display all the ideas for this combination of philosophers
5 ideas
17656 | Being primitive or prior always depends on a constructional system [Goodman] |
Full Idea: Nothing is primitive or derivationally prior to anything apart from a constructional system. | |
From: Nelson Goodman (Ways of Worldmaking [1978], 1.4c) | |
A reaction: Something may be primitive not just because we can't be bothered to analyse it any further, but because even God couldn't analyse it. Maybe. |
17661 | We don't recognise patterns - we invent them [Goodman] |
Full Idea: Recognising patterns is very much a matter of inventing or imposing them. | |
From: Nelson Goodman (Ways of Worldmaking [1978], 1.7) | |
A reaction: I take this to be false. |
17659 | Reality is largely a matter of habit [Goodman] |
Full Idea: Reality in a world, like realism in a picture, is largely a matter of habit. | |
From: Nelson Goodman (Ways of Worldmaking [1978], 1.6) | |
A reaction: I'm a robust realist, me, but I sort of see what he means. We become steeped in unspoken conventions about how we take our world to be, and filter out anything that conflicts with it. |
17657 | We build our world, and ignore anything that won't fit [Goodman] |
Full Idea: We dismiss as illusory or negligible what cannot be fitted into the architecture of the world we are building. | |
From: Nelson Goodman (Ways of Worldmaking [1978], 1.4d) | |
A reaction: I'm trying to think of an example of this, but can't. Maybe poor people are invisible to the rich? |
17654 | A world can be full of variety or not, depending on how we sort it [Goodman] |
Full Idea: A world may be unmanageably heterogeneous or unbearably monotonous according to how events are sorted into kinds. | |
From: Nelson Goodman (Ways of Worldmaking [1978], 1.4a) | |
A reaction: We might expect this from the man who invented 'grue', which allows you to classify things that change colour with things that don't. Could you describe a bird as 'might have been a fish', and classify it with fish? ('Projectible'?) |