In my recent book "Tropy i uniwersalia" (Tropes and Universals), I argued that Roman Ingarden’s theory of universals is in fact a kind hidden nominalism. This claim has been subjected to serious criticism by Marek Piwowarczyk, who defended position attempted flesh out the Platonic universals. reply, argue his interpretation Platonism, though it fits Plato’s doctrine, does not correspond ontolog...

We describe a discovery program, called UNIVAUTO (UNIVersals AUthoringTOol), whose domain of application is the study of language universals, a classic trend in contemporary linguistics. Accepting as input information about languages, presented in terms of feature-values, the discoveries of another human agent arising from the same data, as well as some additional data, the program discovers th...

In 1969, Berlin and Kay proposed that there exist crosscultural universals in the form of basic color terms. To test this hypothesis, the World Color Survey (WCS) collected color naming data from 110 non-industrial societies, identifying regularities in the structure of languages with different numbers of terms. This leaves us with the question of where these universals come from. We use a simp...

There are around 5.000 spoken languages of the world today, and they are all different. Thus, natural languages are very diverse. However, most linguists share the view that the languages of the world, and the way they are used in different communities, have a lot in common. The properties that all languages have in common are called language universals. Linguists have claimed of many different...