Editing Problem of universals (section)

===James===
[[William James]] [[Pragmaticism#Pragmatism's origin|learned about pragmatism]]<!--, this way of understanding an idea by its practical effects, from his friend Peirce, but he gave it new significance – which was not to Peirce's taste: he came to complain that James had "kidnapped" the term and eventually to call himself a "pragmaticist" instead-->. Though James certainly agreed with Peirce and against Berkeley that general ideas exist as a psychological fact, he was a nominalist in his ontology:

{{Blockquote | From every point of view, the overwhelming and portentous character ascribed to universal conceptions is surprising. Why, from Plato and Aristotle, philosophers should have vied with each other in scorn of the knowledge of the particular and in adoration of that of the general, is hard to understand, seeing that the more adorable knowledge ought to be that of the more adorable things and that the things of worth are all concretes and singulars. The only value of universal characters is that they help us, by reasoning, to know new [[truth]]s about individual things.|William James|''[[The Principles of Psychology]]'' (1890)|}}

There are at least three ways in which a realist might try to answer James' challenge of explaining the reason why universal conceptions are more lofty than those of particulars: the moral–political answer, the mathematical–scientific answer, and the anti-paradoxical answer. Each has contemporary or near-contemporary advocates.