Nelson Goodman

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Western Philosophy
20th-century philosophy
Name: Nelson Goodman
Birth: August 7, 1906
Death: November 25, 1998
School/tradition: Analytic
Main interests: Logic, Induction, Counterfactuals, Mereology, Aesthetics, Philosophy of science, Philosophy of language
Notable ideas: New Riddle of Induction
Influences: David Hume, W. V. O. Quine, Carl G. Hempel
Influenced: W. V. O. Quine

Henry Nelson Goodman (7 August 1906, Somerville, Massachusetts – 25 November 1998, Needham, Massachusetts) was an American philosopher, known for his work on counterfactuals, mereology, the problem of induction, irrealism and aesthetics.

Contents

[edit] Career

Goodman graduated from Harvard University in 1928. During the 1930s, he ran an art gallery in Boston, Massachusetts while studying for a Harvard Ph.D. in philosophy, which he completed in 1941. His experience as an art dealer helps explain his later turn towards aesthetics, where he became better known than in logic and analytic philosophy. During World War II, he served in the US Army.

He taught at the University of Pennsylvania, 1946–1964, where his students included Noam Chomsky and Hilary Putnam. He left Penn because he was not granted the control he desired over the philosophy department. He was a research fellow at the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies from 1962 to 1963 and was a Professor at several universities from 1964 to 1967, before being appointed Professor of Philosophy at Harvard in 1968.

[edit] Induction and "grue"

In his book Fact, Fiction, and Forecast, Goodman introduced the "new riddle of induction", so-called by analogy with Hume's classical problem of induction. He accepted Hume's observation that inductive reasoning (i.e. inferring from past experience about events in the future) was based solely on human habit and regularities to which our day to day existence has accustomed us. Goodman argued, however, that Hume overlooked the fact that some regularities establish habits (a given piece of copper conducting electricity increases the credibility of statements asserting that other pieces of copper conduct electricity) while some do not (the fact that a given man in a room is a third son does not increase the credibility of statements asserting that other men in this room are third sons). How then can we differentiate between regularities or hypotheses which construe lawlike statements from those which are contingent or based upon accidental generality?

Hempel's confirmation theory argued that the solution is to differentiate between hypotheses, which apply to all things of a certain class, and evidence statements, which apply to only one thing. Goodman's famous counterargument was to introduce the color grue, which applies to all things examined before a certain time t just in case they are green, but also to other things just in case they are blue and not examined before time t. If we examine emeralds before time t and find that emerald a is green, emerald b is green, and so forth, each will confirm the hypothesis that all emeralds are green. However, emeralds a, b, c,..etc. also confirm the hypothesis that all emeralds are grue. In this case emeralds a,b,c, examined after time t should be grue, and therefore blue!

Goodman's example showed that the difficulty in determining what constitutes lawlike hypotheses is far greater than previously thought, and that once again we find ourselves facing the initial dilemma that "anything can confirm anything".

[edit] Nominalism and mereology

Goodman, along with Stanislaw Lesniewski, is the founder of the contemporary variant of nominalism, which argues that philosophy, logic, and mathematics should dispense with set theory. Goodman's nominalism was driven purely by ontological considerations. After a long and difficult 1947 paper coauthored with Quine, Goodman ceased to trouble himself with finding a way to reconstruct mathematics while dispensing with set theory. Quine soon came to believe that such a reconstruction was impossible, but Goodman's Penn colleague Richard Milton Martin argued otherwise, writing a number of papers suggesting ways forward.

The Goodman–Leonard (1940) calculus of individuals is the starting point for the American variant of mereology. While the exposition in Goodman and Leonard invoked a bit of naive set theory, the variant of the calculus of individuals that grounds Goodman's 1951 The Structure of Appearance, a revision and extension of his Ph.D. thesis, makes no mention of the notion of set. Simons (1987) and Casati and Varzi (1999) show that the calculus of individuals can be grounded in either in a bit of set theory, or in monadic predicates, schematically employed. Mereology is indeed "ontologically neutral".

[edit] Bibliography

Click here for information about translations of Goodman's books.

  • "The Calculus of Individuals and Its Uses" (with Henry S. Leonard), Journal of Symbolic Logic 5 (1940): 45-55.
  • A Study of Qualities. Diss. Harvard U., 1941. Reprinted 1990, by Garland (New York), as part of its Harvard dissertations in Philosophy Series.
  • The Structure of Appearance. Harvard UP, 1951. 2nd ed. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966. 3rd ed. Boston: Reidel, 1977.
  • Fact, Fiction, and Forecast. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1955. 2nd ed. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965. 3rd. ed. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973. 4th ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1983.
  • Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968. 2nd ed. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976. Based on his 1960-61 John Locke lectures.
  • Problems and Projects. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972. Currently available from Hackett.
  • Basic Abilities Required for Understanding and Creation in the Arts: Final Report (with David Perkins, Howard Gardner, and the assistance of Jeanne Bamberger et al.) Cambridge: Harvard University, Graduate School of Education: Project No. 9-0283, Grant No. OEG-0-9-310283-3721 (010), 1972.
  • Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978. Paperback: Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985.
  • Of Mind and Other Matters. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1984.
  • Reconceptions in Philosophy and other Arts and Sciences (with Catherine Z. Elgin). Indianapolis: Hackett; London: Routledge, 1988. Paperback Edition, London: Routledge, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1990.

[edit] External links

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