WORK
Ways of Worldmaking
Goodman's 1978 synthesis arguing there is no ready-made world—only multiple right versions constructed through different
symbol systems, each organizing experience differently.
Ways of Worldmaking (1978) extended Goodman's symbol-system framework from aesthetics into a general epistemology and metaphysics. The book's central claim is radical: there is no single world that all our versions describe. There are only versions—worlds constructed by physics, painting, astronomy, myth, perception—and the versions are irreducibly plural. The physicist's world of particles and the painter's world of colors are not two descriptions of the same reality but two genuinely different worlds, each constituted by its
symbol system's conventions. Worldmaking proceeds through composition and decomposition, weighting and emphasis, ordering, deletion and supplementation, and deformation of prior versions. A new version takes elements from accepted versions and reconfigures them—not arbitrarily, but according to standards of
rightness internal to the worldmaking project. The book's seven short chapters ('Words, Works, Worlds,' 'The Status of Style,' 'Some Questions Concerning Quotation') are written with Goodman's characteristic precision and unflinching willingness to defend claims that sound
absurd until their implications are traced. The thesis is not relativism—some versions are right and others wrong—but it is pluralism without apology,