Combining Texts

Ideas for 'Ways of Worldmaking', 'The Sign of Four' and 'Why Propositions cannot be concrete'

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5 ideas

7. Existence / C. Structure of Existence / 4. Ontological Dependence

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.

7. Existence / C. Structure of Existence / 5. Supervenience / d. Humean supervenience

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.

7. Existence / D. Theories of Reality / 3. Reality

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.

7. Existence / D. Theories of Reality / 4. Anti-realism

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?

7. Existence / E. Categories / 5. Category Anti-Realism

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'?)