Abstracta and Women
- Posted by Andrew Bailey on Friday, December 15, 2006 at 7:04 AM
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Eric links to this hilarious essay by Alonzo Church. The central analogy:
Goodman says somewhere that he finds abstract entities difficult to understand. And from a psychological viewpoint it is certainly his dislike and distrust of abstract entities which leads him to propose an ontology from which they are omitted. Now a misogynist is a man who finds women difficult to understand, and who in fact considers them objectionable incongruities in an otherwise matter-of-fact and hard-headed world. Suppose then that in analogy with nominalism the misogynist is led by his dislike and distrust of women to omit them from his ontology. Women are not real, he tells himself, and derives great comfort from the thought -- there are no such things. This doctrine let us call ontological misogyny.
