Blackwell Reference Online

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American philosopher who made major contributions to epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of science, as well as to aesthetics. In his youth he ran an art gallery, and throughout his life he was an avid collector of art. He was professor emeritus of philosophy at Harvard University. The arts enhance understanding, Goodman (1976) contends, and aesthetics explains how they do so. Aesthetics, then, is a branch of epistemology. He maintains that understanding a work of art is not a matter of appreciating it, or finding beauty in it, or having an “aesthetic experience” of it. Like understanding an utterance or inscription, understanding a work of art consists in interpreting it correctly. This involves recognizing how and what it symbolizes, and how what it symbolizes bears on other visions and versions of our worlds. Works of art, then, belong to symbol systems with determinate syntactic and semantic structures. Much of Languages of Art (first published in 1968) is devoted to delineating the structures of the systems that the various arts employ, detailing their powers and limitations. Goodman recognizes two basic modes of reference: denotation and exemplification. A symbol denotes whatever it applies to. A name denotes its bearer; a portrait its subject; a predicate the members of its extension; and so on. Fictive symbols fail to denote. Their significance, he believes, depends ... log in or subscribe to read full text