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Works, Texts, and Contexts: Goodman on the Literary Artwork

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

David Davies
David Davies*
Affiliation:
McGill University, Montreal, PQ, Canada, H3A 2T7
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Extract

We have seen that a musical score is in a notation and defines a work; that a sketch or picture is not in a notation but is itself a work; and that a literary script is both in a notation and is itself a work. Thus in the individual arts a work is differently localized. In painting, the work is an individual object; and in etching, a class of objects. In music, the work is the class of performances compliant with a character. In literature, the work is the character itself. And in calligraphy, we may add, the work is an individual inscription.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 21 , Issue 3 , September 1991 , pp. 331 - 345
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1991

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References

1 Goodman, Nelson Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Hackett 1976), 210Google Scholar

2 Goodman, Nelson Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett 1978), 67Google Scholar

3 Goodman, Languages of Art, 143

4 Ibid., 131

5 Ways of Worldmaking, 67-8

6 Ibid., 69

7 Goodman, Nelson and Elgin, Catherine Z. Reconceptions in Philosophy and Other Arts and Sciences (Indianapolis: Hackett 1987)Google Scholar

8 As an example of two syntactically equivalent inscriptions that fail to instantiate the same text by failing to belong to the same symbol system, consider any inscription and its identically spelled Twin Earth counterpart, where at least some of the terms employed in the inscription are assigned different extensions in the interpretation of the languages English and Twin Earth English.

9 Goodman and Elgin, 58

10 In proposing these alternatives, Goodman and Elgin may have in mind Arthur Danto, who advances a version of (2) in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1981). In fact, Dan to himself uses the Borges example introduced below to argue against versions of (1). See section VI below for further discussion of this point.

11 See, for example, Danto, 32-6 and passim.

12 Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1970), 62-71

13 Goodman and Elgin, 62

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid., 63

16 This is to avoid the objection that relevant differences in the constraints on rightness of interpretation for the two texts are merely a function of the one ‘text’ being embedded in a much larger text.

17 Borges, 68

18 Borges, 69. The following passage is also of interest in the present context: It is a revelation to compare Menard’s Don Quixote with Cervantes’. The latter, for example, wrote (part one, chapter nine): “ … Truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, exemplar and advisor to the present, and the future’s counsellor.” Written in the seventeenth century, written by the “lay genius” Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes: “ …Truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, exemplar and advisor to the present, and the future’s counsellor.” History, the mother of truth: the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an inquiry into reality, but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened. The final phrases — exemplar a11d advisor to the present, and the future’s counsellor — are brazenly pragmatic. (Borges, 70)

19 Elgin, in discussion at a recent symposium on Reconceptions, offered this kind of response to the Borges example.

20 Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, 35

21 Ibid., 40

22 Ibid., 38

23 Ibid., 39

24 Goodman and Elgin, 63-5

25 This should not be viewed as problematic. All that satisfaction of this condition requires is that there would be no question about the status of each inscription as a literary artifact if, counterfactually, its inscribing had occurred in the absence of the inscribing of the other inscription of the text.

26 Consider, for example, a situation in which a number of poets engage in the simultaneous composition of short poems When the resulting inscriptions are examined, A and Bare discovered to have independently generated inscriptions of the same text.

27 Dan to, 125; see also 135.

28 James McGilvray has suggested that the method by which an author generates an instance of a text might involve the simultaneous production of multiple inscriptions of the text — if, for example, the work is composed at a keyboard linked to more than one printer. In such a case, my account would hold — I think rightly — that the act whereby the multiple inscriptions of the text are generated creates a single work. Contrast this with the poetry competition described in note 26 above. It is a virtue of the proposed account— a virtue not shared by the Goodman/Elgin account— that it can distinguish between these two kinds of cases.

29 Binkley, Timothy ‘Deciding About Art,’ in Mogensen, Lars-Aagaard ed., Culture and Art (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press 1976), 90-109Google Scholar. I develop the idea of ‘artistic acts’ as a way of combining insights from both Goodman and the ‘Institutional’ theorists in ‘The Aesthetic Relevance of Artistic Acts’ (MA Thesis, University of Manitoba, 1979).

30 Dickie, George Art and tire Aesthetic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1974)Google Scholar

31 I disagree, here, with Gregory Currie who, in his recent very interesting defence of an act-oriented ontology of art (An Ontology of Art [New York: St. Martin’s 1989]) takes such an account to undermine Goodman’s autographic/allographic distinction. Currie’s argument rests on what I believe to be a dubious application of Putnamian ‘Twin Earth’ arguments to the generation of paintings and sculptures.

32 The reference, of course, is to Putnam’s famous slogan. See, for example, ‘The Meaning of “Meaning”,’ in Mind, Language, and Reality: Philosophical Papers Volume II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1975), 215-71.

33 For a defence of this view as it applies to works in the fine arts, and for a very interesting examination of the implications of such a view for practical criticism and scholarship in the fine arts, see Baxandall, Michael Patterns of Intention (New Haven: Yale University Press 1985)Google Scholar.

34 For a defence of this sort of account of intentionality, see Putnam, Hilary ‘Computational Psychology and Interpretation Theory,’ in Realism and Reason: Philosophical Papers Volume III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1983), 139-54CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Representation and Reality (Cambridge: MIT Press 1988), ch. 7.

35 Ways of Worldmaking, 129

36 I should like to thank Catherine Elgin, Barbara Fultner, Michael Hallett, Paisley Livingston, James McGilvray, and Patrick Maynard for helpful discussions of these issues and/or critical comments on earlier versions of this paper. The writing of this paper was greatly facilitated by a Research Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.