Nominalism

Nominalism is the doctrine that man can only conceive of particular or individual things, persons and events and thus all general or universal terms, such as a tool, a man or a speech, are mere figments of the imagination and non-existing. It is opposed to realism, the doctrine that general or universal terms predated particular or individual terms and thus have substantial reality. Nominalists tend to distrust abstractions and deductive reasoning while leaning on experience and the direct observation of experiments.