirce’s view and nominalism pretty much for granted. Would one not rather expect, only by the book-title, a critical description of the development of Peirce’s thought with regard to the nominalistic theme? The “threat” of nominalism is not, I suggest, quite so unvaryingly present to Peirce’s philosophy as Forster assumes… Forster’s method in much of the book consists on the contrary in a rather ponderous sequence of chapters, some of them pervaded by the dry recurring dialectical structure of the type : “Peirce’s Point of View…” – “The Nominalist’s Point of View….”. Other chapters, however, are almost completely lacking an explicit reference to nominalism. In any case, despite the first chapter, the before-raised theme of the “threat” of nominalism is no longer coherently pursued, and from this point of view, Peirce’s provocative statements on nominalism quoted by Forster in the first chapter turn out to be nothing more than an entertaining introductory tool. The material of the chapters is partly repetitive, which enables each chapter to be more or less free-standing. Indeed, most readers are likely to read particular chapters on themes of interest rather than to work through this book from cover to cover. Nevertheless, Forster urges an intimate link between the more technical and logical part of Peirce’s theory of inquiry (that Forster treats in the first 8 chapters) and the more ethical and evolutionary peircian cosmology (illuminated in the last 3 chapters). He argues that both seek “to provide the very thing […] nominalism threatens : an ultimate, impartial and binding basis for the organization of human life” (12). In the beginning of the book, Forster explains how Peirce’s proposal – to rest the science of inquiry on diagrammatic reasoning – is connected with a view of the science of inquiry as independent and not as part of the natural sciences (as “the nominalists” think it to be). Peirce holds that “mathematical diagrams exemplify properties of signs in a way that abstracts from any consideration of psychological mechanisms” (103) and thinks this proves that there is a fundamental difference between the truths of the science of inquiry and the truths of the natural sciences. Forster here aims to show how far Peirce conceives the science of inquiry as a “secure basis for metaphysical theorizing” (chapter 2, “Logic, Philosophy and the Special Sciences” : 176). In the following chapter (“Continuity and the Problem of Universals”), Forster explains the epistemological significance of Peirce’s concept of “true continuity” with regard to the nominalist’s metaphysical view that reality contains only individuals. Here, Forster shows how Peirce’s mathematical analysis of the concept of continuity principally outlines the argument that no multitude of individual points can form a continuum – and how Peirce, consequently, concludes that knowledge about a continuous series cannot be reduced to a collection of truths about its individuals. For Peirce then, the …