Abstract
While Goodman held many points in common with the positivists, he never claimed affiliation with them. Among the points he held in common were the notion ontology must be understood as reducible to atomic units (Wittgenstein’s Tractatus had established the legitimacy of that view); that this logical atomism was mirrored in language instead of being found in either the abstraction of mathematics or in metaphysical speculation; and that these be only provable truths - or as Russell said, “what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know”. But Goodman rejects the positivists’ sense data and their phenomenal reality, as he also rejects the positivists’ “the given”, as it had an odd way of evaporating upon close examination. Instead Goodman’s is a referential account within semantics, giving an analysis of the relationship between language and its objects. Language is bound by truth and by logic. And we know the world by means of reference, not by meaning - for truth conditions will be undermined by the existence of intensional contexts for which we possess no rules of replacement.
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Shottenkirk, D. (2009). Twentieth Century Epistemology. In: Shottenkirk, D. (eds) Nominalism and Its Aftermath: The Philosophy of Nelson Goodman. Synthese Library, vol 343. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9931-1_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9931-1_4
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