International Relations. A self-Study Guide to Theory

particular point in time and a concrete human. Only as a concrete person at a 
particular point in time can the “human” be “observed” and have a “causal ef-
fect”. Research on “Foreign Policy” provides another example: only by refer-
ence to a particular point in time and a particular policy (such as American 

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Foreign policy during the Cold War) does “Foreign Policy” have “existence”. 
It otherwise remains only a general theory or concept, serving as an “instru-
ment”, but ontologically without “being”.  
In other words, in positivist science only “particulars” are claimed to exist 
(materialism, atomism). Here, universals are terms that can only be exempli-
fied by many particular elements and by what these “elements”/particulars 
have in common: characteristics, qualities, properties, relations. Universals are 
abstract and particulars are concrete; humanity is a universal while a particular 
person/an individual is a particular. The general – universals – do not exist. In-
stead, they are products of the human mind. The mind generates universals in 
a process of abstraction, abstracting from time and space and other factors 
needed to reference particulars/individuals. It results in an abstract idea (a uni-
versal) based on the analysis of the commonalities of the particulars/indivi-
duals. The “universal” is only the “name” or the idea.Words and abstract ideas 
have no being. For example, nominalism considers “movement” to be only a 
word – for the sum of the single, particular physical movements of a body (a 
position which an artist, painter, or sculptor would certainly deny). 
In short, as products of the human mind, universals have no “being” in a 
positivist account of science. Only the particulars can be claimed to exist. 
Nominalism occupied the core of scientific thought in the 19
th
century, 
exemplified for instance in the influential works of John Stuart Mill. It fea-
tured prominently throughout the 20
th
century (above all in the works of the 
Vienna Circle) and still maintains that prominence today. 
With regard to universals, nominalism is anti-realist. Please note that an-
ti-realism in regard to universals is nothing specific or exclusive to positiv-
ism; it is shared by other philosophies of science as well. For example, for 
mathematical constructivism, mathematical “objects” such as “numbers” are 
not assumed to be ontological entities; they have no being but are simply 
constructions of the human mind. The “number” or “class” as such has no be-
ing. This is in contrast to the realist position that mathematical entities (the 
universals) have their own existence: they are “there” and have to be discov-
ered by natural science. 
In the social sciences, realism about universals can be found in the phi-
losophy of science known as scientific realism (for example in the works of 
Charles Peirce, Bertrand Russell , Edmund Husserl, or Roy Bhaskar). Scien-
tific realism assumes ontologically the existence, the “being” of abstract 
terms such as “structure”.
This brief excursion to the philosophy of science’s realism/anti-realism 
debate, particularly with regard to the ontology of “universals”, demonstrates 
how fundamental the questions at the heart of philosophy of science are. 

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However, the debate about the ontological status of “universals” forms 
only one aspect of the “universals controversy”. In addition to this ontologi-
cal question as to whether universals “are”, there is a related “universals 
problem”: the general question of whether a phenomenon can be expressed