From logic to art: themes from Nelson Goodman

355 Pages·2009·4.22 MB·English

by  Gerhard Ernst

Gerhard Ernst / Jakob Steinbrenner / Oliver R. Scholz (Eds.)
From Logic to Art
Themes from Nelson Goodman
P h i l o s o p h i s c h e F o r s c h u n g
P h i l o s o p h i c a l R e s e a r c h

Herausgegeben von / Edited by

Johannes Brandl • Andreas Kemmerling
Wolfgang Künne • Mark Textor

Band 7 / Volume 7
Gerhard Ernst / Jakob Steinbrenner
Oliver R. Scholz (Eds.)

From Logic to Art

Themes from Nelson Goodman
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Preface

Nelson Goodman was born on August 7th 1906 in Somerville,
Massachusetts. When he died on November 25th 1998 at the age of 92 in
Needham, Massachusetts, the world lost one of its great philosophers.
In August 2006 a couple of Goodman aficionados met in Munich to
celebrate the Centennial. The proceedings of the ensuing international
conference Nelson Goodman: From Logic to Art – Looking Back on the
Occasion of his 100th Birthday are documented in this volume. The
conference was organized by the editors and carried out in the Seminar for
Philosophy, Logic and Philosophy of Science at Ludwig Maximilians
University Munich. We want to thank Godehard Link for his
organizational support and the University for its hospitality. Alexander
Oldemeier and Philipp Richter provided invaluable help in preparing the
manuscripts for publication. We are very much indebted to them. Last, but
not least we want to thank the contributors for their lectures at the
conference and, of course, for their papers.
The contributions in this volume attest the fact that Goodman’s thinking
holds many treasures waiting for being digged up. May they inspire further
research.

Gerhard Ernst Jakob Steinbrenner Oliver R. Scholz
SA: The Structure of Appearance, third edition, Dordrecht 1977 (first
edition 1951)
FFF: Fact, Fiction, Forecast, fourth edition, Cambridge, Mass. 1983 (first
edition 1954)
LA: Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols, second
edition, Indianapolis, Ind. 1976 (first edition 1968)
PP: Problems and Projects, Indianapolis 1972
WW: Ways of Worldmaking, second printing 1981, Indianapolis 1978
MM: Of Mind and Other Matters, Cambridge, Mass. 1984
R: N. Goodman u. C.Z. Elgin: Reconceptions in Philosophy and Other Arts
and Sciences, Indianapolis 1988
Contents

Oliver R. Scholz
The Life and Opinions of Nelson Goodman –
A Very Short Introduction 1

Daniel Cohnitz
The Unity of Goodman’s Thought 33

Marcus Rossberg
Leonard, Goodman, and the Development
of the Calculus of Individuals 51

Wolfgang Heydrich
Counterfactuals beyond Paradox 71

Ansgar Seide
Contextualist References in Nelson Goodman’s
Solution to the “New Riddle of Induction” 121

Karl-Georg Niebergall
On “About”: Definitions and Principles 137

Richard Schantz
Goodman on Truth 171

Thomas Splett
How Much of a Relativist Is Goodman? 191

Mark Textor
Exemplification and Idealisation 207

Inga Vermeulen, Georg Brun, Christoph Baumberger
Five Ways of (not) Defining Exemplification 219
Jakob Steinbrenner
Art-Samples. On the Connection between Art and Science 251

Remei Capdevila Werning
Nelson Goodman’s Autographic-Allographic
Distinction in Architecture:
The Case of Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion 269

Christoph Baumberger
Ambiguity in Architecture 293

Sabine Ammon
Language of Architecture. Some Reflections on
Nelson Goodman’s Theory of Symbols 321

Axel Spree
Fiction, Truth, and Knowledge 329

Contributors 345
Oliver R. Scholz

The Life and Opinions of Nelson Goodman
1
– A Very Short Introduction

Abstract
Nelson Goodman was an eminent philosopher and a passionate art collector. The first
section of this introductory essay provides some biographical information with special
emphasis on Goodman's education and academic career. The second part gives a
survey of his major works and highlights their most distinctive contributions. The final
section throws a glance at the still imperfect reception of his rich legacy.
1. Life
Nelson Goodman was one of the outstanding thinkers of the 20th century.
In a memorial note in the Harvard University Gazette (1998), Hilary
Putnam considers him to be “one of the two or three greatest analytic
philosophers of the post-World War II period”.2
Goodman has left his mark in many fields of philosophical investigation.
Whether Epistemology, Philosophy of Science, Logic, Metaphysics, the
General Theory of Symbols, Philosophy of Language or Philosophy of Art,
all have been challenged and enriched by the problems he has shown up,
the projects he developed from them and the solutions he has suggested.
Non-philosophical disciplines, too, – from measurement theory (cf. e.g.
Grunstra 1972) to linguistics (cf. e.g. Heydrich 1982, 1993), literary
criticism (cf. e.g. Scholz 1984; Ihwe 1985; Thürnau 1994) and art
education – build on his findings. In further fields we may yet expect his
ideas to be taken up.

1 This is a revised and extended version of (Scholz 2005). I am grateful to Morton
G. White, Catherine Z. Elgin, Henry S. Leonard, Jr., Karlheinz Lüdeking, Daniel
Cohnitz and Marcus Rossberg for personal communication and advice. For his
translation of my German text I want to thank Rudolf Owen Müllan (Hughes). A much
more comprehensive and thorough introduction in Goodman’s philosophy is now
available in (Cohnitz; Rossberg 2006).

2 Quoted in (Cohnitz; Rossberg 2006, 11).