Nelson Goodman's Ways of Worldmaking

Worldmaking as we know it always starts from worlds already on hand; the making is a remaking. Anthropology and developmental psychology may study social and individual histories of such world-building, but the search for a universal or necessary beginning is best left to theology. My interest here is rather with the processes involved in building a world out of others. With the false hope of a firm foundation gone, with the world displaced by worlds that are but versions, with substance dissolved into function, and with the given acknowledged as taken, we face the questions how worlds are made, tested, and known.

Without presuming to instruct the gods or other worldmakers, or attempting any comprehensive or systematic survey, I want to illustrate and comment on some of the processes that go into worldmaking.

What I have said so far plainly points to a radical relativism; but severe restraints are imposed. Willingness to accept countless alternative true or right world-versions does not mean that everything goes, that tall stories are as good as short ones, that truths are no longer distinguished from falsehoods, but only that truth must be otherwise conceived than as correspondence with a ready-made world. Though we make worlds by making versions, we no more make a world by putting symbols together at random than a carpenter makes a chair by putting pieces of wood together at random. The multiple worlds I countenance are just the actual worlds made by and answering to true or right versions. Worlds possible or impossible supposedly answering to false versions have no place in my philosophy.

Just what worlds are to be recognized as actual is quite another question. Although some aspects of a philosophical position have a bearing, even what seem severely restrictive views may recognize countless versions as equally right. For example, I am sometimes asked how my relativism can be reconciled with my nominalism. The answer is easy. Although a nominalistic system speaks only of individuals, banning all talk of classes, it may take anything whatever as an individual; that is, the nominalistic prohibition is against the profligate propagation of entities out of any chosen basis of individuals, but leaves the choice of that basis quite free. Nominalism of itself thus authorizes an abundance of alternative versions based on particle physics or phenomenal elements or ordinary things or whatever else one is willing to take as individuals. Nothing here prevents any given nominalist from preferring on other grounds some among the systems thus recognized as legitimate. In contrast, the typical physicalism, for example, while prodigal in the platonistic instruments it supplies for endless generation of entities, admits of only one correct (even if yet unidentified) basis.

Thus while the physicalist's doctrine "no difference without a physical difference" and the nominalist's doctrine "no difference without a difference of individuals" sound alike, they differ notably in this respect.

At the same time, in this general discussion of worldmaking I do not impose nominalistic restrictions, for I want to allow for some difference of opinion as to what actual worlds are. That falls far short of countenancing merely possible worlds. The platonist and I may disagree about what makes an actual world while we agree in rejecting all else. We may disagree in what we take to be true while we agree that nothing answers to what we take to be false.

To speak of worlds as made by versions often offends both by its implicit pluralism and by its sabotage of what I have called 'something solid underneath'. Let me offer what comfort I can. While I stress the multiplicity of right world-versions, I by no means insist that there are many worlds -- or indeed any; for as I have already suggested, the question whether two versions are of the same world has as many good answers as there are good interpretations of the words "versions of the same world." The monist can always contend that two versions need only be right to be accounted versions of the same world. The pluralist can always reply by asking what the world is like apart from all versions. Perhaps the best answer is that given by Professor Woody Allen when he writes:

Can we actually 'know' the universe? My God, it's hard enough finding your way around in Chinatown. The point, however, is: Is there anything out there? And why? And must they be so noisy? Finally, there can be no doubt that the one characteristic of 'reality' is that it lacks essence. That is not to say it has no essence, but merely lacks it. (The reality I speak of here is the same one Hobbes described, but a little smaller.) The message, I take it, is simply this: never mind mind, essence is not essential, and matter doesn't matter. We do better to focus on versions rather than worlds. Of course, we want to distinguish between versions that do and those that do not refer, and to talk about things and worlds, if any, referred to; but these things and worlds and even the stuff they are made of -- matter, anti-matter, mind, energy, or whatnot -- are themselves fashioned by and along with the versions. Facts, as Norwood Hanson says, are theory-laden; they are as theory-laden as we hope our theories are fact-laden. Or in other words, facts are small theories, and true theories are big facts. This does not mean, I must repeat, that right versions can be arrived at casually, or that worlds are built from scratch. We start, on any occasion, with some old version or world that we have on hand and that we are stuck with until we have the determination and skill to remake it into a new one. Some of the felt stubborness of fact is the grip of habit: our firm foundation is indeed solid. Worldmaking begins with one version and ends with another.

Source: Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking
(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1978), pp. 6, 7, 94-97.