The Triumph of Nominalism: The End of Essentialism and LLMs as Mirrors of Names
Introduction: The Philosophy That Quietly Built the Digital Age What if one of the oldest philosophical disputes in Western civilisation had already been decided—not by philosophers, but by machines? For centuries, the conflict between realism and nominalism remained one of the most abstract debates in philosophy, apparently confined to medieval monasteries, university lecture halls and specialist works on metaphysics. Yet beneath this seemingly technical controversy lay one of the most fundamental questions human beings can ask: do the concepts through which we understand the world correspond to objective realities, or are they merely names that we have invented to organise experience? Every scientific theory, every legal system, every political ideology, every religious doctrine and every act of communication depends upon how this question is answered. Whether we speak of justice, democracy, intelligence, humanity, freedom or truth, we inevitably assume either that these concepts...