The “nominalists” . . . hold that all our ideas are only images of concretes,
and that abstractions are merely “names” which we give to arbitrary groupings
of concretes on the basis of vague resemblances. . . . (There is also the
extreme nominalist position, the modern one, which consists of declaring that
the problem [of universals] is a meaningless issue, that “reality” is a
meaningless term, that we can never know whether our concepts correspond to
anything or not, that our knowledge consists of words—and that words are an
arbitrary social convention.)