Home > Author > Nelson Goodman
1 " We make versions, and true versions make worlds. "
― Nelson Goodman
2 " We aim at simplicity and hope for truth. "
― Nelson Goodman , Ways of Worldmaking
3 " My title “The Fabrication of Facts,” has the virtue not only of indicating pretty clearly what I am going to discuss but also of irritating those fundamentalists who know very well that facts are found not madder, that facts constitute the one and only real world, and that knowledge consists of believing the facts. These articles of faith so firmly possess most of us, they so bind and blind us, that “fabrication of fact” has a paradoxical sound. “Fabrication” has become a synonym for “falsehood” or “fiction” as contrasted with “truth” or “fact.” Of course, we must distinguish falsehood and fiction from truth and fact; but we cannot, I am sure, do it on ground that fiction is fabricated and fact found. - 91 "
4 " Discovering laws involves drafting them. Recognizing patternsis very much a matter of inventing and imposing them. Comprehensionand creation go on together. "
5 " To make a faithful picture, come as close as possible to copying the object as it is.’ This simple-minded injunction baffles me; for the object before me is a man, a swarm of atoms, a complex of cells, a fiddler, a friend, a fool and much more. If none of these constitute the object as it is, what else might? If all are ways the object is, then none is way the object is. I cannot copy all these at once; and the more nearly I succeeded, the less would the result be a realistic picture. "
6 " The catch here, as Ernest Gombrich insists, is that there is no innocent eye . 1 The eye comes always ancient to its work, obsessed by its own past and by old and new insinuations of the ear, nose, tongue, fingers, heart and brain. It functions not as an instrument self-powered and alone, but as a dutiful member of a complex and capricious organism. Not only how but what it sees is regulated by need and prejudice. It selects, rejects, organizes, discriminates, associates, classifies, analyses, constructs. It does not so much mirror as take and make; and what it takes and makes it sees not bare, as items without attributes, but as things, as food, as people, as enemies, as stars, as weapons. Nothing is seen nakedly or naked. "
