The Triumph of Nominalism: The End of Essentialism and LLMs as Mirrors of Names

This article argues that the rapid development of artificial intelligence has transformed nominalism from a long-standing philosophical position into the dominant operational logic of the digital age. Beginning with the medieval Problem of Universals, it traces the historical evolution of nominalism from Roscellinus and William of Ockham through early modern empiricism and twentieth-century philosophy to contemporary theories of language, cognition and artificial intelligence. The article examines how thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, W. V. O. Quine, Nelson Goodman, Hartry Field, Jody Azzouni, Richard Rorty, B. F. Skinner, Cormac McCarthy and Elan Barenholtz progressively dismantled realist assumptions concerning universals, essences and fixed meanings. It also offers a comparative analysis of the Dao De Jing as an independent tradition of radical linguistic nominalism, contrasting Daoist scepticism towards naming with the Western philosophical debate over universals. Particular attention is given to the emergence of Large Language Models, arguing that they constitute the first large-scale technological demonstration that language can function without reference to objective essences or metaphysical universals. Rather than discovering hidden meanings, artificial intelligence operates through statistical relationships among linguistic tokens, revealing language as a self-organising symbolic system. Building upon Peter Ayolov's theories of the Planned Obsolescence of Language and The New Paradigm of Communication, the article further argues that digital platforms transform words into temporary behavioural instruments optimised for prediction, engagement and algorithmic influence. The study concludes that while artificial intelligence has produced an unprecedented practical victory for nominalism, the ethical, legal and political challenges of the AI era simultaneously generate renewed demands for objective truth, stable values and realism. The future of human civilisation may therefore be characterised by an enduring philosophical duality in which increasingly nominalist machines coexist with societies that continue to seek realist foundations for knowledge, morality and collective life.