![]() |
| ||||||||||||||||||
|
Amazon.com Textbooks Store
Shop the Amazon.com Textbooks Store and save up to 70% on textbook rentals, 90% on used textbooks and 60% on eTextbooks. |
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images? |
Ways of Worldmaking contains one brilliant argument after another for the idea that no appeal to a real world beyond our "conceptual schemes" is necessary to understand, or to produce, science and scientific knowledge. What's more, Goodman also shows how art is just as necessary as science if we are to understand ourselves and the world. He explains that neither art nor science is a copy of the world: as the old joke has it, "one of the damn things is enough." Instead both art and science succeed when they provide us with symbols that re-categorize things and people in ways we find useful.
It is this usefulness, not a connection to a world beyond all categories, that we actually seek when we generate both theories and artworks. Notice that we do in fact stop our seeking when we achieve this kind of satisfaction. Goodman's neo-pragmatic explanation of how we should investigate the world pays close attention, and gives proper respect, to the ways in which we actually do investigate.
A wonderful book from an underappreciated thinker.