--- title: What did Nelson Goodman and Hilary Putnam say about many true versions of the world? description: "The American philosophers Nelson Goodman (1906 to 1998) and Hilary Putnam (1926 to 2016) both held that there is no single, finished description of the world waiting to be found. Goodman, in *Ways of Worldmaking* (1978), held that we make…" url: "https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/wiki/what-did-nelson-goodman-and-hilary-putnam-say-about-many-true-versions-of-the-world/" updated: "2026-11-10" category: People tags: - "co-creation" - conceptual relativity - does it grow corn - "God's-eye view" - Hilary Putnam - internal realism - irrealism - logos - mythos - Nelson Goodman - pluralism - Reason - rightness - stalking oneself - Truth and History - versions - Ways of Worldmaking - worldmaking --- # What did Nelson Goodman and Hilary Putnam say about many true versions of the world? The American philosophers Nelson Goodman (1906 to 1998) and Hilary Putnam (1926 to 2016) both held that there is no single, finished description of the world waiting to be found. Goodman, in *Ways of Worldmaking* (1978), held that we make many right, even conflicting, versions of the world through science, art, perception and everyday speech, though not every version is right; Putnam held that we can never step outside all our ways of describing to a 'God's-eye view', yet truth is not merely relative. Both sit close to the shamanic teaching that every journey is co-created, real yet clothed in the forms we bring, though Therapeutic Shamanism holds more firmly than Goodman to the reality of what is being described. ## Who were Nelson Goodman and Hilary Putnam? Goodman was born on 7 August 1906 in Somerville, Massachusetts. Before he became a professional philosopher he ran an art gallery in Boston, from 1928 to 1940, and art stayed at the centre of his work. He took his doctorate at Harvard in 1941, taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Brandeis, and returned to Harvard from 1968 to 1977, where he founded Project Zero to study and improve education in the arts. His books include *Fact, Fiction, and Forecast* (1954), with its famous 'new riddle of induction', *Languages of Art* (1968) and *Ways of Worldmaking* (1978). He died in Needham, Massachusetts, on 25 November 1998.^[1](#note-1) Putnam was born on 31 July 1926 in Chicago. He taught at Northwestern, Princeton and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and moved to Harvard in 1965, where he stayed until he retired in 2000; Goodman joined the same department in 1968. He worked across the philosophy of mind, language, mathematics and science, and is known for the slogan "Meanings just ain't in the head!" and for his argument about brains in a vat. He died on 13 March 2016.^[2](#note-2) 1. "Nelson Goodman", *Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy*. 2. "Hilary Putnam", *Encyclopaedia Britannica*; *The Harvard Crimson*, 26 March 1965. ## What did Goodman mean by worldmaking? That worlds are made, not found, by the ways we describe and depict them. Ask how the world is, and an answer can be given under one frame of description or another; insist on how it is apart from all frames, and there is nothing left to say. "We are confined to ways of describing whatever is described."^[3](#note-3) 'The sun always moves' and 'The sun never moves' can both be right, each within its own frame, and Goodman took such conflicting truths to belong to different versions, or worlds. Elsewhere comes the short form, "There are many worlds, if any."^[4](#note-4) He described the movement of his thought as one from a single truth and a world "fixed and found" to many right versions, "worlds in the making", made not from nothing but from other worlds already on hand, so that "the making is a remaking."^[5](#note-5) Science is one way of making a world, but so are perception, painting, music and metaphor, and the arts must be taken "no less seriously than the sciences as modes of discovery, creation, and enlargement of knowledge".^[6](#note-6) He called his position "a radical relativism under rigorous restraints". The restraints matter as much as the relativism. Not every version is right, and "a willingness to welcome all worlds builds none." Truth is only one kind of rightness among others, such as a good fit, a fair sample or a well-made design, and rightness is relative to a system, but "such relativity should not be mistaken for subjectivity".^[7](#note-7) 1. Nelson Goodman, *Ways of Worldmaking* (Harvester Press, 1978), Chapter I. 2. "Nelson Goodman", *Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy*. 3. Nelson Goodman, *Ways of Worldmaking* (Harvester Press, 1978), Foreword and Chapter I. 4. Nelson Goodman, *Ways of Worldmaking* (Harvester Press, 1978), Chapter VI. 5. Nelson Goodman, *Ways of Worldmaking* (Harvester Press, 1978), Foreword, Chapters I and VII. ## What did Putnam add? A middle way between two pictures of truth. In the late 1970s Putnam turned against what he called metaphysical realism, the idea of one fixed world with one true and complete description, seen as if from outside. In its place he proposed internal realism. We cannot sensibly take a "God's-eye view" of how we relate to the world, and what is correct depends on what human beings are prepared to recognise as correct, yet truth is not therefore relative.^[8](#note-8) His *Reason, Truth and History* (1981) set out "to break the strangle hold which a number of dichotomies appear to have", chief among them "the dichotomy between objective and subjective views of truth and reason".^[9](#note-9) Putnam agreed with Goodman that we have no access to a world apart from our versions, but he doubted Goodman's many worlds. Saying two versions conflict, he pointed out, means their words must share a meaning, and it is not clear they do. And in a piece of 1992 he allowed that the idea that we make the Big Dipper by grouping stars is plausible, but not that we make the stars.^[10](#note-10) He later moved away from the label 'internal realism' towards what he called a commonsense realism.^[11](#note-11) 1. "Putnam, Hilary", Encyclopedia.com; "Hilary Putnam", *Encyclopaedia Britannica*. 2. Hilary Putnam, *Reason, Truth and History* (Cambridge University Press, 1981), Preface. 3. "Nelson Goodman", *Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy*. 4. "Hilary Putnam", *Encyclopaedia Britannica*. ## How does their work connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? Through co-creation. Shamanic journeys are not an objective experience but something co-created between us and Spirit. What we experience is real, yet to make sense of it we give it form and imagery we can comprehend, and so journeys are never objectively true; like great paintings, music or poems, they attempt to convey something mysterious, intangible and ineffable, shaped by our own frameworks, beliefs and prior knowledge.^[12](#note-12) Goodman's claim that the arts are a way of knowing, and Putnam's refusal of the split between objective and subjective, both sit close to that. The same underlying archetypal themes and energies are expressed in very different cultural imagery, from Renaissance paintings of heaven to paintings of Buddhas and Hindu gods and goddesses.^[13](#note-13) Even the choice to bring non-hierarchical thinking to the Lower-World**Lower-World.** The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. [Read the full answer](/wiki/what-is-the-lower-world/) may colour what is experienced there, and there is no objective way of knowing; to experience the realms at all we cannot help but fashion them into something, which is why, although there are common underlying themes, experiences of the realms vary from culture to culture in their details.^[14](#note-14) That is a version of Putnam's point about the God's-eye view, made about the realms. And, like Goodman, shamanism does not conclude that every version is as good as every other. There is a saying, 'be careful what seeds you plant'; hierarchical thinking is not good seed, and that is why Core and Therapeutic Shamanism make a deliberate choice to see the Lower-World as a place of love and healing, and so experience it that way. Hence, too, the practice of stalking oneself, becoming aware of the thoughts, preconceptions and biases we bring, so they do not unconsciously distort the journey.^[15](#note-15) The question to ask of a version is the shamanic one. Does it grow corn, and what kind of corn does it grow?^[16](#note-16) See [Is shamanic journeying imagination, and how are journeys co-created?](/wiki/is-shamanic-journeying-imagination-and-how-are-journeys-co-created/) 1. Paul Francis, [*Finding Your Deep Soul*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/finding-your-deep-soul/), Chapter One, "Research, Then Journey". 2. Paul Francis, [*Rewilding Yourself*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/rewilding-yourself/), Chapter Two, "Co-Creation and the Hero's Journey". 3. Paul Francis, [*Rewilding Yourself*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/rewilding-yourself/), Chapter Two, "Our Interpretations Colour Our Experiences". 4. Paul Francis, [*Rewilding Yourself*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/rewilding-yourself/), Chapter Two, "Our Interpretations Colour Our Experiences". 5. Paul Francis, [*Finding Your Deep Soul*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/finding-your-deep-soul/), Chapter Four, "Our (Healthy) Inner Tribe". ## Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? On what lies beneath the versions. Goodman deliberately declined to posit any world underneath the versions; for him the search for one is futile. In shamanic practice the many cultural images are clothing for something that is there. The realms are not just made up, and shamans are clear that they are a world as real as this one.^[17](#note-17) The variety of versions is a sign of how humans perceive, not evidence that nothing lies behind them. On who makes the versions. Both philosophers wrote about human versions, made in human symbols and judged by human standards. In a journey the making is shared with the beings and the realms themselves, co-created between us and Spirit, not by us alone. 1. Paul Francis, [*The Shamanic Journey*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/the-shamanic-journey/), Chapter Three, "Real, Not Imaginary". ## What have critics said? The philosopher Israel Scheffler argued in 1979 that Goodman uses 'world' in two senses at once, sometimes meaning a version and sometimes what a version is about, and found it unacceptable that the things a version refers to should themselves be made by it. Putnam's doubt about the stars, above, makes a related point.^[18](#note-18) Goodman's general defence, made in *Ways of Worldmaking* before these criticisms, is against the charge that anything goes: rejecting one ready-made world does not make every version right, since standards of rightness still sort right versions from wrong, and the relativity of rightness to a system is not subjectivity.^[19](#note-19) 1. "Nelson Goodman", *Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy*. 2. Nelson Goodman, *Ways of Worldmaking* (Harvester Press, 1978), Chapters I and VII. - [What did Thomas Kuhn argue about paradigms?](/wiki/what-did-thomas-kuhn-argue-about-paradigms/) - [What did W. V. Quine argue about justifying experience?](/wiki/what-did-w-v-quine-argue-about-justifying-experience/) - [Is shamanic journeying imagination, and how are journeys co-created?](/wiki/is-shamanic-journeying-imagination-and-how-are-journeys-co-created/) - [What did Hans Vaihinger mean by the philosophy of "as if"?](/wiki/what-did-hans-vaihinger-mean-by-the-philosophy-of-as-if/) - [What did Ernst Cassirer teach about myth as a way of knowing?](/wiki/what-did-ernst-cassirer-teach-about-myth-as-a-way-of-knowing/) - [Who is Philippe Descola, and what are his four ways of seeing the world?](/wiki/who-is-philippe-descola-and-what-are-his-four-ways-of-seeing-the-world/) - [*Rewilding Yourself*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/rewilding-yourself/) (Chapter Two, co-creation and how our interpretations colour our experiences) - [*Finding Your Deep Soul*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/finding-your-deep-soul/) (Chapter One, journeys as mythos) - [all courses](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/shamanic-courses/)