[From Latin nomen: name.]
(epistemology) The doctrine (similar to subjectivism) that words are simply conventionally-accepted names or sounds that human beings happen to use for their own convenience, lacking objective meaning or correspondence to reality. The great movements of nominalistic thought occurred among the Sophists of ancient Greece, in the Middle Ages (see also realism and conceptualism), and in the 20th century among some advocates of logical positivism.