If logic is founded on metaphysics, then nominalism is not logical

One cannot argue that logic is based on metaphysics unless we say something like ‘logic tends toward the good’, that ‘logic is related to universal truth’ or that ‘logic transcends psychology and indeed is consistent with reality, construed as all or everything’.

Well, this — the statement below — consigns our binary, we-they, nominalistic world to the ash heap of history. Or, if you wish to be charitable, the netherworld of quasi-narcissist cynicism (aka hypocrisy, if one is privileged).

I sometimes think Peirce had it good. Writing all his thoughts down on scraps and only fitfully seeking somehow to get a hearing for his fertile thinking.

He had been royally rejected almost from the start. And like many bright rejects, he helped the process along, reserving his love for a few students among whom we can name Royce, Dewey and Veblen.

But though Peirce wrote prolifically for himself alone, he could not have forseen a time when the very disorganization and plenitude of his deliverances would spawn an industry which seems mired in a sort of exegetical maze, largely unable to affirm, that Peirce is not to be understood but exhibited.

Peirce’s central theses are plain, damning and true.

Build your thought on that. There is no holy grail behind it. The grail is in the grasping and the articulation. Which is why Peirce himself hoped that he would be built on, not interpreted and argued to yet another death.

Peirce: CP 2.168 Cross-Ref:††

168. So this is the way in which modern philosophy became pushed into Ockhamism. The new thinkers were incapable of the subtle thought that would have been necessary for any adequate discussion of the question. They accepted nominalistic views upon the most superficial grounds. The question soon became buried and put out of sight by new questions which overlaid it, like new papers on an encumbered study table. In that way it has happened that the question has never attracted general, acute attention among modern metaphysicians. What is there in that genealogy which entitles the prevalent metaphysics to one feather’s weight of rational authority? Authority is a thing not to be lightly introduced into science. Moreover, metaphysics ought to be founded on logic. To found logic on metaphysics is a crazy scheme. It was on logical grounds, and in a treatise on logic, that Ockham himself supported his nominalism.†1 For though his system had its faults, he had a more cultivated comprehension of the architecture of philosophy than have those modern Germans who boast that their systems of logic are “philosophical,” that is, founded on metaphysics.