Did you know that no two plums are the same
                           - they are all different?

For a Nominalist of course there is no such thing as 'difference,' but only those entities which are existentially different [from each other - and from everything else]

Nominalists have no wish to ban or otherwise eliminate any word whatsoever in the English language. The name of the game for Nominalists is to point to these very handy short-cuts, which usually describe in one convenient word, the activities, modalities and states of some entity or entities, which, using the battery of adjectives and adverbs required would take up a lot of time and remind people that it is not the WORD ITSELF which exists - but that which the word is purporting to describe. That is not to say that for a Nominalist such words are inadmissible either between themselves or amongst others in natural language, or in philosophical or ontological discussion. In ontological discussion however the words take on a more serious significance, for what is under discussion is the metaphysical study of the nature of being and existence, which as a non-metaphysician is like temporarily taking on board biblical assumptions, concepts, beliefs etc., in order to argue against them. Thus as far as 'difference' is concerned a Nominalist is quite at ease discussing the the 'difference' between two pairs of socks in Sandwich Market, and even making such statements like: 'The question of Saddam Hussein's existence remains unknown, and many believe he is hiding out in Syria or even Saudi Arabia.' Now a Nominalist doesn't REALLY believe that the question of Saddam Hussein's 'existence' is even worth asking, for he doesn't accept that there IS such a thing as Saddam Hussein's 'existence' to ask questions about in the first place. but for speed in natural conversation he will employ the term and only start to challenge the concept in philosophical dialogue.

The Nominalist realises this but also realises that non-Nominalists do not, and just like in a discussion with Deists it is necessary to compromise in order to communicate.

For a Nominalist it is the entities that are different from each other, in that they all have different existential modalities. It is not a question of 'there is a difference in or between the two,' but rather that Entity (A) exists in a different existential mode or manner to Entity (B).

To posit or mark a 'difference' as observed and perceived from the human classificational or categorial position, and then to attribute such a notion as something which 'inheres' or is 'intrinsic' in or between the two entities as some sort of 'property or 'quality' is for the Nominalist an act of gross philosophical vandalism of the primitive kind for the notion of 'difference' is patently EXTRINSIC to Entities (A) and (B) and does not form an essential part of the two objects at all - but arises and originates from the observational human attributant of such notions.

I am still waiting for some bright Heideggerian spark to explain the significance or differentiation of meaning between 'a different' and ' a difference'? Hopefully my in-tray will be flooded with explanations next time I log on - but I very much doubt it somehow.

All entities exist in the way that that exist, and those entities DO NOT INCLUDE the existential modality of 'differentness' or 'difference' in their modalic repertoire or Gesamtsumme, the appreciation of existential modalic 'differentness' is part of the existential modality or experience of THE HUMAN OBSERVER and NOT the entities to which the human attributant attributes his classificational notions of 'difference.'

But I [I will say 'I' rather than Nominalists all the time] DO acknowledge that there is a humanly perceived contrast between the way in which two objects strike the human observer in the manner of their existing, which in natural language I refer to as the 'difference' between 'say' an apple and a pear. However the big difference between this realisation and the vulgarity of Heidegger's ontology is that I I recognise this as a humanly perceived and experienced phenomena, which DOESN'T IN ITSELF EXIST for the entities themselves, for what DOES exist is the two existing entities the apple and the pear and the human observer existing in the ways that they exist. The Nominalist ontology is much more sophisticated than Heidegger's crude update of mankind's primitive notions.

All entities exist in the way that that exist, and these entities DO NOT INCLUDE the existential modality of 'differentness' or 'difference' in their modalic repertoire or Gesamtsumme, the appreciation of existential modalic 'differentness' is part of the existential modality or experience of THE HUMAN OBSERVER and NOT the entities to which the human attributant attributes his classificatory notions of 'difference.'

It is impossible to observe anything without observing it as a human-type observer, and the act of observing and the conclusions that we arrive at from those observations we map in accordance with our human categorial perogatives. .

There are of course gradations of 'differentness' and lots of different ways that 'differentness' is perceived by humans. For example a live mouse id different from a dead mouse and a live mouse is different from a live elephant. They are different sorts of differentness as mapped on the clip-board of the human brain. No human utterance or categorial assessment is possible unless it is enacted by a human being, and such activity is the activity of humans in a human way, and the conclusions that we arrive at and the existential labelling of the other entities we encounter with human conceptions of how we conceive of those objects are part of our own experience and existential modalities.

If I state that every individual plum on every individual plum tree in the orchard is different, without me going around and inspecting every such plum, then that does not mean that the statement is wrong FROM A HUMAN PERSPECTIVE, for patently if you collected all of the plums in the orchard you would not discover any of them to be exactly the same, and if they WHERE all exactly the same, then there would only be one plum in the orchard. Even if some appeared to be the same, a simple child's magnifying glass would soon prove to the contrary.

It is true that you or I [a human] can characterise this fruity phenomena as a 'feature' or a 'property' or an 'attribute', and say of plums: 'Did you know - no two plums are alike?' But these are HUMAN attributions of non-likeness, and other features, and 'properties' - not genus Prunus' ones. Plums don't have ANY 'properties' of their 'own' because plums don't have 'owness,' or any other of the human categorial notions we burden then with, they just exist hanging there on a plum tree, and couldn't care less about human transcendentalists labelling them with human-style notions such as 'owning,' or 'having ' this 'property' of 'sweetness' or 'sourness', or featuring this characteristic, or that 'essence [isness] - plums just exist in a certain spatial positionality, and are not conscious or aware about whether they become a plum tree themselves or not. They are just insensate existents, bundles of conglomerational cells which as a result of millions of years of trial and error, have found a niche in nature where they have developed a flesh which both supplies the growing seed [stone] within to grow, and attracts birds and animals and humans to eat the flesh and excrete or throw away the stone, which may or may not develop into another plum tree. They DON'T KNOW THEY ARE PLUMS or rather they don't know that they are the denotata which English-speaking humans signify with the words plums. Each individual exists and as it exists it changes like every other entity in the cosmos - and plumwise that is the end of the story.

I could [long-windedly] say that my human sense of perception informs me that each and every object in the cosmos appears to the human embodied brain as having a different existential modality to every other, though I am aware that this 'difference' is not a modality of the objects in space, but a categorialising modality of MY OWN life activity as an observational categoriser. You can see now how handy the word 'difference' is as a short-cut - BUT IT DOESN'T EXIST IN ITSELF.

I observe an individual plum as existing differently from all other individual plums and whilst I register this obvious disparity of sameness from my human perspective, I do not burden or foist upon the fruits of the plum tree the human characteristics of sameness or dissimilarity - redness or greenness, sweetness or sourness or as 'having' any of the human categorial descriptions that I myself use as descriptive tools. I leave the plums to exist in their individual states and modes of un-human un-plumness. : If I talk about certain entities, in this case the entities which are denoted with the word 'plum' then I am referring to those individuate entities which are mapped using that signifier. If I say that those plums are 'expensive' then that does not mean that the plums themselves have an existential modality of 'expensiveness' but rather that those humans who agree as to the 'quality' of those plums, and if in a market situation the 'price' of those plums, then the notion of 'expensiveness' is a human modality in relation to the plums by the humans involved in the sale and purchase of the plums, and is not some modality that is inherent in the plums themselves. The notion of expensiveness is to be observed in the active consideration of the plums by the humans engaged in any transaction or possible transaction. To other humans from another village the plums may seem extremely cheap and obviously the property of expensiveness and cheapness cannot inhere in the plums but in the existential modes of the various humans in relation to the plums and the price.

Finally an extract from a preliminary account of a work presented by S. W. Zhang and M. V. Srinivasan as a poster and unpublished abstract at the Gordon Research Conference on "Neuroethology: Behaviour, Evolution and Neurobiology", Oxford, Aug 29- Sept 3, 1999. It covers the point I was making about the ability of animals to detect [what we call] difference. The bee's don't conceive of it as 'sameness' or 'differentness' of course, but as variant chemical reactions.

Insects process and learn information flexibly in order to adapt to their environment. The honeybee Apis mellifera constitutes a traditional model for the study of learning and memory at the behavioural, cellular, and molecular levels. Earlier studies have focused on elementary associative and non-associative forms of learning as uncovered by olfactory conditioning of the proboscis extension reflex1 and learning of visual stimuli in an operant context. However, recent research has found that bees are capable of cognitive performances that were previously thought to occur only in some vertebrate species.

For example, honeybees can interpolate visual information, exhibit associative recall categorize visual information and learn contextual information. Here we show that honeybees can form "sameness" and "difference" concepts. They learn to solve delayed-matching-to-sample and delayed-non-matching to sample discriminations and transfer the learned rules to novel stimuli of the same or a different sensory modality. Thus, bees can, not only learn specific objects and their physical parameters, but also master abstract interrelationships, such as "sameness" and "difference."

Whilst we are on the subject of singularity, it is interesting that even the concept of 'singularity' is fraught with questions as to what constitutes singularity, for most entities that we would refer to in natural language as single individuals are actually colonies of individuate cells, which have their own singularity, and those cells are conglomerates of millions of particulate individuals. This raises interesting philosophical questions about inter-entitic dependency, and whether for instance the individuality of the various molecules of an atom can be thought to be putting their singularity 'on hold' whilst they exist in a 'partnership' of 'entitic convenience' with their molecular partners?

Again, this is something I have never read about, and are my own musings, and like all humans I attribute human-style notions of 'dependency, individuality, putting, partnership, convenience to insensate existents.