Nelson Goodman’s work
August 21, 2002 | Michael Leddy
2 Comment(s)
I’m wondering–do you see any relations between your work and that of the philosopher Nelson Goodman? It’s been a while since I’ve read Goodman, but I kept expecting his name to turn up somewhere in Envisioning Information or Visual Explanations.
Years ago, while working on Envisioning Information, I tried to read Goodman on art and aesthetics but just couldn’t get anywhere. For me, at any rate, Goodman’s analysis was unvisual, thickly wordy, and didn’t help to see better or to think differently about visual matters. I didn’t have much luck with Roger Fry either.
I much prefer Klee, Arnheim, Gombrich, Schapiro, Alexander–artists and scholars who are closer to the visual experience. They have all given me insights into seeing and reasoning about seeing.
Speaking of Alexander, “Edward Tufte meets Christopher Alexander”, at
http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1085313.1085322
This paper examines the relationships between Christopher Alexander’s Fifteen Properties of living structures, found in The Nature of Order, and Edward Tufte’s Principles of Information Design, found in Envisioning Information. In the examination of examples of Tufte’s Principles, we find commonality between the Principles and Alexander’s Fifteen Properties.