Background

Nelson Goodman was born on August 7, 1906, in Somerville, Massachusetts, United States as the only child of Henry Lewis Goodman and Sarah Elizabeth Woodbury. He was of Jewish descent by his father's side.

Education

In the 1920s Nelson Goodman enrolled at Harvard University and studied under Clarence Irving Lewis (who later became his doctoral supervisor), Alfred North Whitehead, Harry Scheffer, W.E. Hooking, and Ralph Barton Perry. Goodman graduated from Harvard with a Bachelor of Arts in 1928. It took him, however, 12 more years until he finished his Doctor of Philosophy in 1941 with A Study of Qualities. There are several possible reasons for the lateness of his Doctor of Philosophy. Maybe the most important was that Goodman was Jewish, and therefore not eligible for a graduate fellowship at Harvard.

Career

Nelson Goodman had to work outside the university to finance his studies. From 1928 until 1940, Goodman worked as the director of the Walker-Goodman Art Gallery at Copley Square, Boston. This interest and activity in the art world is more frequently cited as a reason for the lateness of his doctorate. During his graduate studies, Goodman was also a regular participant in W.V. Quine’s seminars on the philosophy of the Vienna Circle (in particular of Rudolf Carnap).

Goodman also worked closely with Henry Leonard, who wrote his doctorate at the same time under Alfred North Whitehead’s supervision.

After military service, Goodman taught briefly as an instructor in philosophy at Tufts College, and was then hired as associate professor (1946-1951) and later as a full professor (1951-1964) at the University of Pennsylvania. At Pennsylvania, his students included Noam Chomsky, Sydney Morgenbesser, Stephen Stich, and Hilary Putnam. He served briefly as Harry Austryn Wolfson Professor of Philosophy at Brandeis University (1964-1967), finally returning to Harvard in 1968, where he taught philosophy until 1977.

At Harvard, Goodman founded Project-Zero, a center to study and improve education in the arts. Besides being an art gallery director as a graduate student, and private art collector throughout his life, Goodman was also involved in the production of three multimedia-performance events, Hockey Seen: A Nightmare in Three Periods and Sudden Death (1972), Rabbit, Run (1973), and Variations: An Illustrated Lecture Concert (1985).

Achievements

• Goodman is most famous for his discovery of the new riddle of induction and its consequences for the theory of induction. His famous grue-bleen example shows that contextual and pragmatic factors are crucial for the validity of inductive and counterfactual arguments because their compellingness varies with the selection of predicates and rules for their application by competent judges. Goodman’s second groundbreaking methodological contribution to the inductive sciences is the proposal to model inductive and counterfactual inferences as the partly informal process of producing a coherent whole in "reflective equilibrium." Goodman’s work decisively shifted the attention of theorists of induction away from mathematical formalisms (like the probability calculus) toward the pragmatic conditions of nondeductive reasoning.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Fact, Fiction, and Forecast

    (Nelson Goodman’s provocative philosophical classic - a bo...)

    1954
  • The Structure of Appearance

    (With this third edition of Nelson Goodman's The Structure...)

    1951
  • Of Mind and Other Matters

    (Of Mind and Other Matters displays perhaps more vividly t...)

    1984
  • Reconceptions in Philosophy and Other Arts and Sciences

    (The authors argue against certain philosophical distincti...)

    1988
  • Languages of Art

    (Like Dewey, Goodman has revolted against the empiricist d...)

    1968
  • Problems and Projects 1972
  • Basic Abilities Required for Understanding and Creation in the Arts: Final Report 1972
  • Ways of Worldmaking 1978

Religion

Goodman’s philosophical suppose that he was Agnostic.

Politics

Nelson Goodman was described as "disillusioned" about politics and tended to stay away from it.

Views

Goodman’s philosophical theories embrace nominalism, constructivism, and a form of radical relativism. He perhaps best sums up his approach to philosophical concerns in the foreword of his book Ways of Worldmaking. "Few familiar philosophical labels fit comfortably a book that is at odds with rationalism and empiricism alike, with materialism and idealism and dualism, with essentialism and existentialism, with mechanism and vitalism, with mysticism and scientism, and with most other ardent doctrines." He thought of his work as belonging to the mainstream of modern philosophy, yet he proposed to substitute his own structures of several symbol systems for the structure of the world, the structure of the mind, and the structure of concepts. The symbol systems of the sciences, philosophy, the arts, perception, and everyday discourse thus constitute the “ways of worldmaking." For Goodman, "The movement is from unique truth and a world fixed and found to a diversity of right and even conflicting versions of worlds in the making."

In the field of aesthetics, Goodman’s Languages of Art offers a new program for aesthetics, grounded in his theory of symbols. His attempt to analyze the various art forms according to their symbolic features affords the possibility of greater discrimination among the art forms of painting, music, literature, dance, architecture, and the other arts. Underlying this approach is Goodman’s belief in the cognitive nature of art, which invites consideration of the arts as partners with the sciences in the pursuit of understanding. Pictures, musical performances, literary texts, dance performances, and buildings shape our experiences, just as do linguistic and scientific representations. Within this formulation, representational, expressive, and exemplification forms of symbols govern the features and functions of the arts. Goodman’s approach substitutes for the question, "What is art?" that of "When is art?" He finds without significance the attempt to determine uniquely aesthetic qualities, preferring instead to look for certain clusters of symbolic features that evoke understanding characteristic of art works. Gone too is the attempt to proffer spurious distinctions between scientific understanding and aesthetics. For Goodman, they are but two complementary means for making and understanding our worlds.

Goodman’s activities extended beyond philosophy. Activating the arts in museums, performance, and especially in multi-disciplinary contexts, was a major theme in his life and work. Goodman’s professional role as a gallery director and his private art collecting were sources of great satisfaction. His life-long pursuit of collecting art began in his student days. He was well known in the art world for his discriminating aesthetic perception and equally for his astuteness in negotiating the price of an object. A visit to his home in Weston, Massachusetts would reveal a collector with enthusiasm and in-depth knowledge over a wide range of art. Virtually every corner and closet held yet another group of art treasures. It was not unusual to see hanging on opposite walls an important Flemish Old Master by Jan Van Kessel and an exquisite naïve work by an unknown Twentieth-Century Italian immigrant farmer, Peter Petronzio. His collections included Seventeenth-Century Old Master paintings and drawings, Modern art from Picasso to Demuth, ancient Asian sculptures, and Native American arts of the Northwest Coast and the Southwest, even Pre-Columbian.

As a generous lender and donor, Goodman benefited various museums including the Fogg Museum at Harvard, the Worcester Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts, and the Haggerty Museum at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

As a lover of animals, Goodman was deeply concerned with animal welfare. He was a member of the World Society for the Protection of Animals and other societies dedicated to this cause. His generous contributions supported the rescue of animals in war zones or endangered by natural disasters. For instance, he funded animal rescue projects in Kuwait during the Gulf War, in Bosnia, during volcanic eruption at Montserrat and fires in Borneo.

Quotations: "We aim at simplicity and hope for truth."

"We make versions, and true versions make worlds."

"Discovering laws involves drafting them. Recognizing patterns is very much a matter of inventing and imposing them. Comprehension and creation go on together."

Membership

Nelson Goodman was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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  American Academy of Arts and Sciences , United States

Personality

Goodman was more interested in solving philosophical problems than in his celebrity as a philosopher. He authorized only two interviews, did not write an autobiography, and rejected the invitation to be honored with a volume in the prestigious Schilpp Library of Living Philosophers. Sparse bits of information about his personal life can only be gathered from the autobiographies of his contemporaries and their published correspondences or his obituaries.

Nelson Goodman pursued his interests with energy and great intensity, whether writing, lecturing, or in pursuit of a new work of art. To his friends, he was a warm and stimulating person, with high expectations and a great deal to contribute to a friendship. He had little patience with incompetence and anything less than full attention to his perceived needs.

Physical Characteristics: In the months before his death, Goodman suffered a stroke and became unable to continue his regular travels and other activities.

Interests

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Immanuel Kant, David Hume, W. V. O. Quine, Carl G. Hempel, Rudolf Carnap, C. I. Lewis

• Artists

  Jan van Kessel, Peter Petronzio, Pablo Picasso, Charles Demuth

Connections

Artist Katharine (Kay) Sturgis was Goodman's wife and companion of over fifty years. They met when she brought her watercolors of New England subjects for exhibition at his Boston gallery. Sturgis, Cambridge spinster and heiress, and Goodman were both over forty when they married.

Father:

Henry Lewis Goodman

Mother:

Sarah Elizabeth Woodbury

Wife:

Katharine Sturgis

Student:

Noam Chomsky

Student:

Hilary Putnam

References

• Nelson Goodman
  2014
• Nelson Goodman and the Case for a Kalological Aesthetics
  2008