How did William of Ockham’s nominalism explain universal terms such as humanity?

William of Ockham’s nominalism rejected the existence of universal entities, asserting that everything in the nonlinguistic world is strictly particular. Consequently, he denied that universal terms like "humanity" correspond to any real, abstract thing existing outside the mind or within individual people.123

Instead, Ockham explained the human ability to use general terms through the following mechanisms:

• Mental Concepts: He argued that general terms function as "natural signs" within the mind. These mental entities or concepts represent the many individual things to which the term applies.3
• Objective Resemblance: Ockham maintained that while there is no "universal" essence shared by individuals, things do "share features in common" because of objective relations of resemblance that hold among them.3
• Linguistic Application: Because these similarities exist among particulars, the use of a general word is not arbitrary. The term "humanity" is simply a linguistic tool used to signify a collection of individual things that resemble one another, without requiring the existence of a separate, universal "humanity" itself.21

By eliminating the need for abstract universals, Ockham applied his principle of Ockham’s razor to simplify the explanation of how we think and speak.45