Abstract
Goodman’s worldmaking is dependent upon his notion of induction, the issue of which was not solved by Hume, as the problem of distinguishing which regularities could be projected into the future and which regularities would not be projected still remained - hence, Goodman’s “new” riddle. The answer to the problem of the projection of predicates is also constructionalist in that we are free to re-make our world; inductive practices, which are the fundamental mechanism with which we cognize, are determined by social practices, and we - as a collective of individuals - are able to remake those patterns. The principle is one of pragmatism, which is a strand of thought that continually resurfaces in Goodman’s philosophy. All knowledge is relative to the system in which it resides, and the “truths” within one system are relative only to that system, making all knowledge relative, with the notion of “truth” only applied to statements of subject-predicate form, and all other sentences falling under the notion of “right fit”. The underlying argument is that we do not see the world in a direct and unmediated manner; his worldmaking allows us to create worlds that are made by social agreement on inductive practices revealed in the general projection of certain predicates, which themselves referentially relate to other entities.
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Keywords
- Inductive Inference
- General Projection
- Correspondence Theory
- Phenomenal Experience
- Inductive Generalization
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Shottenkirk, D. (2009). The Effects of Goodman’s Nominalist Constructionalism on his 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_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9931-1_6
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