Realism, Irrealism, and Ideology: A Critique of Nelson Goodman

Abstract

My previous applications of Nelson Goodman's theories of symbolism have emphasized the usefulness of his relatively neutral or value-free characterizations of symbol types as way of measuring the highly charged associations of value in traditional theories.1 The distinction between images and words, for instance, as respectively dense and differentiated systems offers clarifying respite from metaphysical distinctions like space and time or nature and convention. The differences between symbolic types become relative matter, embedded in questions of function, context, and habit, and cease to be question of essences or absolute categories. I've always felt, however, that there was certain price to be paid in the elaboration of what Goodman has called a neutral comparative study of artistic media and symbol systems.2 This article try to assess what that price is. I want to ask, first, exactly what Goodman excluding under the rubric of value. How rigorous are the exclusions, and to what extent are aesthetic, ethical, or political values reintroduced as aspects of an expanded epistemology? How does the neutrality of Goodman's method enable or disable it for inquiries into historical and ideological issues? To what extent Goodman's self-imposed limits create difficulties, not just in its extension beyond those limits, but in conceptual issues internal to his project? The main focus for this critique be Goodman's accounts of realism. My argument be that realism constitutes an especially vexing problem for Goodman's theory, precisely because it occupies the unstable boundary between what lies inside and outside the scope of that theory. A critique of realism absolutely fundamental to the internal integrity of Goodman's theory, and yet it seems to resist the kind of systematic account he able to produce for other problems in symbolism. Realism, like reality, Goodman concludes, is multiple and evanescent, and no one account of it do.3 The question, then, whether this negative result will do for the problem