[spsp-members] Workshop: Ways of Worldmaking: Nelson Goodman and the Languages of Technology and Art

[Alfred Nordmann]

Call for Participation

Ways of Worldmaking: Nelson Goodman and the Languages of Technology and Art

January 16 to 19, 2024 in Weimar (Oßmannstedt), Germany

The fairly slim, yet enormously influential books Ways of Worldmaking
(1984) and Languages of Art (1968/76) by Nelson Goodman offer a rich
account of processes involved in constructing and creating reality.
Pictures, descriptions, and notations; denotation and exemplification;
truth and rightness; works and worlds; working and fitting — these
notions are discussed with a concrete sensibility for abstract
questions: how we do things (not only with words!) and what this implies
for ontology and epistemology. Throughout, Goodman chips away at the
philosophical prejudice that questions of truth and questions of
worldmaking boil down to the problem of picturing, highlighting instead
the procedural and creative aspects of worldmaking.

While Goodman discusses works of fine art, he does not — or only
incidentally — consider works of technical art. Worldmaking and
Goodman’s constructivism are confined to the ways in which one presents
(darstellen) and represents (vorstellen) worlds, broadly conceived. Our
workshop seeks to explore how we might extend this to artefactual
worldmaking, to making and building and design. How does this implicate
codes and notations and principles of composition, how does technology
denote or exemplify, anticipate, project, or transform a world?

We are not looking for a series of fully worked-out lectures. Instead,
we want to engage together in a creative re-reading of Goodman through
the lens of the philosophy of technology. Therefore, we want to bring
together experts in the philosophy of Goodman who are interested in the
philosophy of technology, as well as philosophers of technology and
philosophers of art who are curious to expand and refine our ideas of
technological practice and the languages of people and things.

The envisioned workshop will be small (no more than 20 participants),
including MA and PhD students as well as senior researchers. Cost for
travel and accommodation can be covered to a considerable extent. Please
send expressions of interest by October 2 to
mohammadsadegh.mirzaei at tu-darmstadt.de.

Ryan Wittingslow (Humboldt Fellow, TU Darmstadt and Rijksuniversiteit
Groningen), Sabine Ammon (TU Berlin), Alfred Nordmann (TU Darmstadt)
with Sadegh Mirzaei (Sharif University of Technology and TU Darmstadt)