I would guess that most nominalists would stand their ground with only a little pragmatic redefinition. There are things in the world (like waves) we can model using complex numbers. Therefore, they might say, complex numbers are objects that we abstract out of waves in merely a slightly more complicated way than we abstract numbers out of sets of objects.
I would guess that most nominalists would stand their ground with only a little pragmatic redefinition. There are things in the world (like waves) we can model using complex numbers. Therefore, they might say, complex numbers are objects that we abstract out of waves in merely a slightly more complicated way than we abstract numbers out of sets of objects.