Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:18 — 28.7MB)
Discussing Goodman's Ways of Worldmaking (1978).
This is a 31-minute preview of our vintage 2 hr, 10-minute episode which you can buy at partiallyexaminedlife.com/store or get for free with PEL Citizenship (see partiallyexaminedlife.com/membership). You can also purchase the full episode in the iTunes Store: Search for "Partially Goodman" and look under "Albums."
What's the relationship between art and science? Does understanding works of art constitute "knowledge," and if so, how does this relate to other kinds of knowledge? Goodman describes art as a symbol system (including art like instrumental music that doesn't seem representative), which can symbolize successfully or not. While there is no one set of concepts by which to judge all art (different types of art and other descriptive endeavors establish incommensurable "worlds"), neither is art an anything goes endeavor where the individual spectator is the only determinant of quality.
We're joined by painter Jay Bailey to bring up lots of amusing artwork examples (The Monkees! Thomas Kinkade! Self-mutilation as art!) and tell us how well Goodman's account accords with his understanding of artistic practice (his answer: not so well).
End song: "Staple Gun" by Mark Lint and Stevie P (1999).
I enjoyed the concrete examples that Jay brought to this abstract subject. I take it that Goodman was trying to give art some sort of epistemic status, to consider the subject with whatever degree of percision that it allows (Aristotle). I listened to it a couple of days ago, and one of the things that stuck out to me was the talk about the difference between a swatch of cloth, a symbol, things that denote, etc, and the different elements of a work of art (expression or whatever). Interesting, but, admittedly, it wasn’t very clear to me, and an explanation would be helpful.
This podcast seemed to me also to relate to the (excellent)Lewis Lancaster lecture (posted earlier here). Lancaster talks about a religious “relic,” like a piece of a saint’s bone or a piece of the cross that a martyr was crucified on. He contrasted a “relic” with a work of art, arguing that early Buddhists did not have artistic representations and they didn’t need them, because they had relics. It was only after Greek influence that they began to make representations of say the Buddha.
One of the things we were having trouble with was that I don’t think Goodman’s very clear re. concrete examples when it comes to works of art exemplifying thing and doesn’t exactly spell out how identifying an exemplification relates to aesthetic judgment and, relatedly, to the success of a work in creating a world… or participating in an existing world?
Here are the basics: A work can denote something, either by literally containing a message or metaphorically containing one. At one point he says that works of fantasy, instead of being literally true of some fictional world, can be metaphorically true of our world; so 1984 is saying something about our fears and about totalitarian tendencies in the governments of the Orwell’s time.
A work can also express an emotion, again, either literally, because it has passionate words in it that are usually used by people to express such things (or passionate characters in a play acting out emotions), or metaphorically, as when a painting or music or building through some convention specific to its form mimics expression or “feel” of such an emotion.
Lastly, a work can exemplify something. It can be an example of a style of art. It can exemplify that artist’s specific style. It can through similarities to other works refer to or even quote those works.
As said on the podcast, these functions are not specific to artworks, though all artworks perform at least one of them (so there is no “pure,” non-representational art; even the most abstract pieces represent by exemplifying). He also makes it clear that you can’t really understand a work of art until you understand these references, at least in part… until you can understand what style it is, how it relates to other work, what the words (if any) literally mean and what the metaphors and symbols mean. If I listen to Indian music, I may not understand quite what emotions are supposed to be expressed by what, as there are some cultural differences in how emotions are expressed, though of course there are many seemingly universal elements about that too (e.g. it’s been found that the smile is universal, present even in isolated tribes).
A “world” has to do with the standards by which a work has to be judged; it’s the realm in which the work (or scientific theory, or potentially other kinds of expressions like a political endorsement, though he doesn’t use any examples like that) is created and determines the ontology of that realm, logical rules within it (e.g. what counts as a legitimate inference or an expression of something), how we know the truths of it, whether there even are truths; it’s an open-ended concept, as the idea of a world is supposed to be open-ended, and we can best understand it by thinking of the examples he uses which in art correspond roughly, I guess, to stylistic elements, though, really, I think you could have, e.g. two texts written in a very similar style which nonetheless have very different intent (e.g. a journalistic, factually true piece and a piece of realistic fiction) and so constitute different worlds.
Artistic failure is possible because of (among other reasons, presumably) incoherence; if you ripped the ending off a James Joyce novel and shoved it into a Charlotte Bronte book, it would be violating its own rules and wouldn’t really work. …Which is not to say you can’t have a whimsical work, but in that case, the whimsy is the rule.
As Wes hinted at in the discussion, this assumes that works, to be really successful, have to be innovative: like a new, successful scientific theory, it has to accord with current practice (i.e. our observations) but challenge some theoretical piece, which drives us to make new experiments and look in different directions than before. A good piece of art, then, has to resonate (it has to somehow make sense to the audience), but should challenge something, to, for instance, express something in a novel way, or express some novel content. It can exemplify a unique combination of features (merging musical genres interestingly, for instance, or contrasting the tone of the words and music in a cool way).
Even some of what I have here is speculation on my part, not having read “Languages of Art,” and I’m guessing that even there he doesn’t address the whole issue of “what makes good art” or the individual spectator’s experience, because that just wasn’t the kind of philosophy he was trying to do: he was trying to help us understand how we perceive and judge works, not which works should be judged good… for that, we can look at established opinion for clues, but just as in science the majority can be wrong, and even generalizing from some works, we can’t come up with a general theory that would apply to all works; that would violate the pluralism he’s arguing for.
Mark, just listened to this podcast, and your written clarification here is excellent.
I found this podcast a really useful introduction to Goodman, though I struggled to understand much of it. Goodman’s ideas seem to explain why I regard my work as art (see http://www.blackvanilla.org.uk). My sculptures reference my world (including my experiences of the art world) and (playfully) tries out new objects(symbols?) that give (me) visual pleasure. For me an essential element in successful art is ambiguity in what it could represent, leaving space for the viewer to bring to it his own world and to have it expanded by experiencing the work.
Art and scientific research have so much in common – are they the same human pursuit? Original scientists with their existing world (of experiences of other scientist’s worlds, etc.) play with new ideas (symbols, concepts etc) to see what effect they have on their world – if they are pleased with the outcome they exhibit (publish) them!
thank you a lot for this. i do base my »approach to an applied cognitive aesthetics« on the work of goodman. and bullt my master thesis in »Bildwissenschaft/MediaArtHistories« regarding »pictorial ambiguity« on it, if you like, here’s an excerpt (see part 3 regarding epistemological aspects of pictorial ambiguity:
http://www.bildwissenschaft.org/image?function=fnArticle&showArticle=161).
and, great, you did post this right on my birthday! for this birthday gift, my comment, particularly. finest thoughts, nicolas
Goodman’s ideas on world making, opposing conceptual schemes and explanations of objectivity seem fuzzy partially because the inherent abstract nature of art and aesthetics. However, I’d suggest that a reading of the latter half (including Section X) of “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” by Thomas Kuhn might help further nail down this material. In brief, most people would consider society’s scientific pursuits (particularly, in the natural sciences) as reaching towards some objective truth about the material world. However, Kuhn argues that throughout history scientists operate within a particular paradigm. This paradigm colors the questions that can be asked, the phenomena that are observed and even the results that are found. Although the objective does exist, the scientific worlds will be altered depending on the time period (or paradigm) they operate within and new worlds will be created with novel explanations to anomalies of a given conceptual scheme. Interestingly, Kuhn also would say that arguments over the truth of a particular paradigm in comparison to other paradigms/worlds is a moot point. Scientific explanation inside a given world is the goal inquiry. Goodman (as the podcasters teased out) echoes many of these sentiments when describing the nature of art. However, as a scientist myself, Kuhn’s analysis of science with historical examples seems to make the overall thrust of the philosophical theories more tangible.
Art or Epistemology:
Just listened to this podcast, and can’t help but compare Goodman’s project to that of Wittgenstein, who turned on his own failed effort to make logic the primary foundation of language, and instead refuted logic/inherent knowledge of truth in favor of language games, the usage of language.
What Goodman does is apply this same paradigm of Wittgenstein’s language games to art (self imposed limitation on ability to know truth, a pragmatism which shows up for Goodman as nominalism). Then he proceeds to identify what those art games are, which includes expression, exemplification, or representation, (most generally as symbolization) with implications for right and wrong art.
Underlying Goodman’s epistemology/ontology of reality is the basis of World Making, which compares with Wittgenstein’s Life Form. These are the default categories of reality which both Wittgenstein and Goodman simply refer to as the background which underlies and grounds reality. This is a relinquishment to the impossibility of access to noumena, that we can not know it directly, but it underlies how we know (nominalism).
Thus, the value of Goodman and Wittgenstein are practical efforts to categorize and elaborate how language or art works with the circumspection that there is no privileged knowledge to define “understanding” but that knowledge is subservient to usage.
I just started reading ‘RELATIVISM: Cognitive and Moral’, with the first paper being from ‘Ways of Worldmaking’ by Nelson Goodman. A quick search of the P.E.L. website pointed to Episode 28: ‘Nelson Goodman on Art as Epistemology,’ which I downloaded and listened to immediately. Great podcast!!! Hope you gentlemen someday devote a full podcast to epistemological relativism. Anyway, thanks for the great discussion.