Nelson Goodman | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Henry Nelson Goodman August 7, 1906 Somerville,Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Died | November 25, 1998(1998-11-25) (aged 92) Needham,Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Education | |
| Education | Harvard University (BA,PhD) |
| Thesis | A Study of Qualities (1941) |
| Doctoral advisor | C. I. Lewis |
| Philosophical work | |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Analytic Nominalism[1] |
| Institutions | University of Pennsylvania Harvard University |
| Doctoral students | Herbert G. Bohnert,Israel Scheffler |
| Notable students | Noam Chomsky,Sydney Morgenbesser,Stephen Stich,Hilary Putnam |
| Main interests | Logic,induction,counterfactuals,mereology,aesthetics,philosophy of science,philosophy of language |
| Notable ideas | New riddle of induction, Goodman–Leonard calculus of individuals,[1]counterfactual conditional,Goodman's method,languages of art,irrealism |
Henry Nelson Goodman (7 August 1906 – 25 November 1998) was an Americanphilosopher, known for his work oncounterfactuals,mereology, theproblem of induction,irrealism, andaesthetics.
Goodman was born inSomerville,Massachusetts, the son of Sarah Elizabeth (née Woodbury) and Henry Lewis Goodman.[2] He was ofJewish origins.[3] He graduated fromHarvard University,AB,magna cum laude (1928). During the 1930s, he ran anart gallery inBoston, Massachusetts, while studying for a HarvardPhD inphilosophy, which he completed in 1941.[4] His experience as anart dealer helps explain his later turn towardsaesthetics, where he became better known than inlogic andanalytic philosophy. DuringWorld War II, he served as apsychologist in theUS Army.[5]
He taught at theUniversity of Pennsylvania, 1946–1964, where his students includedNoam Chomsky,Sidney Morgenbesser,Stephen Stich, andHilary Putnam. He was aresearch fellow at the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies from 1962 to 1963 and was a professor atBrandeis University from 1964 to 1967, before being appointed Professor of Philosophy at Harvard in 1968.[6]
In 1967, at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, he was the founding director of Harvard Project Zero, a basic research project in artistic cognition and artistic education. He remained the director for four years and served as an informal adviser for many years thereafter.[7]
Goodman died inNeedham, Massachusetts.
In his bookFact, Fiction, and Forecast, Goodman introduced the "new riddle of induction", so-called by analogy withHume's classicalproblem of induction. He accepted Hume's observation thatinductive 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).
Hempel'sconfirmation theory argued that the solution is to differentiate between hypotheses, which apply to all things of a certain class, andevidence statements, which apply to only one thing. Goodman's famous counterargument was to introduce the predicategrue, which applies to all things examined before a certain timet just in case they are green, but also to other things just in case they are blue and not examined before timet. If we examine emeralds before timet and find that emeralda is green, emeraldb is green, and so forth, each will confirm the hypothesis that all emeralds are green. However, emeraldsa, b, c,..etc. also confirm the hypothesis that all emeralds aregrue. Thus, before timet, the apparently law-like statements "All emeralds are green" and "All emeralds are grue" are equally well confirmed by observation, but obviously "All emeralds are grue" is not a law-like statement.[clarification needed]
Goodman's example showed that the difficulty in determining what constitutes law-like statements is far greater than previously thought, and that once again we find ourselves facing the initialdilemma that "anything can confirm anything".
Goodman, along withStanislaw Lesniewski, is the founder of the contemporary variant ofnominalism, which argues thatphilosophy,logic, andmathematics should dispense withset theory. Goodman's nominalism was driven purely byontological considerations. After a long and difficult 1947 paper coauthored withW. V. O. Quine, Goodman ceased to trouble himself with finding a way to reconstruct mathematics while dispensing withset theory – discredited as solefoundations of mathematics as of 1913 (Russell andWhitehead, inPrincipia Mathematica).
The program ofDavid Hilbert to reconstruct it from logical axioms was proven futile in 1931 byGödel. Because of this and other failures of seemingly fruitful lines of research, Quine soon came to believe that such a reconstruction was impossible, but Goodman's Penn colleagueRichard Milton Martin argued otherwise, writing a number of papers suggesting ways forward.
According toThomas Tymoczko'safterword inNew directions in the philosophy of mathematics, Quine had "urged that we abandon ad hoc devices distinguishing mathematics from science and just accept the resulting assimilation", putting the "key burden on the theories (networks of sentences) that we accept, not on the individual sentences whose significance can change dramatically depending on their theoretical context." In so doing, Tymoczko claimed,philosophy of mathematics andphilosophy of science were merged intoquasi-empiricism: the emphasis ofmathematical practice as effectively part of thescientific method, an emphasis on method over result.
The Goodman–Leonard (1940) calculus of individuals is the starting point for the American variant ofmereology. 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 1951The Structure of Appearance, a revision and extension of his PhD thesis, makes no mention of the notion of set (while his PhD thesis still did).[8] Simons (1987) and Casati andVarzi (1999) show that the calculus of individuals can be grounded in either a bit of set theory, or monadic predicates, schematically employed. Mereology is accordingly "ontologically neutral" and retains some of Quine's pragmatism (which Tymoczko in 1998 carefully qualified asAmerican Pragmatism).
Source:Complete International Bibliography[11]
