The Legacy of Nelson Goodman

Nelson Goodman was one of the soaring figures of twentieth century philosophy.1 His work radically reshaped the subject, forcing fundamental reconceptions of philosophy's problems, ends, and means. Goodman not only contributed to diverse fields, from philosophy of language to aesthetics, from philosophy of science to mereology, his works cut across these and other fields, revealing shared features and connecting links that narrowly focused philosophers overlook. That the author of The Structure of Appearance also wrote Languages of Art is not in the end surprising. No philosophical progress is made, Goodman believes, by arguments adverting to something we know not what. He therefore rejects intensional entities-meanings, essences, propositions, and possibilities-deeming their criteria of identity irremediably obscure. He even repudiates sets, since he regards as unintelligible the contention that the same basic elements (e.g., the null set) can comprise infinitely many distinct entities (the sets). This austerity threatens to leave him bereft of resources. But Goodman's principled parsimony combines with inventiveness and critical acuity to obviate the need for such devices. As graduate students, Goodman and Henry Leonard developed a version of mereology that they called the calculus of individuals.2 Elaborated in The Structure of Appearance, it grounds Goodman's nominalism. Goodman takes the difference between mereology and set theory to lie in the constraints on construction they permit. Set theory admits infinitely many distinct entities-sets of sets of sets of sets... -all composed of the same basic elements. Mereology holds that the same basic elements are parts of but a single whole. Goodman's nominalism consists in a refusal to recognize more than one entity comprised of exactly the same basic elements. This says nothing about the metaphysical constitution of the elements. Whether to