Constructionalism

Abstract

Goodman does not advocate an empiricist foundationalism and instead offers a constructional adequacy criterion for systems in general and argues that it be placed within the language of first-order predicate calculus with a set of terms defined within the system and an extra-logical set of terms taken as primitives that he calls “presystematic knowledge” or “the uninterpreted symbolic system”. The concrete phenomenal individual quale is the atomic unit. The kind of isomorphism required in Goodman’s system is not a one-to-one correspondence, because in the Goodmanian system the two domains are not perfectly equivalent. He thus proposes a system whereby each definiendum and definiens is not squared in a one-to-one correspondence, but that the whole system of the definiens corresponds to the new system of definiendum. Unlike the physicalists and the phenomenalists of his day, Goodman does not argue that reality is ascertained in a direct and unmediated way - there is no epistemology free from doubt. His coherentism is posited as relativized constructionalism based on relativized reference but is not completely relativized as his constructionalism requires that some individual statements must have initial credibility apart from their relations to other statements though the system as a whole i.e., the “presystematic knowledge”.