nonism

Noun

nonism (uncountable)

1. The abstention from harmful activities, foods, and so on.
2. The stance that the nature of reality is unknowable because all information comes through the senses, which are unreliable.
   • Neo-Platonism "tended to break the unity of life and thought which Christianity sought to establish," yet withal it prevented a too "facile nonism."1904, The Hartford Seminary Record - Volume 14, page 238
   • But it surely affects his theory of perception in that, with the espousal of neutral nonism, he had to abandon the sense-datum theory because he abandoned the relational character of sensation consisting of a subject and an object ie, a sense-datum.1987 July, Sajahan Miah, “Russell's Theory of Perception (1905-1919)”, in Philosophy Dissertation at McMaster University
3. The denial of higher-level meaning beyond physical existence; materialism.
   • Sir Oliver's standing as a scientist makes his book interesting as a statement of the reasons a scientist can give in opposition to the conclusions of materialistic nonism.1906, The American Educational Review - Volume 27, Issue 10, page 519
   • That philosophy of the relation of psyche and soma which may be called materialistic nonism, the philosophy most congenial to behaviorists, was as ancient as Greek thought.1938, Willard Harrell, Ross Harrison, “The rise and fall of behaviorism”, in The Journal of general psychology, volume 18, number 2
4. The belief in the existence of entities and events within a domain that can only be defined in terms of what it is not.
   • Not really: fundamentality is a red herring, and the proponents of nonism have avoided Hempel’s dilemma only at the cost of emptying their position of any distinctives that might give the anti-physicalist reason to reject it (which, naturally, is not to say that the anti-physicalist should accept...2007 August 9, Neal Judisch, “Why ‘non-mental’ won’t work: on Hempel’s dilemma and the characterization of the ‘physical’”, in Philosophical Studies, volume 140, number 3, →DOI