Editing Problem of universals (section)

===Medieval nominalism===
{{main|Medieval nominalism}}
[[File:William_of_Ockham.png|thumb|150px|William of Ockham]]
The opposing view to realism is one called nominalism, which at its strongest maintains that universals are verbal constructs and that they do not inhere in objects or pre-exist them. Therefore, universals in this view are something which are peculiar to [[cognition|human cognition]] and language. The French philosopher and [[Theology|theologian]] [[Roscellinus]] (1050–1125) was an early, prominent proponent of this view. His particular view was that universals are little more than vocal utterances (''voces'').<ref>{{cite book |last1=Salisbury |first1=John of |editor1-last=Webb |editor1-first=Clemens C.I. |title=Metalogicon 2.17 |date=1929 |publisher=Oxford |page=92}}</ref>

[[William of Ockham]] (1285–1347) wrote extensively on this topic. He argued strongly that universals are a product of abstract human thought. According to Ockham, universals are just words or concepts (at best) that only exist in the mind and have no real place in the external world.<ref>{{cite encyclopedia|last1=Panaccio|first1=Claude|last2=Spade|first2=Paul Vincent|article=William of Ockham|date=2015|article-url=https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/ockham/|encyclopedia=The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy|editor-last=Zalta|editor-first=Edward N.|edition=Winter 2016|publisher=Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University|access-date=2019-02-26}}</ref> His opposition to universals was not based on his [[Ockham's razor|eponymous Razor]], but rather he found that regarding them as real was contradictory in some sense. An early work has Ockham stating that 'no thing outside the soul is universal, either through itself or through anything real or rational added on, no matter how it is considered or understood'. Nevertheless, his position did shift away from an outright opposition to accommodating them in his later works such as the ''Summae Logicae'' (albeit in a modified way that would not classify him as a complete realist).