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PARTISAN REVIEW
are they disabused of the notion that we can enter the temple ofCer–
tainty through language; they have come to redefine our very notion
of certainty and in so doing have explicitly returned to the central
questions of philosophy - the meaning of art, the objectivity of
science, relativism and morals, the status of literary expression–
without reducing them to questions of method.
There are severe problems
with the way they answer these questions, problems I would like to
examine at length in this essay. But they are
interesting
problems; in–
deed, for the first time in decades certain academic philosophers are
posing the right problems, and that makes their work worthy of
attention.
1.
Ways of Worldmaking
(1978) is by far the most accessible of
Nelson Goodman's works written over thirty years of a distinguished
career. Having made his mark in logic and the philosophy of lan–
guage, he has turned to aesthetics, and his current reflections on
"worldmaking" derive from his interest in the arts. Indeed, it might
fairly be said that Goodman's extended critique of foundationalism
has been an attempt to make sense of his own aesthetic response,
and make room for that response within the mind of an analytic phi–
losopher.
The question Goodman asks is something like this: can both
Kepler and Kandinsky be right? Only analytic philosophers would
take such a question seriously, because everyone else is satisfied
that, since one was an astronomer and the other a painter, the ques–
tion is meaningless. But analytic philosophers have usually taken the
question of "rightness" very seriously - to be right means to be true,
and for something to be true it must correspond to something real in
the world. We think we know that Kepler referred to the planets we
see, and we also think that the motion of those planets corresponds
to his laws. But to what do Kandinsky's
Improvisations
refer, and how
do we begin to check correspondence?
Goodman's answer is not that aesthetic concepts have nothing
to do with trueness or rightness, but that our conception of truth as
correspondence to the "real world" is mistaken. There is no single
"true theory of the world" - especially not a logical, scientific
one - but many different versions of the same world (or, as Good–
man says, there may be different worlds). Kepler and Kandinsky
