Since the quarantine has lasted for a longer time than anticipated, I have successfully moved on from my first project of reviewing the basics of all of Latin grammar (see post Completion!) to another project of reviewing the fundamentals of statistics and probability.
As suffering readers of this blog know, I have been digging into the depths of Spinoza's Ethics in order to explore and articulate Spinoza's promised provision of "continuous, supreme and unending joy." Perhaps the answer is simply doing anything other than reading the Ethics after attempting to read the Ethics.
As a result of studying the Ethics in Latin, I have been exploring the medieval (6th - 14th centuries) philosophical traditions in Latin which precede those of Spinoza. These readings have not only been excellent for encouraging sleepiness at bedtime, but have also shown the meandering development of language. However, last night's study had a wakeful impact.
In the late 11th century lived a theologian and philosophy named Roscellinus. He is considered the founder of nominalism. Nominalism is a school of thought that holds that universals, such as brown, chair or wood are not real. Instead, concrete singular items are the only reality and these universals such as brown, chair or wood are simply abstractions which function as mental tools, but are not realities. So radical were the implications that Roscellinus had to retract most of what he wrote. Political correctness has always been a central part of the academic world.
This nominalism debate is interesting to me because the same issue arises for Spinoza as he grapples with the role of language, belief and Aristotelian categories. Without wading into those areas in this post, I have found myself agreeing with the idea that the most detailed description of an item is the most real and thus, regardless of my self-serving bias, the most perfect.
As I come to statistics, I find that the same issues come up. Statistics is a mode of reasoning which attempts to observe, describe and summarize without a loss of "meaning." This is precisely that challenge that nominalism presented to medieval thinkers. Nominalism challenges Right and Wrong in the same way as statistics does. The central idea of nominalism is singularity while the central idea of statistics is randomness. Both modes of reasoning reject a transcendence of Right and Wrong. If everything is a singularity, what modes of thought, language and belief are relevant? Statistics holds methods for reasoning within singularities. As nominalism set up statistics, the modern age could establish itself in the face of Right and Wrong.
