nonism

English

Etymology

(This etymology is missing or incomplete. Please add to it, or discuss it at the Etymology scriptorium.)

Noun

nonism (uncountable)

1. The abstention from harmful activities, foods, and so on.
2. (philosophy) The stance that the nature of reality is unknowable because all information comes through the senses, which are unreliable.
   • 1904, The Hartford Seminary Record - Volume 14, page 238:

     Neo-Platonism "tended to break the unity of life and thought which Christianity sought to establish," yet withal it prevented a too "facile nonism."

   • 1987 July, Sajahan Miah, “Russell's Theory of Perception (1905-1919)”, in Philosophy Dissertation at McMaster University:

     But it surely affects his theory of perception in that, with the espousal of neutral nonism, he had to abandon the sense-datum theory because he abandoned the relational character of sensation consisting of a subject and an object ie, a sense-datum.

   • 1997, Peter McWilliams, Life 101: Everything We Wish We Had Learned about Life in School - But Didn't, →ISBN, page 22:

     Shakespeare, of course, called life "a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage..." and James Thurber continued: "It's a tale told in an idiom, full of unsoundness and fury, signifying nonism."

   • 2008, Frédéric Vandenberghe, A Philosophical History of German Sociology, →ISBN:

     I share Simmel's dialectical “neither-nor” position (not monism, but nonism), as formulated in the regulating principle of methodological pluralism: neither idealism, nor materialism, nor elementarism, nor emergentism. Taken individually, each of the metatheoretical permutation and theoretical positions based on them are insufficient, for each is biased; as a whole, however, they make it possible to construct a general, global and multidimensional theory of society.

3. (philosophy) The denial of higher-level meaning beyond physical existence; materialism.
   • 1906, The American Educational Review - Volume 27, Issue 10, page 519:

     Sir Oliver's standing as a scientist makes his book interesting as a statement of the reasons a scientist can give in opposition to the conclusions of materialistic nonism.

   • 1938, Willard Harrell, Ross Harrison, “The rise and fall of behaviorism”, in The Journal of general psychology, volume 18, number 2:

     That philosophy of the relation of psyche and soma which may be called materialistic nonism, the philosophy most congenial to behaviorists, was as ancient as Greek thought.

4. (philosophy) The belief in the existence of entities and events within a domain that can only be defined in terms of what it is not.
   • 2007 August 9, Neal Judisch, “Why ‘non-mental’ won’t work: on Hempel’s dilemma and the characterization of the ‘physical’”, in Philosophical Studies, volume 140, number 3, →DOI:

     Not really: fundamentality is a red herring, and the proponents of nonism have avoided Hempel’s dilemma only at the cost of emptying their position of any distinctives that might give the anti-physicalist reason to reject it (which, naturally, is not to say that the anti-physicalist should accept it).

Related terms

• nonist

Anagrams

• Inmons, Minson, mo'nin's