CONCEPT
Worldmaking
Goodman's radical thesis that there is no single ready-made world—only multiple versions constructed through different symbol systems, each organizing experience differently.
Worldmaking is Nelson Goodman's central philosophical concept, developed most fully in Ways of Worldmaking (1978). The thesis is stark: there is no version-free reality that our representations describe. There are only versions—structured constructions produced by different symbol systems (physics, painting, narrative, music), each organizing experience according to its own conventions and standards. The physicist's world of particles and forces, the painter's world of light and color, the historian's world of events and causes—these are genuinely different worlds, not different descriptions of the same world. Worldmaking proceeds through specific operations Goodman catalogued: composition and decomposition, weighting and ordering, deletion and supplementation, deformation. A new version is constructed by taking elements from prior versions, rearranging them, emphasizing some and suppressing others, stretching conventional categories or compressing them into new configurations. The materials are never original; the configuration is. What makes a version right is not correspondence to a pre-given reality but coherence, fit with other accepted versions, productivity of understanding, and responsiveness to the standards of the symbol system within which the version operates.
