ON GOODMAN’S QUERY’ Stephanie Ross University of Missouri- St. Louis 1. Introduction

Cub newspaper reporters are allegedly drilled in the five W’s. They are trained to answer the questions “Who?”, “What?”, “Where?”, “When?”, and “Why?” in the initial sentences of every story. In his recent book Ways of Worldmaking, Nelson Goodman has advised us to eschew one traditional W-question in aesthetics-“What is art?”-and replace it with another-“When is art?”. Goodman believes this new query has two advantages. First, it encourages us to abandon the fruitless search for necessary and sufficient conditions governing the concept of art; and second, it helps us to see why found objects and conceptual art are rightly grouped together with Rembrandt’s canvases and Beethoven’s compositions. But does Goodman’s new query elicit a new theory? I think not. T o explain whena symbol functions artistically Goodman must invoke a host of contextual factors. The artist’s intent, the audience’s expectations, artistic practice and representational con- ventions all play a role in determining whether a particular object or event is a work of art. And once these contextual details are supplied, I claim that Goodman’s account of ar t strongly resembles the institu- tional analyses of Arthur Danto and George Dickie.

In what follows I shall first set out the puzzle about non-representa- tional ar t which prompts Goodman’s new query. Next I shall present Goodman’s solution to this puzzle. Goodman views artworks as sym- bols in systems, and these in turn as ways of making worlds. I shall argue that any such treatment must incorporate a n account of meaning and reference like those of David Lewis or H. P. Grice.2 Finally, I shall show that this expansion of Goodman’s view relies on the very contextual details which define Danto’s Artworld or Dickie’s institutional analysis. In arguing that the account of ar t generated by Goodman’s new query resembles the institutional analyses of Danto and Dickie, I a m not taking issue with anything Goodman explicitly claims. He has not, t o my knowledge, discussed the institutional theory of art, and he has declared himself uninterested in questions about the origins and pre- suppositions of reference.3 It is here that we disagree. I believe such questions are interesting and important, for they reveal the contexts in which objects function artistically and point to unexpected kinships between Goodman’s, Danto’s, and Dickie’s divergent approaches to art.

Stephanie Ross received her Ph. D. from Harvard University in 1977. She is presently an assistant professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Her research interests include aesthetics. the emotions. and the philosophy of mind.

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2. A puzzle

Goodman’s query is prompted by a puzzle about non-representa- tional art. Purists or formalists in the tradition of Roger Fry and Clive Bell claim that we ought t o pay attention only to the intrinsic properties of a work of art, any others being irrelevant to our aesthetic interactions with it. Their proposal seems suited to the case of abstract art for abstract works, lacking representational content, seem therefore to lack significant references to the real world. Nonetheless, difficulties arise. First, there seems to be no satisfactory way of distinguishing intrinsic from extrinsic properties of a work of art. This is so even if we confine our attention to non-representational art. As Goodman notes, the formal properties of an abstract painting or an aleatory musical compo- sition are relational. They relate the painting o r composition to all other works which share those properties as well as to all those which lack them.4 Second, the proposed analysis cannot deal with cases of found art. Even supposing that the purist could make sense of the notion of formal properties, appeal to these cannot distinguish the gnarled drift- wood or assembled I-beams exhibited in museums from their countless counterparts on beaches and in scrapyards. Thus the formalists fail even to account for abstract art.

How does Goodman solve these problems? Beginning with Lan- guages of Art and continuing in Ways of Worldmaking, Goodman insists that we understand ar t within the larger context of symbol systems. He characterizes artworks in terms of three symbolic func- tions: what they say (denotation), what they express (metaphorical exemplification), and what they exhibit (literal exemplification). It is this last category which yields an explanation of non-representational art. Goodman proposes that the properties intrinsic t o a work of ar t are those which the work exemplifies. And these in turn he defines as the properties which the work both possesses and refers to. This view allows Goodman to distinguish the surface of a painting or the structure of a fugue as aesthetically relevant, as opposed to the label on the p i ~ t u r e , ~ or the quality of the paper on which the musical score is sketched. Moreover, Goodman holds that an object can exemplify certain of its properties a t some times but not a t others. This transience, he contends, solves the puzzles raised by found art. It also prompts his switch from “What?” to “When?”.

3. Exemplification

Goodman’s solution t o the problems posed by non-representational ar t is effective. 1 object only that he leaves exemplification unexplained. Throughout his writings, Goodman treats symbolization as a primitive. He speaks of works denoting, representing, expressing, and so on, without saying anything further about what is required for a set of sounds, marks, pigments, or motions to have such capacities. When this

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story is filled in, I claim that Goodman’s answer to the question “When is art?”resembles many of the competitors it is meant to replace. Return to the relation of exemplification. Goodman explains this relation through a pair of examples about samples. He introduces us to Mrs. Tricias who, ordering some fabric to reupholster her furniture, demands that it be exactly like the sample swatch. To her dismay she receives a package of hundreds of 2” x 3” fabric pieces. Later, the unfortunate Mrs. Tricias goes to a bakery to order cupcakes for fifty guests and two weeks later receives a n unwieldy fifty-pound cake. The moral, of course, is that samples are samples of some of their properties, but not of them all.6 Moreover, the sampled properties can change with circumstance. The question we now want to put to Goodman is, “Which of its properties is a sample a sample of a t any given time?” His answer is that it is a sample of those of its properties which it not only possesses but also exemplifies.’ This is all very well, but our question is simply reformulated. We now want to know “Which of its properties does a sample exemplify a t any given time?”Goodman’s next answer is a good deal less satisfactory. He says, in effect, “It all depends.”It depends on a n incredibly complex set of facts about circumstance, context, and convent ion.

Goodman makes very little effort t o untangle this network. He settles for the nearly circular claim that a sample

. . . isasampleo~-orcxemp/r~~s-onlysomeofitspropertiesand that the propertiesto which i t bears this relationship of exemplification vary with circumstances and can only be distinguished as those properties that i t serves. under the given circumstances. as a sample of.8

Let us return to Goodman’s sample-examples. What makes a tailor’s swatch a sample of color and texture but not size and shape? What makes a cupcake a sample not only of color and texture but of size and shape as well? Here is one answer: it is a convention in our society that tailors’swatches and bakers’displays are so treated. And, following one popular analysis: conventions themselves arise when antecedent prac- tice is bolstered and entrenched by a complex hierarchy of beliefs, preferences, and expectations. Thus upholsterers’swatches are samples of fabric but not of shape and size because that’s what customers expect of them, that’s what the upholsterers expect their customers to expect, that’s what those customers expect the upholsterers to expect them to expect, and so on, and so on. The initial practices generating these iterated expectations can themselves be justified. We can readily see that it would be impossible for an upholsterer to provide samples already sized to f i t any (and therefore all) of his clients’furniture. It is equally easy to rationalize the cupcake conventions holding in most bakeries. Since cupcakes are sold a t a uniform price per item, it is only practical that the cupcakes displayed are samples of the size a s well a s the flavor of the available merchandise. Thus the initial arrangements

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were mutually satisfactory; they benefitted both customer and dealer in past transactions. These rationalizations help explain why these partic- ular conventions regarding samples have arisen.

4. Convention and Meaning,,

My account of upholsterers’ swatches and cupcake displays owes much to the theories of meaning proposed by H . P. Grice and David Lewis. 1 would like to pause and indicate some central features of their accounts, for I shall argue below that Grice and Lewis’ theories of meaning provide the necessary supplement t o Goodman’s account of art.

Beginning with the paper “Meaning” in 1957 and continuing with others in 1968 and 1969, Grice sought to distinguish natural from non-natural meaning. The former is the sort of meaning according to which grey clouds mean rain, or red spots mean measles; the latter- meaning,,-is the sort of meaning according to which someone means something by her words or her gestures. We might say that the first sort of meaning arises from natural correlations, while the second arises from conventional ones. Thus meaning,, is the distinctive trait of languages and-more broadly-of symbol systems (within which cate- gory Goodman locates works of art).

Grice defines meaning,, in terms of utterers’ intentions. He claims that the meaning of a sign must be explained by appeal t o what users of the sign mean by it on particular occasions.10 Standard meaning, word meaning, and sentence meaning are all t o be derived from this funda- mental notion. Thus Grice grounds his theory in psychological and contextual details: the beliefs and intentions of speaker and audience, and the countless features which distinguish one from another the different occasions of utterance of a given sentence.

Grice’s initial definition is as follows: ‘A meant something by x’ is roughly equivalent to ‘A uttered x with the intention of inducing a belief by means of the recognition of this intention’.”

Thus a sentence (or gesture) is meaningful,, when the utterer intends to produce a belief in her audience and intends the recognition of her intention to play a role in its fulfillment. Twelve years after the appear- ance of his paper “Meaning,” Grice published a sequel which considers a host of counter-examples to his original definition and amends that definition in response to them. I * T o circumvent various counter- examples, Grice incorporates higher-order intentions in his definition. Not only must the utterer intend to impart a belief through recognition of her intention to d o so, but she must also intend that the audience believe that she intends to impart a belief through recognition of her intention to do so, intend that the audience believe that she intends that the audience believe that she intends to impart a belief through recogni- tion of her intention to d o so, and so on, and so on.

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Grice cautionsI3 that the iterated intentions cannot be heaped too high, for their recognition will soon require calculations too difficult for the audience to perform and cues too difficult for the speaker to indicate. The hedged and amended versions of Grice’s definition are themselves perplexing and difficult. The crucial point for our study of art is this: no word or utterance or gesture has meaning all by itself. I t does not announce its significance in the way that clouds announce rain or spots announce measles. Rather, it is only in the context of an appropriate and complex set of beliefs and intentions, possessed and mirrored between utterer and audience, that the symbols come alive.

David Lewis’ book Convention develops an account of meaning compatible with Grice’s. Beginning not with beliefs and intentions but with expectations, preference and desires, Lewis constructs a notion of convention which has meaning,, as a consequence or special case.I4 Lewis motivates his analysis by considering a number of co-ordination problems like the prisoner’s dilemma. The participants in such exercises must achieve an equilibrium by replicating one another’s practical reasoning. To replicate your practical reasoning I may have to replicate your attempt to replicate my reasoning.15 But then to replicate my practical reasoning, you may have to replicate my attempt to replicate your attempt to replicate my practical reasoning, etc. Thus Lewis’ analysis posits iterated and mirrored expectations and desires just as Grice’s analysis posited iterated and mirrored intentions and beliefs. In both analyses non-natural or conventional meaning is constructed from psychological and contextual building blocks. Lewis’ initial definition of convention reads as follows:

A regularity R in the behavior of members of a population P when they are agents in a recurrent situation S is a convenrion if and only if, in any instance of S among members of P,

( I ) everyone conforms to R;

(2)

(3)

everyone expects everyone else to conform to R ;

everyone prefers to conform to R on condition that the others do, since S is a coordination problem and uniform conformity to R is a coordination equili- brium in S.Io

It too is modified and complicated in the course of the book. Lewis’ ultimate interest is the convention of truthfulness in natural language. But again, consider the notions with which he begins-a convention is a regularity in the behavior of a community buttressed by a system of mutual expectations and a system of preferences. Members of the community develop “concordant mutual expectations”about each oth- ers’ actions from “first and higher order expectations about actions, preference, and rationality.”17 Thus as in Grice’s analysis, a regularity in behavior is a convention only if it is situated in the proper psychological

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context-only if it obtains because people’s expectations and desires are so ordered that each prefers to behave inaccord with the convention so long as others do.

Return now to the behavior relevant to the explanation of tailors’ swatches and cupcake displays. Let us conclude that with patience we could f i l l in a suitable Lewis-like account of the conventions according to which a fabric swatch exemplifies color and texture but not size and shape. a cupcake exemplifies texture, flavor, size, andshape, and so on. We can imagine which conventions about samples are likely to take root. We can imagine circumstances in which our conventions govern- ing samples might change. Any such account will still leave some notions unexplained-for instance, the notion ofexpectation. Nonethe- less, the account explains exemplification more fully than the passage from Goodman quoted above.

5. A Non-Representational Painting

Though Goodman’s account of exemplification is based on the func- tioning of samples in the commercial world, i t transfers readily to the realm of art. Let us consider a non-representational work of art , say a painting by abstract expressionist Morris Louis. Louis’painting “Color Barrier,”completed in 1961, is a large white canvas with an array of nine vertical stripes at its center. The innermost brown stripe is flanked by bands of forest green, deep red, orange, and lemon yellow; thecolors are pure. bright. and vibrant. While all the stripes are adjacent and some overlap, they create no illusion of depth. We d o not see the painting as portraying some possible spatial configuration.” Nor d o we see the painting as portraying movement. The stripes extend to the bottom of the canvas but not to the top. Their seeming downward flow, estab- lished by the weight of the vertical column, is balanced and stilled by the splashes with which they terminate at the top.

Clearly “Color Barrier” does not denote any particular scene, nor even some possible arrangement of autonomous shapes or objects. The painting expresses no emotion.19 The major symbolic function of the painting, then. is t o exemplify the colors stained on its surface, their configuration and interaction. How does the painting d o this and how d o we know that it does so? It is not the case that any canvas stained with pigment in just this way would function symbolically as “Color Barrier” does. Many factors inform our interactions with this painting, but one of the most important and most general is that we see it as painting, that is, we view it as a work of art of a certain sort, governed by certain conventions. Thus, when we go into museums, we generally expect to look, but not to touch. (Museum guards enforce these expectations.) Moreover, our eyes discern color and shape. And since the surface of “Color Barrier” doesn’t represent anything-at least, not in any lan- guage we know-we see it as color and shape.

So far this account of our interaction with “Color Barrier”exp1ains

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why we attend to certain of the picture’s properties and not to others, but it doesn’t tell us why the picture can also be said to refer to those properties. (Recall that possession and reference are required to estab- lish exemplification.20) A more complicated set of art-historical factors helps to establish that “Color Barrier”refers to (and therefore exempli- fies) its display of yellow, orange, red, green, and brown. Among these are the whole history of twentieth-century art (impressionism, cubism, and so on), the more specific art-historical context within which the work was produced (abstract expressionism), the existence of other Louis canvases similar in format (e.g., “Pillar of Fire,” “Pillar of Dawn”), the fact that other artists have produced works similar to (yet different from) “Color Barrier” in technique or materials or colors or composition (e.g., Frankenthaler’s stains, Noland’s stripes). Thus not only d o we pay attention to “Color Barrier”’s surface, but the painting itself, in virtue of its place in Louis’ oeuvre and in the history of twentieth-century American art, demands that we pay attention to its surface-to its colors, their quality, their configuration, their interac- tion, and so on. This ‘demand’ made by the painting constitutes a reference to its properties and thereby establishes that it exemplifies them.

6 . Symbols and Reference

I have discussed one painting at length in order t o show that Good- man’s treatment of exemplification (or rather my Gricean extension of that treatment) does apply to the world of art. Let us now think more abstractly and consider not samples, signs, or paintings, but symbols in general. Given proper circumstances, anything can be a symbol of anything else.21 Such relations can be set up by fiat, as in Goodman’s example of paintings in a commandeered museum serving to represent the battle formations of the enemy.22 While we can’t rearrange the meanings of every word in English t o suit ourselves, any one symbol can take on a new significance given sufficient stage-setting. Such stage- setting will involve all those factors invoked in Grice’s analysis of non-natural meaning-namely, the beliefs, desires, intentions, and expectations of both speaker and audience,

How do these reflections about symbols apply to the matter a t hand? Goodman’s ultimate answer to the (reformulated) question “When is art?” is the following:

. . .Just by virtue of functioning as a symbol in a certain way does an object become. while so functioning, a work of art.23

In his concluding paragraphs he elaborates upon this a bit:

. . . whether an object is art-or a chair-depends upon intent or upon whether it sometimes or usually or always or exclusively functions as ~ u c h . 2 ~

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In sum, an object is art when it functions symbolically as art-works do. Goodman lists five formal features which are symptomatic of the aes- thetic: syntactic density, semantic density, relative repleteness, exempli- fication, and multiple and complex reference.*s But these do not suffice to determine whether an object is a work of art. In particular, no formal or non-relational properties of an object can determine this. Goodman supports this point when he contrasts the jagged variegated line in a Hokusai drawing of a mountain with an identically shaped line occur- ring in, say, a graph of the rising value of hog futures. We treat these two symbols differently and find different aspects of them important because they appear in different contexts-contexts governed by vastly different conventions. And it is just this background-this account of context and convention-which must be added to Goodman’s theory to explain how objects come to acquire the symbolic functions characteris- tic of art.

7. The Art World

To flesh out Goodman’s theory and explain when an object functions symbolically as art we must mention a host of contextual factors. I claim that these are in fact the ingredients which make up Arthur Danto’s Artworld, the varied practices and conventions which George Dickie invokes in setting out the institutional theory of art. Let us briefly consider this theory. In his 1964 paper “The Artworld” Danto considered some now-classic examples of pop-art and remarked “To see something as art requires something the eye cannot decry-an atmos- phere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art; an art- world.’q6 Dickie found these remarks provocative in their emphasis on atmosphere and history. He took Danto’s suggestive phrase-the artworld-and transformed it into a theory-the institutional theory of art. Dickie proposed that something is art not because of its intrinsic exhibited properties but because of the status conferred upon it by the artworld. His formal definition reads as follows:

A work of art in the classificatory sense is ( I ) an artifact (2) a set of the aspects of which has had conferred upon it the status of candidate for appreciation by some person or persons acting on behalf of a certain social institution (the artworld).*’

Here is a further description of that social institution:

The artworld consists of a bundle of systems: theatre, painting, sculpture, literature, music, and so on, each of which furnishes an institutional background for the conferring of status on objects within its domain.28

Dickie elaborates and defends his theory in the book Art and the Aesthetic: A n Institutional Analysis. In addition to explicating the phrase ‘conferring the status of candidate for appreciation’, Dickie attempts to clarify the notion of a social institution. He states that a number of persons are required to make up the social institution of the

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a r t ~ o r l d , * ~ although only one need act on behalf of it to confer status on works of art. The institution itself is defined by customary practice3O and Dickie acknowledges the complexity of this practice:

Just as christening a child has as its background the history and structure of the church, conferring the status of art has as its background the Byzantine complexity of the artworld.31

Within each of the subsystems making up the artworld, distinctive conventions operate to determine the presentation and appreciation of works of art. These conventions ‘structure the experience of art’ and Dickie claims we learn them unselfconsciously, much as we learn our native language.)? Here are two of Dickie’s descriptions of the conven- tions and practices operative in the theatre:

A knowledgeable moviegoer knows what to attend to and what to ignore for the same reason that a spectator at traditional Chinese theatre knows to ignore the property man and attend to the actors-they both have learned the conventions that govern the presentation and appreciation of the art forms they are experiencing. Knowledge of the same kind of conventions is presupposed in the experience of the other arts also.33

And again: . . . a theatre-goer is not just someone who happens to enter a theatre; he is a person who enters with certain expectations and knowledge about what he will experience and an understanding of how he should behave in the face of what he will e ~ p e r i e n c e . ~ ~

Thus Dickie characterizes the members of the artworld in terms of their distinctive beliefs, expectations, and preferences. And he appeals to a notion of convention much like that formulated by David Lewis.

A number of philosophers have voiced cogent criticisms of Dickie’s theory. A frequent worry is the theory’s seeming circularity. Art is defined in terms of the artworld. Yet how is membership in that institu- tion to be determined except by appeal to our antecedent notions about what activities count as art? Moreover, if members of the artworld are free to confer the status ‘candidate for appreciation’ on anything what- soever, then the category of art has no bounds. Clearly a full-fledged defense-or defeat-of the institutional theory lies beyond the scope of this paper. Richard Wollheim has persuasively argued in Art and its Objects that our concept of art must be an historical one. And it is perhaps an historical view that can keep Dickie’s circle a virtuous one. We can appeal to practices of the past to delineate the artworld of the present and to place constraints on which new candidates may be proposed for admission. Of course documenting the relevant practices and spelling out the constraints would be a vast-and theory-laden- undertaking. I have focussed on the institutional theory because it calls attention to extrinsic factors-temporal, psychological, social, and contextual-which help determine whether something is a work of art. Both Danto and Dickie’s analyses imply that we must consult past and present custom and convention when answering Goodman’s question

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“When is art?”. Conversely, when we fill in the background to Good- man’s talk of denotation, expression, and exemplification we find our- selves describing features of the institution posited by Dickie and Danto.

None of what I have said so far refutes Goodman’s account of art. Nor d o I claim that Goodman, Danto, and Dickie hold indistinguish- able theories about the nature ofart . However, I d o believe that all three writers point t o a single feature: the role of context and convention in ourjudgments about what is art. Goodman appeals t o convention in his discussion of realism,35 but I have been arguing that his account of ar t embraces this notion in a much broader and more pervasive way. Goodman situated art works within the larger territory of symbol systems. Yet t o understand symbols and symbol systems we must recognize them as conventional in nature. Their significance stems from a complex background of social practice. Moreover this meaning or significance is non-natural-it owes to rule-governed rather than causal connections; it requires intentional explanation. Thus if we supplement Goodman’s theory of art with a Lewis- or Grice-style account of mean- ing and convention, we find ourselves filling in the institutional back- ground cited by Danto and Dickie.

8. Change-The ‘When’ of Art

In one of the passages quoted above, Goodman speaks of objects which sometimes, or usually, or always, or exclusively function as art. In closing, I’d like to examine this notion a little and show that Good- man’s new query allows us to acknowledge this temporal o r modal dimension of art. Probably the most famous example of an object which at a precise moment became art is the urinal which Marcel Duchamp christened “Fountain by R. Mutt” and displayed at the Independents Show in New York in 1917. By importing the urinal into the museum setting, Duchamp ‘created’art. This change in status did not extend to all the similar urinals in men’s rooms throughout the city, but only to the one urinal displaced from men’s room to museum.

For a more prosaic example of the same phenomenon, consider our attitude towards early American quilts. Despite their decoration, quilts were originally utilitarian items, meant t o keep our ancestors warm. We have now begun exhibiting quilts in museums. As a result, we have come to see them in a new way and to notice their similarity to 20th century abstract art. The quilts themselves haven’t changed, but within the institutional setting we attend to color, pattern and texture rather than inches of loft. Once in the museum, they exemplify aesthetic rather than warmth-giving properties. I don’t mean that the quilts undergo a magical change in status the instant they’re carried through the museum door. Old-time quilt makers surely valued the appearance of their creations.36 Yet when we today admire quilts-whether in the home or

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in the museum-our attitude is shaped by a whole set of recent events and changes in the artworld. These include the advent of color-field painting, a growing interest in handicrafts and decorative arts,3’ and the first large exhibition of quilts staged by New York’s Whitney Museum. Thus the values, interests, and choices displayed within that overall institution-the artworld-influence our perceptions of objects and our designations of art.

So far, I have been considering examples where non-art becomes art. What about change in the other direction? Can art works lapse into non-art? We often change our evaluations of works of art. But declaring something to be bad art is significantly different from declaring it to no longer be art at all. I t is the latter change which is relevant to Goodman’s concerns. The puzzles which prompted Goodman’s query involved objects which became art, which gained neN symbolic powers when placed in a new context. Can an art object’s symbolic function disap- pear through a parallel change? Goodman himself gives us one such example. I have already mentioned the case he describes of a museum commandeered in wartime, its paintings aligned to represent the ene- my’s placement. Compare the way we can willfully ‘choose’ to see a realistic painting as a meaningless pattern of colors and shapes. Do such paintings lose symbolic powers just as Duchamp’s urinal gained them?

I suspect this comparison is misleading. The example of seeing a realistic painting as a meaningless abstract pattern is more analogous to taking an ordinary English word and repeating it aloud twenty times in succession. The word becomes a meaningless cluster of sounds-but only to that speaker there and then. The word does not drop out of our language as nonsensical gibberish. Similarly, if the representational or expressive capacities of works of art are socially imbued, then I’m not sure individuals can will them away. Of course 1 can shred a painting or burn a sculpture for firewood. But can I demote the work of art without destroying it? Do I, in using a statue as a coatrack, strip it of its representational powers? Could any change in my behavior cause Mor- ris Louis’ painting “Color Barrier” to cease exemplifying its colors and stripes? And what might count as a musical work’s ceasing to be a work of art? My intuitions run thin here, but I will end with a bit of specula- tion. Informal practices coalesce gradually into conventions, but conventions-once established-are rigid and resistant to change. Moreover, any answer to the question “When is art?” must make mention of the conventions which constitute the Artworld. If an object’s functioning as art is as dependent on social and contextual factors as the account of this paper suggests, then the status “art object” might be a good deal easier to confer than to take away.

9. Conclusion

In this paper I have explored some ramifications of Goodman’s view.

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I have accepted his claim that denotation, expression, and exemplifica- tion are three centrally important modes of symbolization in the realm of art, then argued that the attribution “is a symbol” applies only to cases where a certain complex network of practice, preference, and expectation is established. I believe that pushing Goodman’s theory at these points-demanding a fuller description of what is required for a symbol to function in the ways Goodman specifies-points the way to some interesting new areas for research in aesthetics. Within Good- man’s theory of symbols, important new questions can be framed about the transience of art and about the range and limits of the symbolic relations which an artist can confer upon her creations. For example, could an abstract expressionist painting by Louis, Rothko, or Franken- thaler cease to exemplify its formal properties of color and shape yet still function as art? Could we come to radically re-evaluate the emo- tions we believe are expressed by Gericaux’s “Raft of the Medusa”or by Picasso’s blue period canvases? Are there constraints on the expressive powers of various colors, shapes, pitches? Are there parallel constraints on the range and application of similes and metaphors? What distin- guishes the cases where one art work resembles another, alludes to another, quotes another, satirizes another, extends another? These are all questions quickened by Goodman’s treatment of the nature of art, questions elicited by his new query “When is art?”.

NOTES

I An earlier version of this paper was read at the Fall, 1979, meeting of the Missouri Philosophical Association. I thank all the participants for their helpful discussion. I also benefitted greatly from the suggestions of an anonymous referee for this journal.

2 As presented in Lewis’ book Convenrion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969) and Grice’s paper “Meaning” (Philosophicul Review, 1957) and its successors “Utterer’s Meaning and Intentions” (Philosophical Review, 1969) and “Utterer’s Mean- ing. Sentence-Meaning, and Word-Meaning” ( Foundofions of Lnnguuge, 1968).

For example, see the beginning of Goodman’s recent paper “Routes of Reference” where he states:

Routes of reference are quite independent of roots of reference. I am concerned here with the various relationships that may obtain between a term or other sign or symbol and what it refers to, not with how such relationships are established.

See too his reply to Kjorup (Erkennfnis, 1978). p. 162:

Of course a mark or a painting becomes a symbol, as a piece of wood becomes a railroad tie, through actual or intended use, whether by people, other animals, or machines; but the characteristics and functions of symbols as of railroad ties can be studied quite apart from the acts or beliefs or motives of any agent that may have brought about the -referential or mechanical-relationships involved. In my approach to a theory of symbols I have examined types of referential functions and systems, willingly leaving to others questions about who perpetrated the systems and why.

4 Nelson Goodman, Wuys of Worldmuking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978). p. 62 5 Goodman, Wuys, p. 34. 6 Goodman, Wuys, p. 64.

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Goodman, Ways, p. 65.

Lewis, Convention. Grice, “Meaning,” p. 42. Grice, “Meaning,” p. 45. Some of the counter-examples have to do with situations where the utterer does not

intend to impart a belief-for example, an examiner questioning a student, or a teacher conducting a review session. Others involve cases of deception where the utterer intends the audience to believe that she has a certain intention which she lacks, or intends the audience to fail to notice an intention which she does in fact possess. See Grice, “Utterer’s Meaning and Intentions,” p. 152ff.

I] Grice, “Utterer’s Meaning and Intentions,” p. 160. l 4 Lewis, Convenrion, p. 154. I J Lewis, p. 27. 16 Lewis, p. 42. l 7 Lewis, p. 33. I* As we d o with the abstractions of Mark Rothko or Hans Hoffman. See Richard

Wollheim’s discussion in Arr and I I S Objecrs (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 13-14. Ip Although the painting may rightly be described as strong, bold, powerful, etc. 2o Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968), p. 53. 2 1 Strictly speaking, thisapplies to denotation but not to those other symbolic relations

Goodman explores: expression and exemplification. These latter two relations are defined in terms of possession (the one metaphorical, theother 1iteral)plus reference. And possession cannot be achieved by fiat. For a comparison of the relative constraints which operate on these three realms, see my “Art and Allusion,” Journalof Aesthetics and Art Criricism, forthcoming.

8 Ibid.

Goodman, Lunguages, p. 41. 2 3 Goodman, Ways, p. 67. 24 Goodman, Ways, p. 70. 25 Goodman, Ways, pp. 67-68. 26 Arthur Danto, “The Artworld” in G. Dickie and R. Sclafani, eds., Aesrhetics: A

*’ George Dickie, Art and the Aesrheric: An Institurional Analysis (Ithaca: Cornell

z~ Dickie, p. 33. 2p Dickie, p. 37. 30 Dickie, p. 104.

Dickie, p. 49. 32 Dickie, p. 178. I] Dickie, p. 172. 34 Dickie, p. 36. j5 Goodman, Lunguages, Chapter One, Section 8.

Crirical Anrhology (New York: St. Martin’s, 1977), p. 29.

University Press, 1974). p. 34.

No doubt they prized originality of color and design, intricacy and precision of stitching, as well as the sentimental value of quilts which incorporated materials from familiar articles of clothing or which were overlaid with embroidered figures and messages.

l7 Cf. Gombrich’s latest book The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology o/ Decorarive Art (Cornell, 1979) as an example of this trend.

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