My Quarrels with Nelson Goodman Israel Scheffler Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 62, No. 3. (May, 2001), pp. 665-677. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-8205%28200105%2962%3A3%3C665%3AMQWNG%3E2.0.CO%3B2-P Philosophy and Phenomenological Research is currently published by International Phenomenological Society.
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Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Vol. LXII, No. 3, May 2001
My Quarrels with Nelson Goodman' ISRAEL SCHEFFLER
Haward University
Anyone familiar with Nelson Goodman's philosophical career knows that to have quarreled with him was a hazardous enterprise. For aside from his creative brilliance and analytical subtlety, he was also one of the foremost dialecticians of the age. Seeing through the flaws of rival views and rebutting putative counterarguments to his own came as easily to him as breathing. To recall his rejoinders to a long list of would-be rebuttals of his paper, "On Likeness of Meaning",' or the acute series of counterexamples to received views of scientific law in his pioneering paper, "The Problem of Counterfactual conditional^",^ or his replies to criticisms of his nominalism in "A World of individual^",^ or again, his replies to confident attacks on his theory of projection4 is to find ample evidence of an intimidating intellectual presence. To take issue with him was in fact to take one's philosophical life in one's hands and many are those over the course of his career who rued the venture. Since I was one of the earliest of Goodman's doctoral advisees, starting in 1949 at the University of Pennsylvania, and studying with him during the period of his controversies over likeness of meaning, counterfactuals, and induction, as well as the first publication of his monumental book, T h e Structure of A p p e a r a n ~ e you , ~ can be sure that I did not pick my quarrels with him lightly. Moreover, I had no independent reason to quarrel with him. Indeed, he was generous and helpful to me, commenting on my early efforts with care and suggesting publication for my first papers. The truth is that I not only admired him enormously both as a thinker and a teacher but also *
Presented at a memorial symposium for Nelson Goodman, sponsored by the Harvard
Philosophy Department on March 18,2000.
Goodman, N., "On Likeness of Meaning", Ancllysis 10 (1949), 1-7. His rejoinders
appeared in his "On Some Differences about Meaning", Analysis, 13 (1953), 90-96.
"The Problem of Counterfactual Conditionals", Journcll qf Philosophy 44 (1947), 113-28.
"A World of Individuals", The Problem of Universc~ls,Notre Dame, Indiana: Univeristy
of Notre Dame Press, 1956, pp. 13-31.
Goodman, N., Problems and Projects, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972, pp. 398-412.
Goodman, N., The Structure of Appearance, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press, 1951.
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grew soon to like him as a person, a feeling that, over the years, developed into a solid lifelong friendship. Goodman's philosophy appealed to me from the start. Having grown up with Deweyan pragmatism and the philosophy of science as taught by Ernest Nagel and Sidney Hook, and influenced at a distance by their teacher, Peirce's first anthologist, Morris R. Cohen, I was amply predisposed to a rejection of essences, certainties and immediacies, and fully favorable to scientific skepticism and the rule of logic. Thus, Goodman's paper "Sense and Certainty", delivered in a symposium with C. I. Lewis and Hans Reichenbach6 during the second year of my study with him, struck me as just the ticket. Goodman here introduced his idea of initial credibility as a provisional anchor for probable empirical conclusions, the structure of science as a whole revisable from the bottom up as well as the top down. Peirce's dictum that we must in philosophy begin in the middle of things, not at the beginning, echoed in my head as a background for Goodman's idea, and my paper "On Justification and Commitmentn7 was an effort to construct an analogous framework for the idea of justification in ethics. Several other efforts of mine grew out of a close study and extension of Goodman's ideas. Chapter XI of his Structure ofAppearance8analyzed a direct quotation not as a singular term applicable to its abstract interior, but as a general predicate applicable to every inscription spelled similarly to the one inside its quotation marks. My thesis developed the idea of a similar analysis for indirect quotation, taking the that-clause of such a quotation as a general predicate applicable to every inscription rephrasing the clause following the "that" i n ~ c r i p t i o nInfluenced .~ as well by Goodman and Quine's pioneering paper, "Steps Toward a Constructive Nominalism,""' and by Quine's Word ~ Beyond The LetterL3 and Object," my books Anatomy of I n q ~ i r y 'and employed an inscriptional approach to analyze issues of explanation, teleology, vagueness, ambiguity and metaphor.
"Sense and Certainty", Philosophical Review 61 (1952), 160-67. Originally delivered at a symposium, "The Experiential Element in Knowledge", with C. I. Lewis and Hans Reichenbach at a meeting of the American Philosophical Association in 195 1. Scheffler, I., "On Justification and Commitment", Journal of Philosophy 51 (1954), 18090. Reprinted in Scheffler, I., Inquiries, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1986, pp. 293-302.
Op. cit., pp. 287-90.
Scheffler, I., On Quotc~tion,Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1952. The
idea was later published in my "An Inscriptional Approach to Indirect Quotation",
Analysis 14 (1954) 83-90. Reprinted in my Inquiries, op. cit., pp. 7-13.
Goodman, N. and Quine, W. V., "Steps Toward a Constructive Nominalism", Journal o f
Symbolic Logic 12 (1947) 105-22.
Quine, W. V., Word and Object, New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1960.
Scheffler, I., The Anatomy of Inquiry, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963; now
Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981.
Scheffler, I., Beyond the Letter, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979.
666
ISRAEL SCHEFFLER
In studying the second edition of Goodman's small masterpiece, Fact, Fiction and Forecast,14 Robert Schwartz and I had noticed a serious problem with Goodman's rules of projection, and we called it to his attention. It took several three-way discussions to convince him that there was indeed a problem; once convinced, he put his mind to the search for a solution. Another set of three-way meetings, phone calls and exchanges of drafts issued in a joint paper by the three of us,I5 resolving the problem and reducing Goodman's original several rules to a single one, thus substantially simplifying his theory of projection. The appearance of Goodman's third major work, Languages of Art in 196816signaled a revolutionary approach to aesthetics, another indication of his ingenuity in deploying the power of negatlve thinking. Whereas Fact Fiction and Forecast had shown the poverty of syntax and semantics alone in the theory of science and had introduced the pragmatic factor of entrenchment, Languages of Art did just the opposite, downplaying dominant pragmatic emphases in aesthetics and focusing instead on syntax and semantics-to construct what he called a theory of symbols, a theory that brought art and science into communication, providing an ingenious common framework for analyses of musical scores, literary scripts, scientific discourses, pictorial depictions, architecture and dance. Not since Peirce, indeed, had there been such a union of acute analytical invention with comprehensiveness of scope. With this work, Goodman broke open the crabbed early concentration of analytic philosophy on science and language alone, broadening its range to include the widest reaches of symbolic endeavor, thus reinstating the perspective of the classical American pragmatists. My own work on ritual profited enormously from Goodman's theory of symbols. In a memorial conference in 1980 honoring the late Richard Rudner, Goodman's earliest doctoral advisee, I presented my first paper on ritual, discussing, among other topics, the contrast between arts and rites, and the nature of ritual reenactment-topics which suggested themselves to me after close study of Languages of Art.17 In my earlier book, Beyond Tlze Letter, I had introduced a concept which I called "mention-selection", applying to the use of words to refer not only to their denotata, if any, but also to mentions thereof or to related representations in the way that a picture of a dinosaur or of a unicorn may be captioned "dinosaur" or "unicorn." In dealing l4
l5
l6 l7
Goodman, N., F ~ c Fiction t and Forecast, second edition, Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965. Schwartz, R., Scheffler, I., and Goodman, N., "An Improvement in the Theory of Projectibility", Journal of Philosophy 67 (1970), 605-8. Reprinted in Scheffler, I., Inquiries, op. cit., pp. 207-1 1. Goodman, N., Lnngunges of Art, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968; now Indianapolis: Hackett. Scheffler, I., "Ritual and Reference", Synthese 46 (1981), 421-37; a later version appears in my Inquiries, op, cit., pp. 52-69.
SYMPOSIUM
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now with mimetic rites, I suggested that the names of divinities are used analogously as captions for performers functioning as divinity-representations. I considered my concept of "mention-selection" a contribution to the theory of symbols pioneered by Goodman. When Goodman's fourth major book, Ways of Worldmaking, appeared in 1978,IXI fully anticipated that I would find its approach congenial and, as usual with his work, stimulating and instructive. Indeed, chapter 5, "A Puzzle about Perception", struck me as a gem of ingenuity and insight. But I was soon taken aback to find that his master idea of "worldmaking" was impossible for me to accept, at least if it were to be taken literally. I outlined my reluctant misgivings at an A.P.A. symposium on the book in 1979,Iyand Goodman replied on that occasion, and again in his Of Mind and Other matter^.^')
Noting that "world" in Goodman's usage was ambiguous, at times applying to what he called "right world versions", at times applying to the things referred to by such versions, I argued that his claim that we make worlds can be true only for the "versional" but not the "objectual" interpretation of "worlds." Goodman had insisted that, although we distinguish between versions that do and those that do not refer, the things referred to, "and even the stuff they are made of-matter, anti-matter, mind, energy, or whatnotare fashioned along with the versions them~elves."~' My attitude from the outset was that "worldmaking" as a metaphor for version-making I could tolerate but "worldmaking" as a literal claim to the making of the objects of such versions I could not. I thought it obvious that we made the word "star", and equally obvious that we did not make the stars, concluding that, despite his d i ~ c l a i m e r ,Goodman's ~~ statement "we make worlds by making v e r s i ~ n s " ~ h u of s t course be taken as "purely rhetorical." Goodman was, however, completely unimpressed by my argument. Acknowledging that "a right version and its world are [indeed] different", he insisted that "no firm line can be drawn between world-features that are discourse-dependent and those that are not." If, he said, "I take advantage of the privilege to speak sometimes as if there are only versions and other times as if there are worlds for all right versions, I often do it just to emphasize that point."24 '"oodman, N., Ways of Worldmclking, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978. Scheffler, I., "The Wonderful Worlds of Goodman." Presented at a symposium on Wclys of Worldmclking at a meeting of the American Philosophical Association, 1979, the paper was later published in Synthese 45 (1980), 201-9. 20 Goodman's reply appeared in Synthese 45 (1980), 21 1-15, and in his Of Mind and Other Matters, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1984, pp. 40-42. 21 WCLYS of Worldmclking, op. cit., 96. 22 Ibid., p. 110. 23 Ibid., 94. 24 OfMind ~ n Other d Matters, op. cit., p. 41.
"
668
ISRAEL SCHEFFLER
As to my criticism that we cannot be supposed to have made the stars, Goodman challenged me to say "which features of the stars we did not make [and] to state how these differ from features clearly dependent on discourse." How, he asks, can we have made the stars which are older than we are? "Plainly", he answers, "by making a space and time that contains those stars.. ..We make a star as we make a constellation, by putting its parts together and marking off its boundaries." We make worlds "with languages or other symbol systems. Yet", he concludes, "when I say that worlds are made, I mean it literally .... Surely we make versions, and right versions make worlds. And, however distinct worlds may be from right versions, making versions is making worlds."25 This reply, and the draft of my A.P.A. talk were printed together in Synthese in 1980.26When my Inquiries appeared in 1986, I dedicated the book to Goodman for his eightieth birthday, and included therein a reply to his rebuttal.27 My reply focussed on his statement, "We cannot find any world-feature independent of all versions. Whatever can be said truly of a world is dependent on the saying-not that whatever we say is true but that whatever we say truly.. .is nevertheless informed by and relative to the language or other symbol system we use. No firm line can be drawn between world-features that are discourse-dependent and those that are not."28To this I answered that features, taken nominalistically, in Goodman's style, as predicate-tokens, are certainly dependent on the saying, that is, brought forth by the process of token production. But whether a predicate of our making is null or not is not in the same way dependent on the saying. So if by a worldfeature, Goodman means a feature not null in fact, then that any given feature is a world-feature is indeed independent of our version. Its status as a worldfeature is not discourse dependent. Goodman speaks of "actual worlds made by and answering to true or right versions."2y But whether such a world indeed answers to a version of our making is not, in general, up to us. Neither Pasteur nor his version of the germ theory made the bacteria he postulated. To Goodman's challenge to say which features of the stars we did not make and to say how these differ from features clearly dependent on discourse, I pointed to the equivocation involved in appealing to the concept of discourse-dependence. Surely we made the words by which we describe stars; that these words and the criteria by which we are prepared to apply them are discourse-dependent is trivially true. But the fact that these words are not null is not therefore of our making. The discourse-dependence of the word "star" or the word "constellation" does not imply the discourse-dependence of stars, or 25 2h
27 28
"
Ibid., p. 42.
s e e footnotes 19 and 20 above.
Scheffler, I., Inquiries, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1986, 82-85
O f Mind cmd Other M(ltter.7, p. 41.
Ways of Worldmc~king,p. 94. SYMPOSIUM
669
constellations, i.e. our making it happen that there are in fact such things. To Goodman's statement, "We make versions, and right versions make worlds", I proposed the counter statement, "we make versions and things (made by others, by us, or by no one) make them right.""' A week or so after I presented the book to Goodman at a small party celebrating his birthday, he phoned to thank me for the book, which he said he had liked "except for one bad patch." He then cautioned me, saying, "Don't think that because you dedicated the book to me, I won't reply to you." "Nelson", I said, "the thought never crossed my mind." And, true to his word, Goodman did reply to me in his paper "On Some Worldly W o r r i e ~ . "Here ~ ~ he reiterated his sweeping claim that "although 'table' is different from tables, and 'constellation' different from constellations, still tables and constellations and all other things are version dependent."32Constructing an imaginary dialogue between us, he has me addressing him as follows, "Your arguments seem at most to show that without versions stars, for example, do not exist quu stars, not that they do not exist at all", to which he triumphantly rejoins, "But do stars-not-qua-stars, stars not-qua-moving and not-qua- fixed, move or not? Without a version, they are neither moving nor fixed. And whatever neither moves nor is fixed, is neither qua-so-and-so nor qua-not-so-and-so, comes to nothing."33 "Of course", I responded, "Whoever writes an imaginary dialogue determines the outcome. I should myself rephrase the concluding passage as follows: 'But do stars not yet called "stars", stars not yet describable as "moving" or as "fixed", move or not? Without a language capable of describing anything as a star we cannot call a star "a star"; without the language to describe anything as moving or as fixed, we cannot describe a star as "moving" or as "fixed"'. Given the language to do so, we may, however, of course decide to describe a star as moving, even as having moved before we acquired our language. But acquiring such language does not automatically ensure its applicability to any given instance. Acquiring the word 'moving' does not in itself determine that it is n ~ n - n u l l . " ~ ~ A counter-dialogue I then constructed quoted Goodman's remark that, "painted or written portrayals of Don Quixote.. .do not denote Don Quixotewho is simply not there to be denoted." Then, I continued, "a version may
"' 3'
32
" 33
670
~ o o d m a n ' sstatement appears on p. 42 of his Of Mind and Other Matters; my counter statement is on p. 85 of my Inquiries. "On Some Worldly Worries", published by Goodman, Emerson Hall, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1988; it thereafter appeared in Synthese 95 (1993), 9-12, and was reprinted in P. McCormick, ed. Starmaking, Cambridge, Massachusetts: M.I.T. Press, 1996, pp. 165-68. McCormick, ibid., p. 166. Ibid., p. 167. Scheffler, I., "Worldmaking: Why Worry", in McCormick, ed. Stclrmclking, op. cit., p. 175. ISRAEL SCHEFFLER
contain terms that are null as well as terms that are non-null-whose objects are either there or not there." So, I suggested, the non-null character of the term "Big Dipper" is not determined by the fact that our version contains the term and it is therefore not version-dependent. The Big Dipper itself is thus also not version-dependent.35 In the McCormick volume, Starmaking, Goodman accurately states my position as follows, "Briefly and more generally, Scheffler is arguing that we should not say that versions make worlds, since we cannot, merely by producing a version, bring into being something that answers to it."3h However, he continues by attributing absurd consequences to my view. He says I hold that what a world is but not that it is may be dependent on versions. But, he asks, if not on versions, what then is it dependent on? "[Scheffler] does not appeal to Nature or a Deity, or offer any other account. His view seems to come to this: 'A version cannot make a world, something else is needed. The needed auxiliary, quite independent of all versions, must be bare facts ("states of affairs", "situations", etc.); that is, belong to the world itself." So what is needed to make a world, he takes me to imply, is a version plus its world. This, he concludes quite rightly, is "utterly unsatisfactory",37 and he ends by reaffirming his own view that "worlds are versiondependent.. .with respect not only to what they are but also to that they are."38 In a puzzling remark following this passage, he says, "Such version dependence does not imply that versions make their worlds but only that they have worlds answering to t h e m . " 3 H e then continues, "How can a version make something that existed only long before the version itself?" and he answers, "Notice first that parallel questions such as 'How can a version make something far away from it?' seem to give us no concern.. ... No principle requires that features imputed to a world be features of the version. Why be disturbed, then, by a present version imputing a past temporal location to an event?"40 Starmaking appeared while my own book Symbolic Worlds was in press; thus I could not comment on Goodman's reply in my own book. All I could do was to add a last-minute footnote reporting that, despite several new points in Goodman's statement, our disagreement remained, and I restated my view as follows: "A version of our making may purport to be true; whether it succeeds or not goes beyond the bare making, which therefore does not deter-
35 3h 37 38
3' 40
My counter-dialogue appears in McCormick, ibid., pp. 175-76. Goodman's remark about Don Quixote appears in Ways of Worldmaking, op. cit., p. 103. McCormick, Starmaking, op. cit., 21 1. Ibid., 21 1. Ibid., 212. Ibid., 213. Ibid.
mine its truth, if true, nor create either the objects of which it speaks or their alleged proper tie^."^' With this footnote, I considered the whole series of exchanges with Goodman closed. But I was mistaken. He had been invited to a comprehensive internationai conference on his work at Nancy in 1997. Before going to the conference, Goodman, then 91 years old, asked me if I would write a brief paper outlining my response to his Starmaking reply, saying that he would take it along, and would either read it at the meeting or at least try to incorporate it or comment on it during the discussion following his talk. I was extremely reluctant to comply with his request, feeling that we had had our say and that our differences had already shown themselves incapable of resolution. But, as one of the world's great salesmen, he persisted and phoned me several times to press me to comply with his request. He knew and I knew that I would, reluctantly, have to disagree with him once again, but I respected and admired his insistence that my dissenting voice be heard at this important conference. Accordingly, I wrote a short paper, "Some Responses to Goodman's Comments in S t a r m ~ k i n g . " ~ ~ In reply to the question, "How can a version make something that existed only long before the version itself?", he had answered, "No principle requires that features imputed to a world be features of the version. Why be disturbed, then by a present version imputing a past temporal location to an event?" Here, I noted, was an illegitimate shift from the term "making" in the original question to "imputing" in Goodman's conclusion. I am of course not disturbed by a version's imputing a past temporal location to an event, but I am disturbed by saying that the version in question made that event. Similarly, he had argued that a current version that a particular astronomical body was formed a million years ago "is typical of versions that distribute things over time and space and in doing so make the time and space."43 I responded that a version distributing things over time and space is one that, more strictly, asserts them to be distributed over time and space; it does not determine them to be so distributed. In his paper, Goodman had taken me to be conceding that what a world is may be dependent on versions, while that it is is not, so that "what is needed to make a world is a version plus its world." I now replied by rejecting this interpretation of my view, maintaining instead the following: "that a true version V asserts that a exists and that it has a certain property P shows neither that V made a nor that V made it the case that a has P. That a certain ancient star collapsed eons ago may now be truly asserted by my version 4' 42
43
Scheffler, I., Syrnbolic Worlds, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, footnote 27, p. 209. "Some Responses to Goodman's Comments in Starmaking", Philosophia Scientiae, 2 (1997), 207-1 1. McCormick, op. cit., 213.
without its making either the star or its collapse.. .. In no case is recourse to some all-purpose auxiliary such as Nature or Deity required to supplement my version."44 Some months after the Nancy conference, which Goodman and I had had no real chance to discuss following his return, he became seriously ill, and he died the following year. Thus ended the long series of exchanges outlining our differences on worldmaking. When it was concluded, I felt that I still needed to give my positive view some independent formulation. What had I learned from my extended controversy with Goodman? I tried to sort out my thoughts and place them in the context of my general pragmatic sympathies. My presidential address to the Peirce Society in 1998, with the title "A Plea for Plurealism", outlined the result of my efforts.45 By "plurealism" I intended to signal a third way-between monistic realism and pluralistic irrealism, taking Peirce as representing the former and Goodman as representing the latter. This third way, agreeing with Peirce, upholds the existence of objects independent of our making and accessible to inquiry, but, agreeing with Goodman, denies that inquiry into such objects converges toward a unique world-version. We may indeed, therefore, describe ourselves metaphorically as occupying not one but many discoverably different worlds, none, however, made by us and all proudly jealous of their mutual independence. Peirce takes the "fundamental hypothesis" of the method of science to be that "there are real things, whose characters are entirely independent of our opinions about them."4h Scientific method, for him, holds that "our beliefs may be caused by nothing human but by some external permanency-by something upon which our thinking has no effect."47 That this evident realism of Peirce is also monistic may be seen in his statement that scientists "may at first obtain different results, but, as each perfects his methods and his processes, the results will move steadily together toward a destined center." He describes this center as "a foreordained goal" which no scientific investigator can escape, even by changing the subject.4x"There is a general drift in the history of human thought", he says, "which will lead to one general agreement, one catholic ~ o n s e n t . " ~ " Now the realism of Peirce is, in my opinion, perfectly correct; we cannot, by ourselves, determine what inquiry may reveal. Wishful thinking is not a 44
"Some Responses to Goodman's Comments in Starmaking", op. cit., p. 209-10. Scheffler, I., "A Plea for Plurealism", Transactions qf the Charles S. Peirce Society 35 (1999), pp. 425-36. Much of what follows draws upon this paper. 4h Peirce, C. S., "The Fixation of Belief', C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss, eds., Vol. 1-6 (193135) and A. W. Burks, ed., vols. 7-8 (1958) Peirce, Collected Papers, (hereafter C P ) Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, Vol. 5, para. 384 (5.384). 47 Ibid.
4"eirce, "How to Make our Ideas Clear", CP, 5.407.
4"eirce, CP, 8.12.
45
sound method; it must be tempered by collision with the stubbornness of fact. But the monism of Peirce I hold to be a picturesque fantasy. The questions to which scientific investigations address themselves are couched in a wide variety of seemingly irreducible languages, bound by no antecedent restrictions on their operative categories: Consider, for example, the languages of economics, geology, psychiatry, genetics and linguistics. Can we possibly suppose that investigations within such an array of languages are "moving steadily toward a destined center" with all conceptual variations overcome by reduction? I believe the idea of such an ultimate theory or conceptual domain is at best an article of faith to be redeemed in some far-off hypothetical future, a philosophical tale without foundation. Having accepted Peirce's realism, can we, however, consistently reject his monism? Or, does a rejection of his monism require us to give up his realism as well? Many have held such a view, supposing that with monism abandoned, we must give up all thought of objects responsive to our inquiries and "entirely independent of our opinions about them." The result is an extreme constructivism, anti-realism, or what Goodman calls " i r r e a l i ~ m " ,the ~~ doctrine that it is we who make worlds by constructing right world-versions. Goodman himself assumes that realists must be monists; thus to reject monism is to deny realism. Since worlds are for him plural, each must be construed as identical with, or a product of, some right world-version. Is his underlying assumption correct, however, that realism implies monism? If not, there is room for a pluralistic realism, that is, a view that agrees with him in rejecting the notion of one world but disagrees with him in holding whatever worlds there are to be independent of their true versions. We have, in other words, to reckon with a variety of unreduced domains of entities, for each of which we have versions short of certainty, each commanding a greater or lesser degree of credibility. This is the view I now hold. Goodman allows that "if all right versions could somehow be reduced to one and only one, that one might with some semblance of plausibility be regarded as the only truth about the only world",s1 but he goes on vigorously to criticize the prospect of such reduction. Might one not expect, then, that with one world alone about which there are truths ruled out, the prospect of many such worlds remains open? Yet Goodman instead prefers to treat versions themselves as worlds, denying us recourse to "a world or.. .worlds",s2 thus ignoring the possibility of worlds as discrete from versions and thereby rejecting realism as well as monism. Why does Goodman rule out realism, even in pluralist guise? He offers three arguments. One of these rests on the indispensability of frames of refers~ s2
674
Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, op. cit., p, x Ibid., pp. 4-5. Ibid., 3.
ISRAEL SCHEFFLER
ence. He writes, "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?"53 He here rules out the latter case, where no frames are involved. But this exclusion, I suggest, is consistent not only with his irrealism but also with the plurealism I defend, and which Goodman apparently acknowledges in admitting that you can indeed tell how the world is under one or more frames of reference. A second argument rests on an analysis of comparison. "We cannot test a version by comparing it with a world undescribed, undepicted, unperceived", he writes. "While we may speak of determining what versions are right as 'learning about the world', 'the world' supposedly being that which all right versions describe, all we learn about the world is contained in right versions of it.. ..the underlying world, bereft of these.. .is perhaps on the whole a world well lost.. . .For many purposes, right world-descriptions.. .or just versions can be treated as our worlds."54 But Goodman's criticisms of "the world" as the common reference of all right versions does not, I believe, tell against worlds as respectively referred to by all right versions. To give up the notion of learning about the world leaves us the option of saying that determining what versions are right is learning about worlds. In yet a third argument, Goodman denies that there can be perception without conception; "predicates, pictures, other labels, schemata", he writes, "survive want of application, but content vanishes without form. We can have words without a world but no world without words or other symbols."s5 I am inclined to agree that there is no perception without conception, yet I insist there can be worlds without words. On the basis of perception and conception, we thus in fact postulate worlds prior to speech, by which the origins of speech itself, independent of our making, can be explained. The plurealism I advocate does not imply that to every version there corresponds a world but only that to every true version there corresponds a world. To every version I take to be true, I assign a domain I hold to exist. For compatible yet mutually irreducible versions, their domains-worlds, if you wish-may or may not be discrete. In either case, since these versions are compatible, their joint affirmation occasions no problem. When, however, we are confronted with incompatible but equally credible versions, we cannot affirm them both. Goodman had discussed one such sort of case in The Structure of Appeara n ~ eOne . ~ can, ~ for example, systematically define points as intersections of lines or lines as collections of points, in either case preserving the preferred Ibid., 2-3. Ibid., p. 4. 55 Ibid., p. 6. 5"oodman, N., The Structure of Appearance, 3rd edition, Dordrecht: Reidel, 1977, Chapter I , pp. 3-23. 53
54
fundamental relations between them. Yet the two treatments cannot be merged. Both systems are correct yet cannot be adopted simultaneously. What to do? Goodman insists that a correlation established by systematic definition does not assert an identity but only something considerably weaker. What one system in effect says is that, for certain presumed purposes at hand, points need not be supposed nonidentical with certain intersections of lines, while the other system says, similarly, that for certain purposes, lines need not be supposed nonidentical with collections of points.57Thus, both systematizations are now seen to be compatible and jointly tenable. Goodman's extreme case of conflict in Ways of Worldmaking does not, however, appear to him to lend itself to analogous resolution. "The earth moves" and "the earth stands still" are, he argues, both true yet incompatible, hence they must, he concludes, be construed as "true in different worlds."58 He rejects a relativization, for example, "The earth moves relative to the sun but not relative to my garage", saying that "an astronomer can no more work with a neutral statement [of relative motion] than we can use a map without locating ourselves on it in finding our way around a city."5y But in saying the sun but not the earth moves relative to my telescope, I have, it seems to me, located myself for the purpose of making astronomical observations. Alternatively, a contextualization similar to the lines-and-points case is available here as well, for example, taking "the earth moves" as "For the purposes at hand, it is best to take the earth as moving." If so, the statement again becomes compatible with "the earth stands still" under analogous interpretation. Goodman's critical case, in short, leaves me unpersuaded. Nevertheless, I fully agree with his many worlds doctrine, given my own plurealistic interpretation of it, which I regard as a positive outcome of my reluctant quarrels with Goodman. I have here offered an account of these quarrels, against the background of our substantial agreements, as my tribute to a teacher whose penetrating and original mind has reshaped philosophical understanding in our time. I must, however, admit to feeling somewhat strange, having outlined dissenting views of n i n e with, for the first time, no expectation of Goodman's inevitable critical response. If, as Socrates speculated in the Apology, death is no dreamless sleep but a migration of the soul from this place to another where one might converse with the great minds of the past and discuss philosophy with them, Nelson must surely already have engaged Plato as well as his favorite pre-Socratic philosophers in the discussions with them he had often imagined in this life. If he has, further, bothered to eavesdrop on this symposium in his honor, I am certain not only that he is pleased but
57
5"ar~ . 5y
676
Ibid., 21-22.
of Worldmaking, pp. 110-1 1.
Ibid., p. 114.
ISRAEL SCHEFFLER
also that he has, to his satisfaction at least, refuted everything I have said here this afternoon.
SYMPOSIUM
677
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You have printed the following article: My Quarrels with Nelson Goodman Israel Scheffler Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 62, No. 3. (May, 2001), pp. 665-677. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-8205%28200105%2962%3A3%3C665%3AMQWNG%3E2.0.CO%3B2-P
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[Footnotes] 6
Sense and Certainty Nelson Goodman The Philosophical Review, Vol. 61, No. 2. (Apr., 1952), pp. 160-167. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-8108%28195204%2961%3A2%3C160%3ASAC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-F 10
Steps Toward a Constructive Nominalism Nelson Goodman; W. V. Quine The Journal of Symbolic Logic, Vol. 12, No. 4. (Dec., 1947), pp. 105-122. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-4812%28194712%2912%3A4%3C105%3ASTACN%3E2.0.CO%3B2-I
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