N.+Goodman




 * Goodman, Nelson** **(1906–98).** One of the most influential American philosophers of the twentieth century, trained at Harvard and Professor there for thirty years. Goodman's first published book was //The Structure of Appearance// (1951), an attempt to apply techniques of formal logic to ‘the analysis of phenomena’. Certain entities are characterized as ‘basic individuals’; the objects of ordinary experience are in some sense ‘constructions’ out of these. Goodman has a partiality (though not a commitment) to phenomenalism, the view that basic individuals are sensory items rather than physical things. He describes himself as a nominalist and //The Structure of Appearance// as formulated in nominalistic terms. Goodman's nominalism is sometimes described as a rejection of classes, but may best be summed up in his words: ‘the nominalist recognizes no distinction of entities without a distinction of content’. According to Goodman, then, the class whose members are the counties of Utah is not to be distinguished from the class of acres of Utah or from the single individual, the state of Utah. This view has been described as a ‘simple materialism’ based on the ‘crude principle’ that the entities supposed unintelligible (classes as distinct from their members) are those things we cannot point at or hold in our hands.

In //Fact, Fiction, and Forecast// Goodman proposed his ‘new riddle of induction’. Hume had seen that we make predictions based on regularities in experience, while arguing that there was no rational basis for this. But not all observed regularities form the basis for predictions: though all examined emeralds are grue we do not imagine that all emeralds are.

Goodman was an art collector, and this interest was also reflected in his philosophical writings. In //Languages of Art// (1968) he discusses such topics as representation, expression, and authenticity from the perspective of what he calls ‘a general theory of symbols’.

Mr Michael Cohen "Goodman, Nelson" //The Oxford Companion to Philosophy//. Oxford University Press 2005. //Oxford Reference Online//. Oxford University Press. University of Dayton. 25 September 2007 