Goodman article, and Elgin

Blake Daniel Brown
Paths to Knowledge
15 February 2009

The World: Absolutely Relative

Nelson Goodman discusses the “world” as a convention of humankind. The “actual” world, or the world-as-such, is ineffable. We, as humans, have as a part of our existence the need to create and sustain the “worlds” we live in, and given the pluralism that exists in our “worlds” and the effects of technology on our abilities to encounter and communicate with people that live “worlds apart”, it can be difficult to negotiate the crumbling terrain of being in a “world.”
What Goodman does in his essay Words, Works, and Worlds, is cast a soft light on this reality. We needn’t have a panic attack given the ineffability of the world-as-such; rather, we ought to recognize that what is considered the “world” by ourselves may not be the case for others. Given this understanding, we can explore our “world” and the “worlds” of others as we journey through life.

But what are we to take as a good world to live in? Is there epistemic continuity between worlds? Well, there must be, for one strong fundamental commonality of world-making and world-inhabitance is the human capacity and apparent need for language, wherein resides the possibility for epistemic continuity. Language is rule-governed. While it is possible to redefine the parameters of language, we most often seem to use language to communicate with one another, and given this aim of language, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to do this. Given this, we flourish by playing by the rules of language, i.e., reason, and correspondingly, logic.

With language as our medium of epistemic continuity between worlds, we can discern the good life by understanding our own world and the worlds of others. Whether we are right about our mode of inhabiting the good life is unknowable absolutely, but is knowable contingently. This is where I see some of Elgin’s work coming in to play. Perfect Procedural Epistemology would say that we ought to maintain skepticism about our world and the worlds of others because the truth of our ideas about reality are absolutely uncertain, and therefore, to avoid error, we remain in ignorance.

If we inhabit the world through the Perfect Procedural Epistemological lens, we indeed do become downtrodden and skeptical about the whole endeavor of life; which is why we may have much to gain by considering life through the lens of Imperfect Procedural Epistemology. In inhabiting a pattern of thought and action governed by Imperfect Procedural Epistemology we can consider opposing views of reality with a bit of a grain of salt, and still maintain a rigorous pursuit of knowledge and truth. In doing so, we have the possibility of learning from one another about the common experience called Life, and experiencing a richer world of our own.