The effects of Nelson Goodman's nominalism on his epistemology and aesthetics.
Item
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Title
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The effects of Nelson Goodman's nominalism on his epistemology and aesthetics.
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Identifier
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AAI3187395
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identifier
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3187395
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Creator
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Shottenkirk, Dena.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Frederick Purnell, Jr
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Date
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2005
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Philosophy
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Abstract
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This dissertation asserts that Nelson Goodman's aesthetics cannot be adequately understood without prior knowledge of both his epistemology and his ontology. The dissertation is divided into three sections: The Metaphysics, The Epistemology, The Aesthetics. At the end of each section, the consequent limitations imposed on his terms and concepts available to him are explicated, such that, by the end of the dissertation, I am able to delineate the constraints imposed upon the aesthetics by both the metaphysics and the epistemology.;Goodman's aesthetics is a semantic account of reference, and within that format it forbids intensions, properties, fictive entities, non-semantic meaning, natural symbols, a central role for emotion, and any notion of a universal or empirical truth. None of this can be understood without the prior analysis of his epistemology, which argues for relativism, pluralism, and worldmaking. These latter commitments involve denials of universal/objective truth, natural kinds, the autonomous object, and univocal human responses.;But Goodman's epistemology cannot be adequately understood apart from his ontology for it is in his "calculus of individuals" that he defines qualia (presentation of color, time, and space) as the phenomenal basic units---entities that satisfy the basic adequacy criterion for systems in general, and it is from these basic primitives that the constructionalism can, with a limited set of terms and operations, be used to build an ontological or epistemological system. Goodman is, more than anything else, a nominalist, granting only entities of the lowest ontological kind, necessitating, for example, a definition of "property" as the typically repeated pattern of qualia exhibited by an object, instead of an essentialist trait. Goodman's nominalism has the consequences of forbidding not only (platonist) properties, but also abstract objects, meaning accounts, classes, and fictive reference, as well. All of these constraints are directly translated into his epistemology, wherein empiricism is denied and coherentism embraced, objective reality is denied and replaced by relativistic worldmaking, and induction and the projection of predicates is given the central role in the formation of all knowledge systems. Central, also, to all of Goodman's philosophy is reference: we understand by correctly ascertaining the relation between a symbol and the thing symbolized. This is true for both art and science in that we understand both by sorting the symbols. Hence, Goodman's aesthetic symbols refer in ways that can only be understood within the general framework of the rest of his philosophy.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
