The Effects of Goodman’s Nominalism and Worldmaking on his Aesthetics

Abstract

Goodman cannot, consistent with his metaphysics, countenance either intensional or intentional objects in his aesthetics, nor can he include states of mind as part of the analysis. The “super-extensionalist”/nominalist’s prohibition against classes, null sets, fictive entities, and general terms also affects the kinds of terms and concepts available to him in his aesthetics. Goodman’s relativistic epistemology and his pluralistic metaphysics similarly do not allow him an aesthetics that would claim artworks reveal genuine truths about the universal human condition. As Goodman’s constructionalism begins with “an uninterpreted system”, which presumably also means that the body itself is not an “interpreted” system, there are therefore no “natural” responses. It does, then, become difficult to explain how certain facts pattern themselves across all cultures, as it also becomes difficult to account for art’s significant; predicate matching fails to explain people’s passion for art. In short, what we are expecting from an aesthetic theory is an explanation of what happens the moment we are looking; not the predicate labels that general linguistic usage would attach to the painting after we have seen it. This is especially true as knowing that other people descriptively apply the term cannot be the sufficient condition for understanding an artwork.