Russell’s position on universals is a form of Realism, stating that universals are objective elements of reality. The reality that universals inhabit, however, is not the same everyday world of particulars that sensation acquaints us with.
For Russell, the non-sensible world of universals is very extensive. Any characterisation of an object in terms of qualities, use of generic terms, or claims involving relations, references universals.
However, Russell’s realism is metaphysically ambitious as it asks us to believe in a dimension of reality that you would never have suspected, and it posits a large number of non-sensible entities. Occam’s Razor goes against this realism and leads to the question: is there an explation without positing universals?
Occam’s Razor = principle of parsimony = never posits entities or principles beyond what is necessary for explanations
Alternative views to universals
Nominalism
Nominalism / resemblance-nominalism = there are no universals. The general terms for qualities, kinds, and relations (that Russell denotes as universals) are just general words — they do not refer to general entities.
Nominalists appeal to classifications based on resemblances. E.g. the chalk is white, because it resembles other white things, like the white paper.
One counter argument to Russell’s Argument against Nominalism could be that in light of Occam’s Razor, nominalism is still doing better than Russell’s theory of universals, as it introduces only one universal. (However, the nominalist view introduces many different resemblane relations and so this could be a moot point)
other counterarguments to support nominalism: Russell assumes that there is one single resemblance relation that repeats across cases. But instead of one universal resemblane there could be many particular resemblances.
One approach to this is the “Family Resemblance Approach (Wittgenstein)” where classification based on resemblance works through a network of overlapping similarities (particular resemblances that are group together by us in a web of local likeness)
It could also be said that “resemblance” is a linguisitic convention — we are just describing how we use language to group particulars. Language can be lacking; we draw multiple different forms of traingle to ensure we are defining it correctly. This uses resemblances as a form of linguisitic coomunication / conceptual practice. See Conceptualism
Conceptualism
similar to nominalism in rejecting real universals, but it maintains that the generality associated with general words is grounded in general concept, where concepts are understood to be something more than recognized resemblance relations.
Concepts replace universals as not objectively real entities, but as part of the cognitive process by which we organize our experience of the world. Concepts are part of the mental/cognitive furniture, but not part of the metaphysical furniture. It thus embodies anti-realism.
Concepts replacing univerals to explain a priori knowledge = Instead of positing that there is a real, atemporal, aspatial universal, we say that we’ve managed to construct a concept. And in applying that concept, we are able to formulate certain a priori truths on the basis of the definition of that concept.
difference between theory of universals and conceptualism = a Russellian view would be that the characteristics that the definition ascribes commonly to all particular examples would be objective features and part of the world itself. It’s not just our way of conceptualizing the world. The conceptualist claims that what all the particular examples have in common is the common applicability of a concept to them.
Consider a dark green and a light green patch. The “common greeness” requires an act of abstracton. Does the abstraction reveal a new objective reality — the universal greeness? or does the abstraction furnishes us with a concept of greeness, instead of acquainting us with a real universal?
Russell’s argument against universals being merely mental products (See Are universals real?) is an argument against conceptualism. Russell claims that the landmass where Edinburgh sits would still be to the north of the landmass where London sits, even if there were no human minds, and so “north of” cannot be a mind-dependent concept.
counterargument to Russell’s objection of conceptualism = It can be argued though that while there is a geographical fact, the relational vocabulary (north/south) is imposed by minds to organize experience. Without minds to establish north and south, the landmasses would still be there but the relation “north of” would not exist.
Middle ground between conceptualism and realism
How to preserve objectivity of science and ordinary knowledge if universals are just in our heads as mere concepts = with conceptualism, there is a risk of reducing science and ordinary truth-claims to subjective mental schemes. When scientists define physical features or natural kinds (e.g. electrons are negative), are they simply classfiying things by human concepts / imposing a conceptual framework, or are they “discovering” real universals that exist independently of us?
So, we could say that even though concepts are mind-dependent, we can treat them as objective i.e. they can be shared and applied uniformly. They have inter-subjectivity.
The goal of science, is thus, to reveal more about how our shared concepts apply to the real world, and to develop new concepts to explain the world of senses.