180029 PS Ways of Worldmaking. Nelson Goodman’s Rigorous Relativism (2024W)

The main aim of this seminar is to provide tools for students of philosophy at the beginning of their studies to develop a critical understanding of the structures, concepts, and perceptions of our world(s). Over the course of the seminar, we will be reading texts from Nelson Goodman that expound his concept of worldmaking. This serves as an exemplificatory engagement with traditional questions and problems from the fields of metaphysics and ontology. Goodman’s relativist approach to these questions is encapsulated in his idea of worldmaking. For Goodman, worldmaking is linked with the creation and study of different symbol systems in philosophy, the sciences (especially the psychology of perception), the arts, and our everyday experiences. This account of worldmaking necessitates giving up the notion of one truth and one fixed world, in favour of many actual, possibly even conflicting world versions, which are constantly made and remade by us through our use of symbols. In this sense, all symbol systems, whether in philosophy, science, or the arts, must be understood as equally taking part in the creation and discovery of knowledge as a furthering and advancement of human understanding. Therefore, Goodman urges us to think of the philosophy of perception, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of art as integral parts of metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology.
This philosophical approach, Goodman admits, finds itself at odds with most other classical philosophical distinctions, as it is neither realist nor idealist, neither empiricist nor rationalist, neither scientist nor humanist or mysticist. As Goodman writes in his foreword to Ways of Worldmaking: “What emerges can perhaps be described as a radical relativism under rigorous restraints, that eventuates into something akin to irrealism” (1978, X).
Most sessions will be devoted to one short chapter of one of Goodman’s works. At least the first five sessions will be dedicated to his conception of worldmaking, how it functions, and what it entails. It should give students an understanding of how this conception relates to relativism, constructivism, cognitivism, and nominalism. The next five sessions will be dedicated to investigating how the concept of worldmaking relates to fields such as the nature of truth, the relationship between knowing and understanding, the study of optical illusions, induction and the question of projectability, and representation and expression. The seminar, therefore, aims to show students how these problems are interconnected and how Goodman’s arguments are always motivated and informed by an underlying theoretical framework. This will help students understand the intricacies of philosophical forms of argumentation, which might span anywhere from a singular paragraph up to multiple books. The last three sessions of the seminar will focus on preparing and supporting the students to work on their essays by discussing various points of critique with regard to the issues investigated throughout the seminar. This will help students to limit the scope of their topics for their final essays. It will also give them a rough overview of the rich philosophical discussion of Goodman’s work and support them in finding suitable secondary literature for their final essays.

Throughout the seminar, various skills of the academic practice in philosophy will be trained:
- academic reading
- conducting and contributing to constructive discussions
- constructively responding to questions
- asking sincere and meaningful questions
- cross-disciplinary thinking
- writing an outline to prepare an essay
- writing a short essay