Plenty of Nothing: Ockham's Commitment to Real Possibles

Abstract

����� As Marilyn Adams discovers in the course ofher valuable article on Nominalism and Unreal Entities, Ockham's mature theory of concepts carries with it an ontological commitment to unreduced unactualized possibles.1 What we are thinking about when we think about horses in general cannot be real universal horse outside the mind or fictive horse posited by the mind itselfin 'objective' being, but neither is our concept horse restricted to past or present actual horses. It applies as well to merely possible horses, and for Ockham, eventually, as Adams shows, this means that there must be possible horses for the concept to apply to, fully determinate individual merely possible horses which cannot be reduced to aspects of actual horses or aspects ofthe mind itself. I think I am only spelling out what is implicit here when I say that, on this view, the act of intellection in which we exercise our universal concept horse is sort of mental viewing of each and every one of an infinite number of wholly distinct, fully individuated possible horses, and that when we say that all horses are animals we are somehow identifying each ofthese possible horses with one ofan even larger infinite number ofpossible animals. With some reason, given our usual sense of Ockham's philosophical temperament and given his ridicule of theories of concepts positing a little world ofoccult objectively existent things, Adams concludes that Ockham should have found this commitment to real possibles embarrassing: he should have found such unreduced, unactualized possibles even stranger than the occult entities posited by an objective