This me much to think about and further reveals my ignorance! I’m glad you hold to the conceptualist argument. I did not cover that in Christian Apologetics, but would like to write it up some time, along with the argument from beauty, and the argument from human language.

Blessings my friend,
Doug

As I see it there are two ways for something to be “in” the mind”: as an intentional object (the ball is in my mind merely in the sense that I am thinking about or seeing it) or as a constituent (thoughts, beliefs and so forth are literally “in” the mind). And the way that mental contents are constituents of the mind is that the mind exemplifies them. Thus, concepts, e.g., being-of-the-color-red, are intentional properties, and the having of this property is the thought consisting in having the relevant property. Propositions are structural intentional properties that must be exemplified by some mind to exist (thus, a conceptualist argument is successful on my view).

But non-intentional universals cannot be in the mind as a constituent for at least two reasons that can be highlighted by focusing on being red. First, is something exemplifies the property of being red, say a ball, then the object is red, and a mind–God’s or anyone else’s–isn’t colored.

Aristotle and is followers tried to respond to this problem by saying that universals are exemplified by minds in such a way that those minds do not thereby acquire the relevant property. But I have never been able to see how this could be. When something exemplifies a property, it is characterized by that property. That’s just what exemplification is. Second, it is de re necessarily the case that if something exemplifies redness, then that something is spatially extended, and God’s mind is not extended. Remember, the concept of being red is not itself red; it is of-being-red. The concept of being red is, indeed, in God’s mind as a constituent, but not the property of being red.

These are some of the reasons I cannot be a conceptualist.

I have not read your book on Universals, but I favor the more Augustian conceptualist view. Abstract objects exist in the mind of God: all of them. I take abstract objects to be propositional, and I take propositions to be thoughts, not un-thought things that are “just there.” This also allows us to use the conceptualist argument for God’s existence. But to make this work, God must exist as a logically necessary being (the Anselmian view). I hold this view, and defend it in chapter ten of Christian Apologetics.

Why would you not hold this view? And, yes, you know more about all of this than I do!

Best,
Doug Groothuis