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Nelson Goodman is widely acknowledged as one of the most important analytic philosophers of the post-World War II era. He made penetrating original contributions to logic, philosophy of science, aesthetics, the theory of symbols, epistemology, and metaphysics. Rather than engaging his philosophic predecessors in debates of historic interest or becoming sidetracked by ideological concerns, Goodman developed his own approach to symbol systems. He held that science and the arts alike contribute to understanding. In Ways of Worldmaking (1978) Goodman claimed that there are many correct, even conflicting, versions of the world; yet, he vigorously denied that "anything goes." He acknowledged that wrong versions exist, which he referred to as "not well made." A major portion of his work was devoted to differentiating among the various types of symbols according to their syntactic and semantic features and sorting out their respective contributions to knowledge. He approached value questions not to formalize them but to suggest that the particular value dimension in question be specified.
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