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Nelson Goodman is an American philosopher.
He is best known to a wider public for his "new riddle of
induction", which he sets up by first defining a new color adjective, grue. "Grue"
applies to anything that looks green before some time t, and blue afterwards. (He also throws in, as a bonus, "bleen", which applies to anything that looks blue before some time t, and green
afterwards.)
Now, he says, how do we know that the grass is green and not grue before that time t arrives, and that the sky is blue and not
bleen? This is for him, and numerous other analytic philosophers who jumped into the fray, a very worrisome problem indeed! But the question is
why do they think that this silly little puzzle is so important? The answer is, they are under the insidious sway of the notion
(perhaps unconsciously) that only deduction is a valid way of determining new
truths.
Thus induction and all other methods of thinking are suspect. The strange thing is, however, that deduction is really not all
that important in people's every-day thinking; analogy, for instance, is far more important. Thus the attempt to force all other
forms of thinking into the "induction" straight-jacket, and then to squeeze induction into some variety of deduction is screwed
up from the very start. It says a lot about the state of analytic philosophy that this "grue" business is one of the "big
issues".
Nelson Goodman seems quite keen
Induction yet to show anew
Is somewhat sick as will be seen
And may not be completely true.
Is this leaf a lovely green?
Or is it rather colored grue?
Is the sky above quite bleen?
Or am I right in seeing blue?
I really don't care to be mean
And have no wish to Goodman skew;
But childish puzzles can demean;
Has he nothing else to do??
--JSH, "On 'The New Riddle of Induction'"
External links
http://www.futurefeedforward.com/front.php?fid=56&fpg=2&sid=55&spg=1
http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~cfs/305_html/Induction/Grue.html
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