| Phi 220 Spring 2016 |
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Nelson Goodman (1906-1998) was for most of his career best known as a philosopher of science, but he had a long-standing interest in art and began to write about aesthetics in the 1960s. This lecture dates from about the same time as his book Languages of Art. Although the lecture surveys many of the book’s ideas, he emphasizes ones that appear in its conclusion. I’ve included some notes to fill out a few that appear in the lecture only in a very sketchy form.
• Much of the first third of the lecture is devoted to criticisms of characterizations of art and aesthetic in terms of pleasure and emotion. Goodman doesn’t name names here, but you should watch for places where he may have in mind views you’ve seen in others. What Goodman seems to have in mind in speaking of the “paradox of ugliness” is Aristotle’s puzzle that we take pleasure in the depiction of things that we might find unpleasant in person.
• On p. 9, Goodman distills two problems from this preliminary discussion, and goes on to address them in the next few pages. The way he does this bears comparison with Aristotle’s comments on imitation in ch. 4 of the Poetics (HK 99f). How close is Goodman’s view to Aristotle’s, and how well does it solve Aristotle’s puzzle? Goodman’s idea that “emotions function cognitively” (p. 9) and his comparison of them with sensations on the next couple of pages is worth thinking about in its own right; it and the general attitude to art and the cognitive is displays will be central to the rest of the paper.
• Most of the ideas in this paper appear in the last chapter of Languages of Art. The earlier part of the book is devoted to presenting the sort of theory of symbols Goodman speaks of on p. 12. I’m not likely to say in short space what Goodman says he can’t, but I’ll provide a little further help with some of the ideas he outlines here:
• Syntactic density (vs. articulateness). The idea of “density” Goodman has in mind is a mathematical one. The rational numbers (i.e., fractions) are dense in the sense that between any two you can find another. Something like this is true of painting (a “representational system” in Goodman’s terminology) since, for example, between any two shades of color you can find another; but it isn’t true of the letters of an alphabetic or words of a language or of musical notation.
• Semantic density (vs. articulateness). On the other hand, although the pitches indicated by standard European musical notation are not densely ordered, the meanings of expressions in written language are. (For example, although the phrases expressing fractions in words are not dense when ordered alphabetically, the fractions that are their references are densely ordered as numbers; and, given descriptions of two relatively similar shades of color, we can describe another color as being halfway between them. So written language, although syntactically articulate, is semantically dense.)
• Exemplification (vs. denotation). A paint chip or swatch of cloth exhibits what Goodman calls “exemplificational reference.” It stands for a color or a kind of fabric or, as Goodman thinks about these things, for the verbal label of the color or kind of fabric. That is, this sort of reference runs not from language to world (as does denotation) but from world to language. For Goodman, a painting expressing sadness “refers” to sadness or the label “sad” in this way. Goodman analyzes expression as exemplificational reference in which the exemplified label denotes the work metaphorically; that is, a work expressing sadness is only metaphorically sad.
• Replete (vs. attenuated) symbols. Goodman distinguishes between a technical diagram and an apparently similar line drawing by noting that all features of the lines in the latter are significant while only certain aspects are significant in the former. The difference is a matter of degree; but, when the bulk of the features of a symbol matter, he describes the system as relatively “replete.”
He says that these features of symbols characterize what is aesthetic only as “earmarks” (p. 13), and goes on to note that, on his conception, the question of what is aesthetic is different from the question of what has aesthetic value.
• This leads Goodman to the issue of aesthetic value. Although he says in the end that aesthetic evaluation is not very important—that saying a work is good or bad leaves open many interesting questions about it—he outlines several alternatives to his view, and his claim that art is to be judged “by standards of cognitive efficacy” (p. 17) is an important aspect of his view of art. Is he right?
• Goodman’s final points concern an issue with which we began the course, the relative importance of truth to art and science. Think about his conclusion that truth is too narrow a virtue even for science and that “aptness in conforming to and reforming our knowledge and our world” (p. 18) is “equally relevant” for symbols of both sorts.