(green+blue=grue) a sum of individuals is an individual - Nelson Goodman

When are we warranted to say that a generalization has been confirmed by its
instances? How are past observation and prediction of the future related?

-------------------------

In (a-world-of-individuals) Nelsom Goodman promotes an "exclusion of
classes". What is objectionable about the notion of a class is that it
allows a distinction of entities without a distinction of content. For
instance, the departments of Framce and the provinces of France would be
reckoned as two different classes, yet they are made up of the same
territory. Accourding to the nominalist, there is just one entity here which
is the sum of whatever peices of land are taken as the basic individuals. As
Goodman construes the term, any sum of individuals is itself an individual,
whether or not its parts are cohesive in time and space, and anything counts
as an individual which can figure as an element in a world that can be
described as 'made up of entities no two of which break down into exactly
the same entities'.

Frames of reference, though, it runs, seem to belong less to what is
described than to systems of description: and each of the two statements
[namely, "The Sun always moves" and "The Sun never moves" (for it revolves
in its place)] relates what is described to such a system. If I ask about
the world, you can offer to tell me how it is under one or more frames of
reference, but if I insist that you tell me how it is apart from all frames,
what can you say? "We are presented here not with conflicting statements of
fact but with a choice of different conventions [and simualtanious blendings
of conventions]."

World versions are made not out of nothing but out of one another by
processes of taking things aparts and putting them differently together, by
elimination or addition of entities, by the shifts of emphasis that occur
mst conspicuously in the arts, by reordering and reshaping.

...He as much decrees as discovers the laws he sets forth, as much designs
as discerns the pattern he deliniates. ...What counts as success in
achieving accord depends upon what our habits, progressively modified in the
face of new encounters and new proposals, adopt as projectable kinds.

Philosophy in the Twentieth Century
by Alfred J. Ayers
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0394504542/

---------------------------------

Goodman, Nelson (1906-1998 )

American philosopher. In The Structure of Appearance (1951) and Ways of
Worldmaking (1978), Goodman defended an extreme nominalism according to
which things, qualities, and even similarities are entirely the products of
our habits of speaking, without any ontological foundation in reality. The
"new riddle of induction" introduced by Goodman in Fact, Fiction, and
Forecast (1954) uses the color-predicate "grue" to raise significant doubts
about our ability to project natural predicates into the future. Goodman's
Languages of Art (1969) proposes that art-forms are properly understood as
symbolic systems that establish inter-related networks of meaning without
attempting to represent reality.

http://www.philosophypages.com/dy/g9.htm#goodm

--------------------------------

Nelson Goodman is best known for his "new riddle of induction", which he
sets up by first defining a new color adjective, grue. "Grue" applies to
anything that looks green before some time t, and blue afterwards. (He also
throws in, as a bonus, "bleen", which applies to anything that looks blue
before some time t, and green afterwards.) Now, he says, how do we know that
the grass is green and not grue before that time t arrives, and that the sky
is blue and not bleen? This is for him, and numerous other analytic
philosophers who jumped into the fray, a very worrisome problem indeed! But
the question is why do they think that this silly little puzzle is so
important? The answer is, they are under the insidious sway of the notion
(perhaps unconsciously) that only deduction is a valid way of determining
new truths. Thus induction and all other methods of thinking are suspect.
The strange thing is, however, that deduction is really not all that
important in people's every-day thinking; analogy, for instance, is far more
important. Thus the attempt to force all other forms of thinking into the
"induction" straight-jacket, and then to squeeze induction into some variety
of deduction is screwed up from the very start. It says a lot about the
state of analytic philosophy that this "grue" business is one of the "big
issues".

Nelson Goodman seems quite keen
Induction yet to show anew
Is somewhat sick as will be seen
And may not be completely true.

Is this leaf a lovely green?
Or is it rather colored grue?
Is the sky above quite bleen?
Or am I right in seeing blue?

I really don't care to be mean
And have no wish to Goodman skew;
But childish puzzles can demean;
Has he nothing else to do??
--JSH, "On 'The New Riddle of Induction'"

http://members.aol.com/Philosdog/Goodman.html

-----------------------------------

Here, in a new edition, is Nelson Goodman's provocative philosophical
classic--a book that, according to Science, "raised a storm of controversy"
when it was first published in 1954, and one that remains on the front lines
of philosophical debate. How is it that we feel confident in generalizing
from experience in some ways but not in others? How ore generalizations that
ore warranted to be distinguished from those that are not? Goodman shows
that these questions resist formal solution and his demonstration has been
taken by nativists like Chomsky and Fodor as proof that neither scientific
induction nor ordinary learning can proceed without an a priori, or innate,
ordering of hypotheses. In his new foreword to this edition, Hilary Putnam
forcefully rejects these nativist claims. The controversy surrounding these
unsolved problems is as relevant to the psychology of cognitive development
as it is to the philosophy of science. No serious student of either
discipline can afford to misunderstand Goodman's classic argument.

http://www2.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/GOOFAC.html

----------------------------------

In Languages of Art, {1} Nelson Goodman proposes a broad theory of
denotation which would embrace all referential functions, including the
pictorial, within a single symbolic operation by which one object ``stands
for'' another. Within this work, Goodman offers a theory of metaphor as
transference---the application of predicates from one domain to objects of
another. But one cannot understand Languages of Art without the realization
that this work is informed by Goodman's emphatic commitment to nominalism.

Metaphor as Transference: For Goodman, metaphor must be understood in terms
of its role within the general theory of symbols which is Languages of Art.
Metaphor arises for Goodman within the symbolic function of expression.
Metaphor is present when we say that a picture expresses sadness. Goodman
proposes that we understand expression as metaphorical exemplification.
Therefore, he must explain both the symbolic function called exemplification
and the notion of metaphor which makes exemplification into expression.

http://csmaclab-www.uchicago.edu/philosophyProject/goodman/nominalism.html

----------------------------------

Goodman’s philosophical theories embrace nominalism, constructivism, and a
form of radical relativism. He perhaps best sums up his approach to
philosophical concerns in the foreword of his book Ways of Worldmaking. "Few
familiar philosophical labels fit comfortably a book that is at odds with
rationalism and empiricism alike, with materialism and idealism and dualism,
with essentialism and existentialism, with mechanism and vitalism, with
mysticism and scientism, and with most other ardent doctrines.” He thought
of his work as belonging to the mainstream of modern philosophy, yet he
proposed to substitute his own structures of several symbol systems for the
structure of the world, the structure of the mind, and the structure of
concepts. The symbol systems of the sciences, philosophy, the arts,
perception, and everyday discourse thus constitute the “ways of
 worldmaking.” For Goodman, “The movement is from unique truth and a world
fixed and found to a diversity of right and even conflicting versions of
worlds in the making.”

In the field of aesthetics, Goodman’s Languages of Art offers a new program
for aesthetics, grounded in his theory of symbols. His attempt to analyze
the various art forms according to their symbolic features affords the
possibility of greater discrimination among the art forms of painting,
music, literature, dance, architecture, and the other arts. Underlying this
approach is Goodman’s belief in the cognitive nature of art, which invites
consideration of the arts as partners with the sciences in the pursuit of
understanding. Pictures, musical performances, literary texts, dance
performances, and buildings shape our experiences, just as do linguistic and
scientific representations. Within this formulation, representational,
expressive, and exemplificational forms of symbols govern the features and
functions of the arts. Goodman’s approach substitutes for the question,
“What is art?” that of “When is art?” He finds without significance the
attempt to determine uniquely aesthetic qualities, preferring instead to
look for certain clusters of symbolic features that evoke understanding
characteristic of art works. Gone too is the attempt to proffer spurious
distinctions between scientific understanding and aesthetics. For Goodman,
they are but two complementary means for making and understanding our
worlds.

http://www.aesthetics-online.org/memorials/carter.html

----------------------------------

For the last twenty years this debate has been dominated by the writings of
Ernst Gombrich and Nelson Goodman and usually framed in the form of
questions such as: To what degree are pictures a natural or innate form of
communication? Do we learn to "read" pictures as in the same way we learn to
read a book? Are pictures and language equivalent symbol systems built on
conventions and codes? These questions are useful starting points to
confront the mysterious nature of pictures but it is also important not to
overlook the ideological function of images. In other words, any emphasis on
the study of how pictures work in perceptual and cognitive terms must be
balanced by a study of the relationship between social/political power and
the power of images.

In keeping with the psycho-social emphasis in most study today, image
analysis draws knowledge from across a range of disciplines. Apart from art
history and theory, these include: the psychology of perception, semiotics,
sociology and related cultural theory; although it might be argued that the
focus on visual representation in recent publications suggests that a new
discipline of "image analysis" or "Picture Theory" is already established.
Caution is needed, however, if we accept what Mitchell wrote in 1994 about
the state of our knowledge of pictures.

[W]e still do not know exactly what pictures are, what their relation to
language is, how they operate on observers and on the world, how their
history is to be understood, and what is to be done with or about them.
(Mitchell, Picture Theory, 13)
Not that Mitchell's above statement should discourage attempts at defining a
picture.

http://www.newcastle.edu.au/discipline/fine-art/theory/analysis/an-words.htm#4x

------------------------------------------

So it's understandable that a lot of modern lexicographers should believe
that a photograph can only represent a particular badger, not the idea of
badgerhood. And even today no American dictionary uses photographs to
illustrate the meanings of words apart from the American Heritage. (I should
say that I'm associated with that dictionary, though they keep me pretty far
from the art department end of things.)

Yet contemporary photographers put those austere modernist scruples behind
them some time ago. Fabulists like Joel Peter Witkin, surrealists like Sandy
Skoglund, narrative photographers like Tina Barney or Sam Taylor-Wood -- all
of them take the object in front of the lens as standing in for something
other than itself. I like to imagine some avant-garde Grand Larousse of the
future that's illustrated with modern photographs, like Cindy Sherman's
depictions of herself in the guise of a housewife or a Raphael, or the
photographs that Laurie Simmons calls "Food," "Clothing," and "Shelter,"
where figurines of leggy women wear hot dogs, gloves, and houses on their
upper bodies like the dancing cigarette packs in the Old Gold commercials of
the fifties. That may take a while, though.

The notion of an "avant-garde dictionary" strikes most people as a
contradiction in terms -- if you think of dictionaries as the custodians of
tradition, you're likely to expect them to look a little musty, too. Even
the Grand Larousse was well behind the fin-de-siecle curve. At the same time
the engravers in the Larousse offices in the Boulevard de Montparnasse were
copying the works of Corot and Courbet for the dictionary's illustrations,
Picasso and Brancusi were working in studios just a few meters away. But
dictionaries do catch up, not just with the language, but with the changing
look of the world.

But the problem with the way most modern dictionaries are illustrated isn't
what they imply about photographs, but what they imply about words. They
leave you with the impression that words are colorless abstractions at an
eternal remove from the concrete realm of the senses. You think of the
angels in Wim Wender's "Wings of Desire," who float in black and white above
the streets of Berlin and never make contact with sensory experience. Yet
when you hear words like bagel or bullfrog, what comes to mind isn't a
sketchy silhouette. Meanings are part of the world, too, and they have color
and texture just like everything else. You can even take pictures of them.

At the risk of sullying this point with technical arguments, let me add a
note for semanticists only. In fact, there is nothing metaphorical or
figurative about saying that we can photograph the meanings of common nouns.
Two points are relevant here. First, the particular subjects of photographs
can be taken as standing in for kinds or other objects by a process
analogous to what Quine calls deferred ostension (see my article
"Indexicality and Deixis" for more on this, in addition to Nelson Goodman's
discussion of "sampling" in Languages of Art). For example, we can point at
a particular bird and say "That is almost extinct," where we intend to refer
not to the bird itself, but to the kind it exemplifies. Analogously, a
photograph of a particular bird simply IS a photograph of its type, if
visual culture will only permit it to be.

It might be objected that the types for which photographs stand in aren't
the "meanings" of the expressions, this on the assumption that lexical
meanings are invariably Fregean senses. But in fact the majority of noun
definitions are not of the type <e, t> -- that is, predicates -- but rather
of the type e -- or more specifically, of kind-denoting expressions. For
example, Merriam-Webster defines sherry as "A Spanish fortified wine with a
distinctly nutty flavor." That doesn't entail that sherry applies to
whatever fortified wine is Spanish and has a distinctive nutty flavor, nor¬
does it entail that there could not be a variety of sherry that didn't have
a distinctively nutty flavor; rather the NP denotes a particular kind of
wine that typically or characteristically has those properties, without
implying that every nutty-tasting Spanish fortified wine must count as
sherry. Note that the indefinite makes this clear, since wine is treated as
a count noun only when it denotes a kind; if the definition read simply
"Spanish fortified wine with a distinctly nutty flavor," we'd take it as
expressing a predicate; i.e., as being of type <e, t>. (The point is also
easy to see when we look at the way quantifiers are used in noun
definitions; when the American Heritage defines skunk as "any of several
small, mostly carnivorous New World mammals of the genus Mephitis and
related genera...," we assume that quantification is over kinds, not that
there are several particular skunks in the world.)

http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~nunberg/dicts.html

------------------------------------

Worldmaking as we know it always starts from worlds already on hand; the
making is a remaking. Anthropology and developmental psychology may study
social and individual histories of such world-building, but the search for a
universal or necessary beginning is best left to theology. My interest here
is rather with the processes involved in building a world out of others.

With the false hope of a firm foundation gone, with the world displaced by
worlds that are but versions, with substance dissolved into function, and
with the given acknowledged as taken, we face the questions how worlds are
made, tested, and known.

Without presuming to instruct the gods or other worldmakers, or attempting
any comprehensive or systematic survey, I want to illustrate and comment on
some of the processes that go into worldmaking.

What I have said so far plainly points to a radical relativism; but severe
restraints are imposed. Willingness to accept countless alternative true or
right world-versions does not mean that everything goes, that tall stories
are as good as short ones, that truths are no longer distinguished from
falsehoods, but only that truth must be otherwise conceived than as
correspondence with a ready-made world. Though we make worlds by making
versions, we no more make a world by putting symbols together at random than
a carpenter makes a chair by putting pieces of wood together at random. The
multiple worlds I countenance are just the actual worlds made by and
answering to true or right versions. Worlds possible or impossible
supposedly answering to false versions have no place in my philosophy.

Just what worlds are to be recognized as actual is quite another question.
Although some aspects of a philosophical position have a bearing, even what
seem severely restrictive views may recognize countless versions as equally
right. For example, I am sometimes asked how my relativism can be reconciled
with my nominalism. The answer is easy. Although a nominalistic system
speaks only of individuals, banning all talk of classes, it may take
anything whatever as an individual; that is, the nominalistic prohibition is
against the profligate propagation of entities out of any chosen basis of
individuals, but leaves the choice of that basis quite free. Nominalism of
itself thus authorizes an abundance of alternative versions based on
particle physics or phenomenal elements or ordinary things or whatever else
one is willing to take as individuals. Nothing here prevents any given
nominalist from preferring on other grounds some among the systems thus
recognized as legitimate. In contrast, the typical physicalism, for example,
while prodigal in the platonistic instruments it supplies for endless
generation of entities, admits of only one correct (even if yet
unidentified) basis.

Thus while the physicalist's doctrine "no difference without a physical
difference" and the nominalist's doctrine "no difference without a
difference of individuals" sound alike, they differ notably in this respect.

At the same time, in this general discussion of worldmaking I do not impose
nominalistic restrictions, for I want to allow for some difference of
opinion as to what actual worlds are. That falls far short of countenancing
merely possible worlds. The platonist and I may disagree about what makes an
actual world while we agree in rejecting all else. We may disagree in what
we take to be true while we agree that nothing answers to what we take to be
false.

To speak of worlds as made by versions often offends both by its implicit
pluralism and by its sabotage of what I have called 'something solid
underneath'. Let me offer what comfort I can. While I stress the
multiplicity of right world-versions, I by no means insist that there are
many worlds -- or indeed any; for as I have already suggested, the question
whether two versions are of the same world has as many good answers as there
are good interpretations of the words "versions of the same world." The
monist can always contend that two versions need only be right to be
accounted versions of the same world. The pluralist can always reply by
asking what the world is like apart from all versions. Perhaps the best
answer is that given by Professor Woody Allen when he writes:

Can we actually 'know' the universe? My God, it's hard enough finding your
way around in Chinatown. The point, however, is: Is there anything out
there? And why? And must they be so noisy? Finally, there can be no doubt
that the one characteristic of 'reality' is that it lacks essence. That is
not to say it has no essence, but merely lacks it. (The reality I speak of
here is the same one Hobbes described, but a little smaller.)

The message, I take it, is simply this: never mind mind, essence is not
essential, and matter doesn't matter. We do better to focus on versions
rather than worlds. Of course, we want to distinguish between versions that
do and those that do not refer, and to talk about things and worlds, if any,
referred to; but these things and worlds and even the stuff they are made
of -- matter, anti-matter, mind, energy, or whatnot -- are themselves
fashioned by and along with the versions. Facts, as Norwood Hanson says, are
theory-laden; they are as theory-laden as we hope our theories are
fact-laden. Or in other words, facts are small theories, and true theories
are big facts. This does not mean, I must repeat, that right versions can be
arrived at casually, or that worlds are built from scratch. We start, on any
occasion, with some old version or world that we have on hand and that we
are stuck with until we have the determination and skill to remake it into a
new one. Some of the felt stubborness of fact is the grip of habit: our firm
foundation is indeed solid. Worldmaking begins with one version and ends
with another.

Source: Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking
(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1978), pp. 6, 7, 94-97.
Also see a Goodman memorial web page.

http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/gthursby/0000/goodman.htm

------------------------------------

...And by 1985 it had become obvious, at least to Nelson Goodman, the most
cautious yet audacious of philosophers, that the uniqueness and hence
identity of the world had been rendered unintelligible: there must be,
negation presumed, as many worlds as right world-descriptions...

Cavell and Worth were ignored, trivialized or swept aside by the political
tides of semiotics. Goodman, having friends in high places, was, as usual,
bypassed in reverent disbelief. Goodman, however, in company with the giants
of philosophy from Plato through Kant to Heidegger, Dewey, and Wittgenstein
who began by pondering the perplexities of the exact sciences only to end in
art, went beyond them to suggest (and rightly, as we shall see) that the
making of works of art, those events which most freely exemplify worlds,
must be the model for worldmaking in general. We learn at our best to make
worlds artistically, and hence, although Goodman never says so, learning to
identify works of art must be the model for learning to identify in general.

I wish in this essay to return to Parmenides by making a world, in Goodman's
sense, so absurd and wondrous that readers may at first glance fail to
recognize it as a world remade, again in Goodman's sense a reconstruction of
the logical world whose incoherence we have been trained to disregard. In a
style learned from Quine, Goodman and Davidson, but austerely redirected, I
shall sketch a world in which all things may be identified and yet
distinguished, in which falsity and negation are unintelligible, in which
truth is ubiquitous and nondiscriminatory, and in which the crafty arts like
filmmaking are the models for scientific, philosophical and logical
construction. I shall introduce the world historically, and, after
Collingwood and Kuhn, accept its historicity as part of the logical lesson
to be learned. And I shall conclude, with Parmenides, that it is the only
world available to us.

To those unaccustomed to traversing the wintry wilderness in which my kind
of pragmatism flourishes, I may appear to be skiing across a pond vast and
deep, oblivious to the creaking of the ice under stress beneath the snow. If
so, I would remind you that one may travel more securely within my pristine
logical landscape than in more populated vistas to the south, if only one
knows and respects the ice, checks one's equipment before departing and
travels light.  Should you choose to follow, and fall through the ice,
chances are good the logical baggage you are carrying is excessive.

...Davidson's argument, pushed to its conclusion, renders the notion of
truth indiscriminate. Our cognitive quests, rather than being searches for
truth', would more aptly be construed as finding a place for novel
expressions of belief within the patterns of relative significance, value
and use we bring to their assessment, a task of coherent reconstruction akin
to fitting a piece into a puzzle exactly as Nelson Goodman has suggested.

GOODMAN'S WORLDS

In 1985 Nelson Goodman came as close to hitting the logical nail on the head
as any philosopher ever has. Truths, Goodman recognized, are almost always
irrelevant to the discriminations we must make among assertions, hence the
search for truth' must be reconstrued within a broader context of enquiry.
Our task, even in science, is to arrange assertions in right relationships
with one another a matter of rightness of fit, or useful coherence.

... a statement is true, and a description or representation right, for a
world it fits. ... Rather than attempting to subsume descriptive and
representational rightness under truth, we shall do better, I think, to
subsume truth along with these under the general notion of rightness of fit.
... The differences between fitting a version to a world, a world to a
version, and a version together or to other versions fade when the role of
versions in making the worlds they fit is recognized. And knowing or
understanding is seen as ranging beyond the acquiring of true beliefs to the
discovering and devising of fit of all sorts.

Learning how to think rightly, and thus inquisitively, is learning how to
construct rather than criticize; and since we can only construct something
from elements already at hand, and hence already arranged into a world, it
is to learn how to reconstruct a better world from a world we encounter
rather than seeking the truth about it. The arts, therefore, are the models
for science and philosophy, rather than the reverse, for they encompass the
reconstructions of the world we most freely undertake.

So far, so good.  What then kept Goodman from driving the nail home without
destroying the uniqueness and identity of our world? Goodman has long
believed, and correctly, that every word has a unique meaning, as does every
assertion, and hence, with Quine, that quests for meaning and synonymy are
useless. If then there should be incompatible yet equally coherent and
encompassing networks of assertions describing our world - incompatible
right world-descriptions each would be unique and irreducible to any other.

Goodman, unfortunately, assumed without question that negation is
intelligible, and hence, like Wittgenstein, that a predicate, rightly
applied to an object or event from within a world-description, excludes
others.  Convinced, however, that the same subject term could occur within
distinct world-descriptions, and that incompatible predicates within
alternative world-descriptions could be rightly appended to the same subject
term (e.g. the assertions  The earth moves clockwise' and The earth moves
counterclockwise' may be affirmed with equal right, but only within
alternative world-descriptions), Goodman concluded that we are encompassed
about by incompatible right world-descriptions. Since whatever world is
described by a right world-description can only be accessed by describing it
from within that world-description, it follows, Goodman concluded, that
there must be as many actual worlds as there are right world-descriptions.
Misunderstanding the logic of identity, in other words, Goodman concluded
that the worlds described within right world-descriptions, being
distinguishable from one another, were therefore prohibited from being
identical.

Ever consistent, Goodman made a comparable slip with respect to the identity
of works of art.  One may readily distinguish my dog, for example, from any
painting, photograph or film which represents her, for one can apply
distinct predicates to them.  When looking at a painting, photograph or film
of my dog, Goodman then assumed, it would be a mistake to identify what I
see with my dog. A painting, photograph or film representing my dog, he
concluded, must therefore be a symbol an event which refers to my dog within
some conventional symbol system I have learned to decipher, rather than an
object which (re)presents her to me.

...to represent is surely to refer, to stand for, to symbolize. Every
representational work is a symbol; and art without symbols is restricted to
art without subject.

Having slipped twice, Goodman made the best of it.  If representation must
be denotation, and we must have worlds without a world, then the only unity
available to us must come from above rather than beneath: from an
encompassing  theory of symbols'.

So long as contrasting right versions not all reducible to one are
countenanced, unity is to be sought not in an ambivalent or neutral
something beneath these versions but in an overall organization embracing
them. ... My approach ... is through an analytic study of types and
functions of symbols and symbol systems.

Unfortunately, to construct a theory of symbols encompassing incompatible
right world-descriptions, one must be able to describe from without both the
world-descriptions and the worlds they describe, for otherwise the semantic
relations between description and described would remain unspecifiable. As
Goodman has insisted, however, one can comprehend a world only from within
its world-description. To search for an encompassing theory of symbols,
negation presumed, is therefore fruitless.

Goodman was compelled to deny the identity of our world, and to construe
artistic representation as symbolic, by a misunderstanding of the logic of
identity.  Had he recognized that we must avoid negation if we are to think
unpresumptuously, and hence that distinction and identity are relative, he
assuredly would have recognized that we may both distinguish and identify
events across the worlds we construct, and hence both distinguish and
identify the worlds themselves. He would also have recognized that works of
art may (re)present to us objects, events and worlds both distinguishable
from, and identifiable with, the objects, events and world within which we
live, move and have our being as LumiŠre recognized a century ago. Only
under these conditions could a search for an encompassing theory of symbols
be successful. But then, of course, the root reason for the search would
have disappeared.

We must remember, however, that Goodman was right in his most important
claim: to construct is to reconstruct, whether in art, philosophy or
science, and hence the arts must serve as models for reconstructing the
world.  How then must we train ourselves to learn to reconstruct worlds
artistically? If, as Goodman insists, construction is reconstruction
wherever it occurs, then learning to construct must be learning to
reconstruct.  But that, as Robin Collingwood insisted, is to learn to think
historically...

...Collingwood was dismissed without hearing by most philosophers as a
dilettante perversely disrespectful of the objectivity of philosophy.<40>
Simply put, however, he was despised for rejecting the distinction between
the contexts of discovery and justification, the last dogma of empiricism,
as Kuhn was to reject it, and be rejected, after him.  If, however, as
Davidson has implied, we as philosophers must presume that every assertion
we overhear is true, and, after Goodman, that the philosophical games we
play must be as reconstructive as every other art, and hence that we must
learn to learn, even when pursuing the arts of science or philosophy, as
artists have always learned to learn, then it follows that Collingwood and
Kuhn were correct.  The assertions we overhear as philosophers, and which,
after Davidson, we must interpret as true, must encompass those made by the
philosophers of the past.  If we are to learn how to rephilosophize in our
own era, we must learn to think as they thought, in their terms, exactly as
other artists must learn from the history of their art how to reconstruct
its worlds in our own.

http://www.hanover.edu/philos/film/vol_02/cameron.htm

------------------------------------

In The Structure of Appearance (1951) and Ways of Worldmaking (1978),
Goodman defended an extreme nominalism according to which things, qualities,
and even similarities are entirely the products of our habits of speaking,
without any ontological foundation in reality. He thought of his work as
belonging to the mainstream of modern philosophy, yet he proposed to
substitute his own structures of several symbol systems for the structure of
the world, the structure of the mind, and the structure of concepts. The
symbol systems of the sciences, philosophy, the arts, perception, and
everyday discourse thus constitute the ways of worldmaking.

The "new riddle of induction" introduced by Goodman in Fact, Fiction, and
Forecast (1954) raises significant doubts about our scientific inductive
practices and our ability to project natural predicates into the future.

Goodman's Languages of Art (1969) proposes that art-forms are properly
understood as symbolic systems that establish inter-related networks of
meaning without attempting to represent reality. Languages of Art offers a
new program for aesthetics, grounded in his theory of symbols. Underlying
this approach is Goodman’s belief in the cognitive nature of art. Pictures,
musical performances, literary texts, dance performances, and buildings
shape our experiences, just as do linguistic and scientific representations.
Within this formulation, representational, expressive, and exemplificational
forms of symbols govern the features and functions of the arts.

http://www.tu-dresden.de/phfiph/dozenten/braeuer/goodman.htm

------------------------------------

[GRUE], Quote from: Fact, Fiction, And Forecast

Suppose that all emeralds examined before a certain time t are green. At
time t, then, our observations support the hypothesis that all emeralds are
green; and this is in accord with our definition of confirmation. Our
evidence statements assert that emerald a is green, that emerald b is green,
and so on; and each confirms the general hypothesis that all emeralds are
green. So far, so good.

Now let me introduce a predicate far less familiar than green. It is the
predicate "grue", and it applies to all things examined before t just in
case they are green but to other things just in case they are blue. Then at
time t, for each evidence statement asserting that a given emerald is green,
a parallel evidence statement asserting that that emerald is grue. And that
statements that emerald a is grue, and so on, will each confirm the general
hypothesis that all emeralds are grue. Thus according to our definition, the
predication that all emeralds subsequently examined will be green and the
predication that all will be grue are alike confirmed by evidence statements
describing the same observations. But if an emerald subsequently examined is
grue, it is blue and hence not green.

http://www.ephilosopher.com/phpBB_14-action-viewtopic-topic-251

-------------------------------------

The "Grue" Property alla Nelson Goodman

The "grue" property is defined as: x is grue if and only if x is green and
is observed before the year 2000, or x is blue and is not observed before
the year 2000.

This is a "weird" property but there is no obvious reason why we couldn't
make up such a property. Now, let us pretend that the x referred to above
are actually emeralds. Further, pretend that we have observed many emeralds
and they have all been green and thus have had the property "grue". Then,
intuitively, this should increase our belief that the next emerald we
observe will be green and that it will be grue. This intuition is fine until
New Years Eve in 1999. Now our pretend emeralds observed in 2000 should be
grue and therefore blue and not green. Strange.......Is it still strange if
we pretend x are marbles rather than emeralds.

Why is this strange?

http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~cfs/305_html/Induction/Grue.html

----------------------------------------

The Grue Paradox

The "grue paradox," originally conceived by Nelson Goodman in Fact, Fiction,
and Forecast makes things even worse for the HD account of justification of
universal statements by any amount of particular empirical evidence.

Typically the scientist will not be considering a single hypothesis but will
be looking for which hypothesis is "best confirmed" by the available
evidence. The grue paradox shows us, that if we eliminate induction  (as the
HD-ist hoped to do) as a means of justification, for every hypothesis that
is confirmed by some body of evidence, there are an infinite number of
alternative hypotheses inconsistent with the first which are all equally
well confirmed by that same evidence. Thus, based on the empirical evidence
there is no justification for regarding the evidence as ever confirming one
hypothesis more than another one!

This is a "paradox" because of course scientists frequently make judgments
that the evidence confirms one hypothesis more favorably than another.

Here's how the paradox was presented by Goodman:

Take as our example this time the hypothesis that:

"All emeralds are green."

Clearly this hypothesis is confirmed by observations of green emeralds, i.e.
its "positive instances." Now consider a rival hypothesis:

"All emeralds are grue."

Here "grue" is a new predicate which is defined as the property of being
green before the year 2100 and blue afterwards. Thus this second hypothesis
that all emeralds are grue will be confirmed by any observation of a green
emerald before the year 2100, because "grue" means by definition being green
before 2100. Of course, since all observational evidence available is before
the year 2100, all the evidence we have confirms the grue hypothesis exactly
as much as it confirms the green hypothesis!

Of course picking the year 2100 is absurdly arbitrary; we could have picked
any date. So, in effect, there are an infinite number of alternative
hypotheses (each of which would have the emeralds changing color at a
different future date) which are all equally well confirmed by the observed
positive instances of green emeralds. Since our justification for accepting
a hypothesis as confirmed is the empirical evidence, it follows
paradoxically that we have no rational justification for picking one
hypothesis as better confirmed than an infinite host of alternatives!

NOTE: Obviously, this does not reflect what really is the case in science.
The hypothesis that all emeralds are green is in fact considered highly
confirmed and accepted by all mineralogists, whereas no one believes "All
emeralds are grue."

Why do we consider "green" as "reasonable" but "grue" as utterly "absurd"?
The reason seems obvious: no one has ever observed gems changing color on an
arbitrary date in the past, so no one has any grounds for expecting any gem
to change from green to blue in the year
2100.

But to say this is just to say that we expect the future will resemble the
past (the principle of the uniformity of nature), which is of course the
heart of Hume's problem of induction. No doubt science proceeds on this
assumption of the uniformity of nature, but our task is to justify it. Yet
the only way to justify it is to reason from the evidence which we have
accumulated from the past, and that of course is to assume the very point
which is at issue, namely the reliability of inductive inference from the
past to the future. We must conclude that the confirmationist has not
escaped the problem of induction, and so Goodman calls this "grue paradox"
the "new riddle of induction."

http://www.loyno.edu/~folse/grue.html

-----------------------------------------

UML: An Evaluation of the Visual Syntax of the Language

Examination of the UML indicates weaknesses in its graphic syntax, which
undermine its structure as a visual language. Although the UML Notation
claims to provide a “canonical notation”, there are insufficient rules
governing the graphic constructs used to produce the essential 'signifiers'
of this visual language and to define permissible combinations. The nature
and composition of the graphical elements actually shown is a fundamental
consideration, separate from the underlying constructs that they may
signify. A much earlier formulation for notational systems, that provided by
Nelson Goodman, clarifies the issues involved and makes it possible to set
basic tests for a notational scheme, such as the UML, which require
syntactic disjointedness and differentiability. Application of these tests
(plus others) to graphical primitives, simple characters and diagrams shows
a variety of failures that lead to a fundamental questioning of the
graphical syntax which forms part of the UML structure as a language.

http://csdl.computer.org/comp/proceedings/hicss/2001/0981/03/09813049abs.htm

-----------------------------

Word, Image, and Sound from Comparative Points of View:
A Review Article of New Work Edited by Joret and Remael

1. "Vous connaissez mon infirmité," writes Chopin in a letter to one of his
students, de Rozières, "de ne pouvoir mettre 2 mots l’un à la suite de l’
autre sans une véritable souffrance" ("You know my infirmity of not being
able to write two words the one after the other without a true suffering").
How can this remarkable phrase, cited by Paul Joret from Chopin's
correspondance, and that reveals a paradoxical relation to writing,
illuminate Chopin's concept of musical semantics? How does film translation
construct our visual perception of the often presumed universally readable
stream of images in the movies? How are the relations between metaphorical
language in music commentaries and the "exemplificatory" aspect (Goodman) of
musical reference to be seized? How can ideological devices of language be
visualized through a close reading of the word and image materiality in the
avant-garde collage work of Picasso's Au bon Marché? What can the
sociohistorical investigation into professionnal carreers of Commedia
dell'arte actors tell us about the intersection between dramatic language
and its setting for the stage in the Italian Baroque period? What is the
discursive function of the blank space in texts and art works? What are the
sociolinguistical and philosophical implications of today's post industrial
information society and its loss of the securizing factor of tradition on
the way the individual lives up his relation to the (real?) world?

http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb00-2/books00-2.html

--------------------------------------

The notion of logical construction had a great impact on the future course
of analytic philosophy. One line of influence was via the notion of a
contextual definition, or paraphrase, intended to minimize ontological
commitment and to be a model of philosophical analysis. The distinction
between the surface appearance of definite descriptions, as singular terms,
and the fully analyzed sentences from which they seem to disappear was seen
as a model for making problematic notions disappear upon analysis. The
theory of descriptions has been viewed as a paradigm of philosophical
analysis.

A more technical strand in analytic philosophy was influenced by the
construction of matter. Rudolf Carnap was attempted to carry out the
construction of matter from sense data, and later Nelson Goodman continued
the project. More generally, however, the use of set theoretic constructions
became widespread among philosophers, and continues in the construction of
set theoretic models, both in the sense of logic where they model formal
theories, and as objects of interest in their own right.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logical-construction/

-----------------------------------------

I can think of several ways to use Raffman’s book as part of an exploration
of topics in aesthetics. One would be to consider her account of nuance
ineffability in relation to other discussions of ineffability in music,
using Cavell as a point of departure. As Levinson noted in his review,
discussions of musical ineffability by Schopenhauer, Langer, and others have
addressed something much broader than Raffman’s. Whether cognitive science
has implications for such other notions could be explored. A second option
would be to follow the thread from Goodman discussed in Raffman’s Chapter 6,
“Naturalizing Nelson Goodman,” concerning the properties of symbol systems
in the arts, such as denseness. The seminar might also seek to extend
implications from the phenomena Raffman discusses to others; as noted in
Justin London’s review, there is now a very wide range of musical perception
research on other interesting topics such as rhythm, movement, and
expression.

http://www.aesthetics-online.org/ideas/freeland3.html

--------------------------------------

HOMOLOGICAL STATEMENTS: Statements which are true of themselves, as
"English" is an English word (compare heterological statements). One of the
basic tenets of formalism is that what an artwork symbolizes is external to
the work itself and might just as well be discarded in any serious critique
of it. In Ways of World-Making, Nelson Goodman uses the notion of
homological and heterological statements to undo this assumption. He
maintains that what a symbol symbolizes is not necessarily extraneous to
itself, since, for example, "word" is a word which applies to itself and to
other words, "short" applies to itself among other things, and "having seven
syllables" has seven syllables, as do many other phrases. Formalists, he
concludes, implicitly and erroneously maintain that the most important
characteristic of art is it heterologicality.

HETEROLOGICAL STATEMENTS: A statement which is not true of itself. For
example, "Italian," which not an Italian word. See homological statements.

http://www.arts.ouc.bc.ca/fina/glossary/h_list.html

------------------------------

Since Frege, analytical philosophy has investigated, as a complement to
other conceptions of language, the relationship of reference (Bedeutung) and
thereby of truth, that language maintains with the world, as distinguished
from dimensions of sense (Sinn) — fiction for Frege — according to which
language can signify even though verification may not be practical or even
possible. Errors, fraud, pretence and even fiction therefore clearly become
domains of linguistic activity, without a real engagement of the logical
possibilities of language. This aspect of the philosophy of logic and of
language has long been clearly established. Henceforth, the philosophical
debate is open as to whether fiction is a non-referential linguistic form
(i.e. without literal denotation). Nelson Goodman contests this claim,
preferring to speak of “non-denotational reference” — thereby revealing the
possibility of a positive understanding of the power of fiction, without
having to contradict Frege.

The idea is that the Web, as a result of its geographic reach, its
multi-linguistic (and therefore trans-cultural) scope, but also its
intrinsic dynamics (a more or less automated hypertextualisation, the
interruption of the authorial function, the reappropriation of a whole range
of semiotic, iconic, symbolic and auditory worlds), would seem to permit —
at the very least — expressive and communicational practices in which the
conditions of verification and referencing become, if not impossible, at
least difficult or random. However — and this seems, for the moment, to
contradict the present argument — we are forced to recognise that attempts
to create fiction on the Internet (except for a few, perhaps excessively
experimental efforts) have remained “disappointing” in the sense that they
contribute nothing more than that which literature or cinema have already
provided.

http://www.interdisciplines.org/defispublicationweb/papers/13

-----------------------------------

Concerning: GOODMAN, Nelson: ‘Languagues of Art. An approach to a theory of
symbols’, Hackett Publishing Company Inc., Indianapolis/Cambridge 1976.

As already the title indicates, Goodman considers artworks to be signs
(‘symbols’). He bluntly puts: ‘‘pictorial representation is a mode of
signification’ (p. 3). Which immediately raises the question how signs that
are artworks (‘pictorial representations’) can be distinguished from signs
that are not artworks (‘descriptions’).

Goodman rejects the xisting answers, in particular those of Peirce and
Langer (p. 228). Peirce introduced the concept ‘icon’ for signs that
resemble what they refer to. Langer distinguished ‘discursive’ from
‘presentational’ symbols. Goodman negates that something would become a
‘representation’ (say, a painting) when it resembles what it refers to. He
fiercely opposes the idea that a painting would be a copy or an imitation.

Instead, Goodman introduces a whole array of ‘symbol systems’. The
‘representational’ differs from the ‘verbal’ in that its ‘symbol system’ is
not ‘articulated’ (like verbal language), but ‘dense’ (gradients of colours
and black and white).

Here is not the place to examine whether the Goodman’s criteria suffice to
distinguish ‘representations’ from ‘descriptions’. Our aim is to show that
such distinction is not relevant, as far as art is concerned. What really
matters here is the distinction between words or images (‘pictorial
representations’) that conjure up a world, and words or images that merely
refer to world – words and images that are merely signs (‘symbols’). No
doubt, an image may be used as a sign. The representation of an eagle in an
encyclopaedia refers to ‘eagles’ in general. And the same goes for the
pictorial representation of dishes on a menu: they refer to the real dishes
that will soon be served. We do not look at hem in view of enjoying what is
represented, but as a means of forming an idea of pleasures forthcoming.

Totally different is the eagle on Michelangelo’s drawing of Zeus and
Ganymede. Here, we are not looking through the image at an alleged happening
in a mythical world. We rather obliterate every real or mythic world and
totally submerge in the world evoked in the drawing, as if the event were
unfolding there before our very eyes. Thus, as opposed to an image that is
used as a sign – an image that refers to something outside the painting –
there is also the image that conjures up a world, that is a world itself.

And, just as there are two kinds of images – images that refer and images
that conjure up – there are also two kinds of (verbal) signs. As a rule
words are used to refer to the outside world: ‘It rains’. But, as soon as
one says ‘Once upon a time…’, the words stop referring and begin to conjure
up a world in our imagination. The difference between art and other human
activities, such as science or philosophy, cannot possibly be understood in
terms of signs. Only the difference between referring to and conjuring up –
between semiosis and mimesis – will do.

Which is not to say that the world that is conjured in art cannot be
understood in terms of signs, just like the real world. The expression on
the face of the Mona Lisa is a sign, just like the real expression. And both
a real palm and the palm in an image are symbols of martyrdom. Yet, such
semiotic – iconologic – exercises have nothing to do with art as such.

How much this approach misses the mark, becomes apparent when Goodman claims
that ‘pictorial representations’ belong to the same kind of ‘symbol systems’
as … seismographs and thermometers! How, then, to tell a temperature curve
from a Hokusai drawing of the Fujiyama (p. 229)? Goodman remarks that even
when in both cases the lines exactly match, we still call the one a graph
and the other an image. ‘What makes the difference?’. In both cases we are
dealing with ‘dense schemes’. According to Goodman, the difference is
‘syntactic’: in the graph the quality of the line does not matter, whereas
in the print the subtle variations are constitutive.

This is evidently false. Hokusai’s drawing continues to conjure up a
volcano, however much we might vary the quality of its lines with a computer
program. Only the artistic quality will change, not the fact that we have to
do with an image. Also the graph remains a graph whatever the nature of its
lines What, then, really makes the graph  a sign and a drawing an image? The
answer is obvious: Hokusai’s lines are an optic given that readily conjures
up an equally optic landscape, while a temperature curve is an optic given
the optic qualities of which are readily overlooked because they only refer
to a tactile given: temperature. Also variations in the intensity of light
or even a succession of sounds would do. Whereas a translation of the optic
givens of Hokusai's drawing in variations of sound or pressure would utterly
destroy every evocative power of the image. And that evidently has
everything to do with the difference between an image and a sign.

Goodman’s theory turns out to be one of the many futile efforts to fill the
gap left by giving up the good old - but all too often misunderstood -
conception of art as mimesis

http://www.d-sites.net/english/goodman.htm

------------------------------------

In the film, "Mr Holland's Opus," the beleaguered music teacher defends the
music program that is about to be terminated so that dwindling resources can
be devoted to teaching the "basics." The argument he makes, though
desperate, simply amounts to saying, "If they don't have music, the students
won't have anything to read and write about." Here was the screenwriter's,
the filmmaker's, an art industry's opportunity to make a compelling case for
the arts in school curricula before the general public, and this is the
sound bite they came up with! There is a wonderful truth in those words, but
the argument is clouded by a measure of question-begging: if the arts are
not appreciated, then losing the capacity to write and read artistically or
about artful insights is not going to matter either. However, the film does
offer compelling support for music education when it leaves rational
argument behind, and lets the music speak for itself in its own language -
as it does especially in the last scene which embodies and transcends all
the rational arguments from the enrichment of lives to the sheer enjoyment
of music as a good in itself, and does so artistically, emotionally,
intuitively.

As long as experiences like "Mr Holland's Opus" remain in the public domain,
questions about the nature and place of justifications persist, not only in
support of education in music and the other arts, but also in support of
other curricula offerings. In a delightfully satirical piece titled, "A
Message from Mars," Nelson Goodman imagines a situation on "Mars" in which
the arts are pervasive and unquestioned, while the study of the sciences
takes place mostly in extracurricular clubs, the occasional technical
course, and infrequent guest lectures by outstanding scientists, while the
great scientific experiments of the past are reenacted in performances for
pleasure (the school has even built a large theater for these reenactments)
or have been immortalized in museums. The earth visitor was speechless when
the "Dean of the School for Sciences and Arts" at the Martian university
declared he was not unfavorably disposed towards the sciences, but felt it
best if the sciences were not constrained by formal education and submitted
to the usual evaluation processes. Besides, the students were so fascinated
by, and devoted to, their extracurricular science projects there was no need
for courses, grades, credit, or official recognition.

The difficulty that music and the other arts have in justifying their place
in school curricula is the same difficulty other subject areas have faced in
the past, and science faces on "Mars." When the prevailing worldview does
not afford a supportive context of assumptions and commitments for a
particular way of knowing, justifications appear wanting. The present
scientific mindset predisposes the community of policy-makers and educators
toward the teaching of science without question or doubt as the artistic
mindset presumably could predispose an alien culture to the arts. Judgments
of worth, it seems, are not entirely rational products. They are rather the
outworking of a combination of predispositions, intuitions, moral
imperatives, assumptions (examined and unexamined), and reasoning. Choosing
what is excluded from and included in the school program may very well end
up where the search begins: the initial hunch, pre-rational and unexamined.
Subsequent rational arguments do not determine the final outcome; they
simply give support to prior commitments.

This is intimated in Professor Jorgensen's subtitle: "Belief in Search of
Reason." This resonates with the phrase St. Anselm used centuries ago to
describe the theological enterprise, "Fides quaerens intellectum," or "faith
seeking understanding." These phrases are not condemnations of human
unreasonableness, but rather, comments about the nature of human
rationality, including, it would seem, coming to a conviction about what
learning is of most worth. Decision-making, like music making, like the
scientific enterprise when it is truly understood, even like the functioning
of the human mind itself - is a matter of reasoning, feeling, imagination
and possibly physical awareness as well, working together complementarily.
Professor Jorgensen's subtitle and St. Anselm's confession, "I believe so
that I may understand," are reflected in lines borrowed from the poet Andrew
Marvell:

Through that wide field how he his way should find,
O'er which lame faith leads understanding blind.

http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/EPS/PES-Yearbook/96_docs/yob.html

---------------------------------------

Nelson Goodman controverts Hume's characterization of induction as simply
generalizing from past experience in accord with the 'Uniformity Principle'
with his (Goodman's) "grue" example. Consider the generalization, "All
emeralds are grue," where "grue" means "observed before the year 2000 and
green, or not observed before 2000 and blue." Past observations of grue
emeralds are not taken to confirm that all emeralds are grue -- "grue" is
not a projectible predicate. So this is an example of a case in which we do
not expect that "the future will resemble the past."

A natural reaction to the example is to suppose that only predicates that
contain no references to particular times (or places or people, I suppose)
can be projectible. The easiest, plausible reply to such a proposal, though
not the one Goodman chooses (he instead demurs that all hypotheses can be
phrased so as to contain references to particular times), is to remove the
time reference, defining "grue" simply as "observed and green, or unobserved
and blue"; the predicate is still unprojectible. The second easiest reply is
to point out there are many projectible hypotheses that refer to particular
times and individuals, such as "All Barry's classes this semester will run
late."

But I don't think either Goodman's correction of Hume or any attempts to
meet Goodman's counter-example with modifications to the Uniformity
Principle importantly alter the situation. "The Uniformity Principle" in
Hume's skeptical argument just stands in for a principle of induction -- 
whatever principle would adequately describe induction -- and the argument
goes through whatever you put in for the content of this principle (unless
it's an analytic truth). It's pretty clear that a more detailed
specification of the respects in which nature is uniform will still state an
unobserved, matter-of-fact proposition which is unjustifiable through
inductive means on pain of circularity...

...II. Failed attempts at a solution

There have been several, often ingenious attempts to resolve the problem of
induction, but, apart from my own view, none has been successful. I will try
to survey these failed solutions below, though I am not sure that all the
views I describe were intended as solutions to the problem of induction.

A. Goodman's failure

Nelson Goodman makes a perplexing attempt to reduce the second part of the
problem of induction to the first.(6) In order to justify induction, he says
what we have to do is to formulate general rules and compare them with
particular inferences. Individual inductions will then be justified by their
conformity with the rules, while at the same time, he says, the rules will
be justified by their conformity with our practices, that is, with the
inferences that we actually make.

Now if Goodman's account is intended merely to describe a way of resolving
certain difficult cases, then it need involve no circularity, and is,
moreover, probably correct. That is, Goodman may only be saying: if we
encounter a particular inference whose validity is difficult to evaluate, we
can appeal to some rules that are known independently of that particular
inference, and if we encounter a rule that is difficult to evaluate, we can
appeal to particular inferences that are known independently to be valid.
There would be no circular argument there. However, there would also be no
refutation of skepticism, for the skeptic doubts of induction in general,
not just certain difficult cases; thus, he is not going to grant
unproblematic knowledge of any rules or any particular inferences, however
obvious they may seem to us.

Because Goodman seems to think he is addressing and resolving the
justificatory problem of induction, it is more likely he meant his proposal
as a general means of justifying induction, to be applied to justify every
rule and every particular inference. In this case, it is subject to the
following immediately obvious objections:

(1) Circularity. In general, if p is to justify q, then p must first be
known. It is therefore impossible for p to justify q and q to at the same
time justify p, because in that case each would have to be known prior to
the other. This is just what Goodman wants to claim, with respect to
validity of individual inductive arguments and general rules of induction.

(2) Gives a carte blanche on arbitrary practices. For instance, suppose that
we had inductive practices corresponding to the opposite of every rule that
we presently accept and the opposite of every particular inference that we
presently accept.(7) We could still apply Goodman's procedure and wind up
'justifying' our practices since we would be able to bring our rules into
accord with our particular judgements. The only things that couldn't be
justified by a Goodmanian procedure would be practices that didn't follow
rules (N.B. it's not clear why non-rule-bound practices should be
unjustified) or inconsistent practices. Surely this is the wrong result.

(3) Goodman's suggestions, of course, would fail to impress the skeptic, for
at the first stage of the procedure, where Goodman proposes to 'justify'
some rule through its conformity with accepted practices, the skeptic would
say, "Wait a minute. I agree this rule describes the sort of inferences we
actually make, but I don't think it's valid. Instead, I think the inferences
we actually make are all wrong." And in the second stage, where Goodman
proposes to justify some particular inference by appeal to general rules,
the skeptic would object once again, "Wait a minute. All general rules of
induction are wrong. Therefore, I cannot accept their use to justify
particular inferences."

(4) The procedure Goodman describes, even if it were a valid means of
justification, would not help us any, since no one has been able to carry it
out. That is, if this is the only way of justifying induction, then for all
the time that mankind has existed without having formulated the rules of
induction, our inductive inferences have been irrational. Now someone might
claim that the mere existence of some rules that correspond to our inductive
practices, even if we don't know them, could render our practices justified.
But it's not clear why this would be so, and in any case it hasn't been
shown that some such rules exist.

Goodman's defense

On the face of it, Goodman's proposal seems outrageous, but he does give an
argument for why the procedure he describes would constitute a justification
of induction -- hence, an argument for thinking that what we accept is
valid. It is a linguistic argument:

The task of formulating rules that define the difference between valid and
invalid inductive inferences is much like the task of defining any term with
an established usage. If we set out to define the term "tree", we try to
compose out of already understood words an expression that will apply to the
familiar objects that standard usage calls trees, and that will not apply to
objects that standard usage refuses to call trees. A proposal that plainly
violates either condition is rejected; while a definition that meets these
tests may be adopted and used to decide cases that are not already settled
by actual usage. Thus the interplay we observed between rules of induction
and particular inductive inferences is simply an instance of this
characteristic dual adjustment between definition and usage, whereby the
usage informs the definition, which in turn guides the usage.

(pp68-9; emphasis added)

Goodman's argument, in short, is that if we can formulate some rules that
correspond to the inductive inferences people call valid, then these rules
will define the expression "valid inductive inference" because they state
what we take a valid inductive inference to be; and therefore, an appeal to
these rules to show that some particular inference is valid is legitimate.
Again:

The problem of induction is not a problem of demonstration but a problem of
defining the difference between valid and invalid predictions.

(p68; emphasis added)

Against the principle of charity, I suggest that we take him at his word
and, in particular, take his talk about definitions seriously. Attempting to
define knowledge into existence is a fairly typical linguistic philosophy
ploy. If linguistic analysis had been around during Copernicus' time, I
suppose some philosopher might have argued:

In order to determine whether the earth 'orbits' the sun, we must first
determine the meaning of the expression "orbits," and for that we must
consider its ordinary usage. Now ordinary usage refers to the sun as
orbiting the earth. So Copernicus is simply committing an abuse of language
in saying that the earth orbits the sun.

I doubt Copernicus would have been impressed. The problem is that if
ordinary people consistently call things that have the feature F, "X"'s,
this may indicate, not that "X" just means "a thing that has F", but simply
that people believe things that have F to also have a second property, that
of being X, which belief they could be mistaken in. Otherwise, every dispute
over whether A is B would become a linguistic dispute over the meanings of
"A" and "B".

http://home.sprynet.com/~owl1/confirma.htm

----------------------------------

An underlying assumption that insures active and enthusiastic student
participation can be explained by Nelson Goodman in Ways Of Worldmaking. In
his discussion on "The Significance of Style," he says, "What we find, or
succeed in making, is heavily dependent on how and what we seek" and
concludes the chapter by saying:

The less accessible a style is to our own approach and the more adjustment
we are forced to make, the more insight we gain and the more our powers of
discovery are developed. The discernment of style is an integral aspect of
the understanding of works of art and the worlds they present.

In paired fiction writing, "seeking" combines with another person's reading
and writing. The writing becomes seamless because the two participants seem
to easily guess or imagine each other's "seeking" by constructing it in the
next narrative step. At the end of a paired fiction writing class, the two
writers in the pair often describe their amazement at being able to follow
and even anticipate what each partner thought was the other's intention,
though there is also a good deal of laughter about the confusion and twists
which their writing "dialogue" creates. Nonetheless, real communication is
focused in their writing and reading acts.

An important value of this activity is that it requires a student to share
his or her own text and participate in another writer's text. This type of
dialogue is a universal writing goal. Fiction writing lends itself to
writing concentration because it isn't typically about the work of school so
much as the pleasure of life. Students sense this environmental shift. All
writers and readers have intuitive sensibilities (what Wolfgang Iser
describes in The Act of Reading as "horizons of expectations") which easily
allow stories to surface. The stimulation of a playful environment, of close
reading, of general writing prompts, and of only a limited amount of time to
answer the specific writing and reading tasks produces an atmosphere that is
charged with rhetorical consciousness. Not only do students learn to
concentrate their thinking on another person's writing, but they also learn
to see where their own thinking can lead others.

Concentration is easily induced because students experience immediate
responses and create immediate responses to their texts. This interaction
helps students learn to trust their readers, whether their anticipated ideas
are realized or new horizons of possibilities occur. They learn how to be
playful with each other's thinking while actually experiencing transactional
writing and reading structures.

Most of the claims about paired fiction writing are based on observing the
process and results of the activity for more than fifteen years of teaching.
However, the rationale for paired fiction writing is based on Louise M.
Rosenblatt's transactional theory.

Thus the transactional view, freeing us from the old separation between the
human creature and the world, reveals the individual consciousness as a
continuing self-ordering, self-creating process, shaped by and shaping a
network of interrelationships with its environing social and natural matrix.
Out of such transactions flowers the author's text, an utterance awaiting
the readers whose participation will consummate the speech act. By means of
texts, we say, the individual may share in the funded knowledge and wisdom
of our culture. For the individual reader, each text is a new situation, a
new challenge. (172-73)

Paired fiction writing is able to create a positive learning transaction
within the community of the class not only because the participants can
easily perform the necessary tasks, but also because it allows students to
immediately experience their writing and reading acts as enjoyable events.
The event or learning transaction that occurs during paired fiction writing
is, in Rosenblatt's words, a "transaction with the environment precisely
because it permits such self-aware acts of consciousness" (173). Classrooms
use networks to create community - paired fiction writing is one writing
node that can help students become more conscious of how to build trust,
freedom and creativity in their writing lives.

http://www.daedalus.com/wings/hochman.5.2.html

-------------------------------------

Hume’s ‘association of ideas’ theory is generally considered to be a causal
one, and it seems a good place to begin.  The claim is that if both F and G
perceptions have always been associated in my past experience then if I have
an F impression I cannot help having or expecting a G idea.  So if “one
particular species of event has always, in all instances, been conjoined
with another, we make no longer any scruple of foretelling one upon the
appearance of the other” and therefore it could be considered that it is
only a matter of experience which gives us the idea of a necessary
connection between cause and effect.  Hume goes on to say in his Enquiry:

“But there is nothing in a number of instances, different from every single
instance, which is supposed to be exactly similar; except only, that after a
repetition of similar instances, the mind is carried by habit, upon the
appearance of one event, to expect its usual attendant, and to believe that
it will exist. This connexion, therefore, which we feel in the mind, this
customary transition of the imagination from one object to its usual
attendant, is the sentiment or impression from which we form the idea of
power or necessary connexion.”

To take this literally, would in some way seem to entail that Hume thinks
that there is no such thing as a necessary connection in nature, and that it
is only by the force of habit that we consider cause and effect to be
contiguous. Whether this actually is his view shall be considered later.

If we consider first the stance that there is no such thing as a necessary
connection, we must obviously start to consider how this affects our view of
the world. Scientific induction works on the following principle:

“If a large number of As have been observed under a wide variety of
conditions, and if all those observed As without exception possessed the
property B, then all As have the property B”

So it goes that whilst using this scientific method (also taking into
account the Baconian ideal of the observer having no preconceptions about
what he is observing), we see the same occurrence under many different
conditions, we could consider it to be a property or a power of the object.
However, do any number of instances of a law being fulfilled in the past
mean that it will be in the future?

It can be seen that there is a problem with presuming that one thing will
always go with another, just because it always has done in the past. This is
most clearly illustrated by an analogy given by Bertrand Russell:

“The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last
wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the
uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.”

The chicken in this example will have experienced being fed first thing in
the morning, over many years, under many different circumstances, and may
(if such intentionality can be ascribed to chickens) have begun to feel that
it was a law of nature. Purely because it had always known things to be this
way, it would expect them to go on being the same – although in this example
such expectations were misguided.

The above example, however, only serves to highlight, the difficulty we can
have in going from a finite number of observations to a universal
generalisation or law. One famous example is that of black swans. Millions
of swans have been observed in America and Europe and all of them were
white, therefore by induction we have proved the statement ‘all swans are
white’.  However, even after all of these sightings there remains the
possibility of an ‘unobserved’ non-white swan. In fact, in Australia there
are black swans. So although we can see from the principle of induction that
it may make it more likely that all swans are white, it does not make it
necessarily so. There remains the difficulty of going from the specific to
the general. However the argument could be reformulated as ‘It is probable
that all swans are white’, in which case the argument would not be falsified
by the observation of black swans.

But does everything reduce therefore to such observation laws? Nelson
Goodman suggests otherwise:

“But the fact that a given man in this room is a third son does not increase
the credibility of statements asserting that other men now in this room are
third sons. Yet… our hypothesis is a generalisation of the evidence
statement. The difference is that in…[this]… case, the hypothesis is a
merely contingent or accidental generality. Only a statement that is
lawlike – regardless of its truth or falsity or its scientific importance –
is capable of receiving confirmation from an instance of it; accidental
statements are not.”

>From this we could consider the difference between law-like and accidental
generalisations. The theoretical chicken had made an accidental
generalisation based purely on his own experience, considering his feeding
to be a universal law. It would still remain however to determine which
generalisations are law-like and which are not. An obvious example is that
of gravity. It has always worked in a set manner, experienceable under a
number of different conditions and appears to be a universal occurrence. It
is something so large as a concept that it is hard to consider it not
working. However if we consider all the times that it has yet to act on the
world, our number of observations reduce to next to nothing, and by sheer
probability it seems to become less likely that it will continue to act in
the way that we expect. Still, reducing things to probabilities can cause
problems. One of my favourite examples is from the play Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard, where two characters have the unusual
experience of having tossed a coin a few hundred times and each time it has
landed heads. One character remarks:

“A spectacular vindication of the principle that each individual coin spun
individually is as likely to come down heads as tails and therefore should
cause no surprise each individual time it does”

So probability can be seen to validate the unusual and reduce our belief in
the usual if used in the right way. However it is not the conjunction of
probability and induction that is the concern here. One argument for
believing that experience based on induction will continue to work is that
it always has done so in the past, so it is likely to continue that way
also. However this ends up as a circular argument as the justification is
also inductive.

Is Hume right about causation?
http://www.lumin.freeserve.co.uk/HumeEss.htm

-------------------------------------

Irrealism

Irrealism is a philosophical term which seems to have been coined in the
1980s (origin is Nelson Goodman) to refer to the belief that the debate
between realism and anti-realism was based on poor assumptions. In practice
many irrealists were sympathetic to the critique on realism, but were also
critical of the idealist, relativist or reductionist tendencies of the
anti-realists.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrealism

-------------------------------------

nominalism

Belief that only particular things exist, as opposed to realism. Nominalists
hold that a general term or name {Lat. nomine} is applied to individuals
that resemble each other, without the need of any reference to an
independently existing universal. Prominent representatives of this view
include Ockham, Berkeley, and Goodman.

http://www.philosophypages.com/dy/n9.htm#nomi

--------------------------------

ontology

Branch of metaphysics concerned with identifying, in the most general terms,
the kinds of things that actually exist. Thus, the "ontological commitments"
of a philosophical position include both its explicit assertions and its
implicit presuppositions about the existence of entities, substances, or
beings of particular kinds.

http://www.philosophypages.com/dy/o.htm#onty

---------------------------------

induction

Probable reasoning whose conclusion goes beyond what is formally contained
in its premises; see deduction / induction.

http://www.philosophypages.com/dy/i9.htm#ind

---------------------------------

deduction / induction

Distinction in logic between types of reasoning, arguments, or inferences.
In a deductive argument, the truth of the premises is supposed to guarantee
the truth of the conclusion; in an inductive argument, the truth of the
premises merely makes it probable that the conclusion is true.

http://www.philosophypages.com/dy/d2.htm#ded

---------------------------------

inference

The relationship that holds between the premises and the conclusion of a
logical argument, or the process of drawing a conclusion from premises that
support it deductively or inductively.

http://www.philosophypages.com/dy/i9.htm#inf

---------------------------------

inference, rules of

Elementary valid argument forms whose substitution instances may be used to
justify the steps in a formal proof of the validity of a more complex
deductive argument. The rules of inference that we employ here include:

Modus Ponens,
Modus Tollens,
Hypothetical Syllogism,
Disjunctive Syllogism,
Constructive Dilemma,
Absorption,
Simplification,
Conjunction, and
Addition.

These, taken together with suitable rules of replacement, adequately secure
the completeness of the propositional calculus.

http://www.philosophypages.com/dy/i9.htm#inf

--------------------------------

replacement, rules of

Tautologies that express the logical equivalence of pairs of elementary
statement forms, each of whose substitution instances may be used to replace
those of the other wherever they occur within a formal proof of the validity
of a deductive argument. The rules of replacement that we employ here
include:

De Morgan's Theorems,
Commutation,
Association,
Distribution,
Double Negation,
Transposition,
Implication,
Equivalence,
Exportation, and
Tautology.

These, taken together with the nine rules of inference, adequately secure
the completeness of the propositional calculus.

http://www.philosophypages.com/dy/r9.htm#repl

--------------------------------

completeness

A feature of formal systems whose axioms or rules of inference are adequate
for the demonstration of every true proposition or for the justification of
every valid argument. Thus, the addition of any unprovable formula to a
complete system necessarily results in a contradiction. The propositional
calculus is complete in this sense, but (as Gödel showed) higher-order
versions of quantification theory are not.

http://www.philosophypages.com/dy/c5.htm#cplt

----------------------------------

propositional calculus

A formal system of symbolic logic concerned with compound statements formed
by the use of truth-functional logical connectives.

http://www.philosophypages.com/dy/p9.htm#proca

----------------------------------

connective
A logical symbol used to make compound statements out of simpler component
statements. The truth-functional connectives used here include:

~      for negation,
&      for conjunction,
v      for disjunction,
->     for implication, and
=      for equivalence.

http://www.philosophypages.com/dy/c7.htm#conn

-----------------------------------

Cognitive relativism asserts the relativity of truth. On the other hand,
moral relativism asserts the relativity of morality. Because of the close
connections between the concept of truth and concepts such as rationality
and knowledge, cognitive relativism is often taken to encompass, or imply,
the relativity of both rationality and knowledge. The framework, or
standpoint, to which truth is relativized is usually understood to be a
conceptual scheme. This may be the conceptual scheme of an entire culture or
period; or it may be conceived more narrowly as the theoretical framework of
a particular community: for example, quantum physicists, or Southern
Baptists. Like other forms of relativism, cognitive relativism denies that
any of these standpoints enjoy a uniquely privileged status. None of them
offer a 'God's eye point of view', or represent the standpoint dictated to
us by objective standards of rationality.

Cognitive relativism, like many other forms of relativism, is often said to
have been first put forward by the ancient sophists, particularly
Protagoras, who began his work 'Truth' with the famous statement: "Man is
the measure of all things--of things that are, that they are, of things that
are not that they are not.' But with the possible exception of the sophists,
few philosophers in the Western tradition have espoused any form of
cognitive relativism until relatively recent times. Most assumed that there
is some standpoint--for example, that of God--in relation to which our
judgements are definitively true or false.

http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/c/cog-rel.htm

------------------------------------

The Structure of Argument

Our fundamental unit of what may be asserted or denied is the proposition
(or statement) that is typically expressed by a declarative sentence.
Logicians of earlier centuries often identified propositions with the mental
acts of affirming them, often called judgments, but we can evade some
interesting but thorny philosophical issues by avoiding this locution.

Propositions are distinct from the sentences that convey them. "Smith loves
Jones" expresses exactly the same proposition as "Jones is loved by Smith,"
while the sentence "Today is my birthday" can be used to convey many
different propositions, depending upon who happens to utter it, and on what
day. But each proposition is either true or false. Sometimes, of course, we
don't know which of these truth-values a particular proposition has ("There
is life on the third moon of Jupiter" is presently an example), but we can
be sure that it has one or the other.

The chief concern of logic is how the truth of some propositions is
connected with the truth of another. Thus, we will usually consider a group
of related propositions. An argument is a set of two or more propositions
related to each other in such a way that all but one of them (the premises)
are supposed to provide support for the remaining one (the conclusion). The
transition or movement from premises to conclusion, the logical connection
between them, is the inference upon which the argument relies.

Notice that "premise" and "conclusion" are here defined only as they occur
in relation to each other within a particular argument. One and the same
proposition can (and often does) appear as the conclusion of one line of
reasoning but also as one of the premises of another. A number of words and
phrases are commonly used in ordinary language to indicate the premises and
conclusion of an argument, although their use is never strictly required,
since the context can make clear the direction of movement. What
distinguishes an argument from a mere collection of propositions is the
inference that is supposed to hold between them.

Thus, for example, "The moon is made of green cheese, and strawberries are
red. My dog has fleas." is just a collection of unrelated propositions; the
truth or falsity of each has no bearing on that of the others. But "Helen is
a physician. So Helen went to medical school, since all physicians have gone
to medical school." is an argument; the truth of its conclusion, "Helen went
to medical school," is inferentially derived from its premises, "Helen is a
physician." and "All physicians have gone to medical school."

http://www.philosophypages.com/lg/e01.htm#arg

----------------------------

Carnap's Aufbau program was taken up by Nelson Goodman in his book The
Structure of Appearance, and later vigorously championed in his contribution
to The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap (edited by P.A. Schilpp, 1963). Goodman
argues that the incompleteness of a phenomenal language no more counts
against it than the inability to trisect any angle counts against Euclidean
geometry. Equally irrelevant is the charge that a phenomenal language is
epistemologically false, because the language is not designed to say
anything about an external world. Goodman concludes that Carnap's errors
were "serious, unoriginal, and worthwhile."

Commenting favorably on Goodman's paper, in the same volume, Carnap left no
doubt that he considered the choice between a phenomenal language and the
realistic language of physics to be based only on the "practical decision"
as to which language is the most efficient. Phenomenalism is rejected
because "it is an absolutely private language which can only be used for
soliloquy, but not for common communication between two persons."

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/6752