CONTENTS:
This book does not run a straight course from beginning to end. It hunts; and in the hunting, it sometimes worries the same raccoon in different trees, or different raccoons in the same tree, or even what turns out to be no raccoon in any tree. It finds itself balking more than once at the same barrier and taking off on other trails. It drinks often from the same streams, and stumbles over some cruel country. And it counts not the kill but what is learned of the territory explored.
For the third time in my life, work on a book has been spurred by an invitation to give a series of lectures. Special Lectures at the University of London led to Fact, Fiction, and Forecast. John Locke Lectures at Oxford University became Languages of Art. And the first Immanuel Kant Lectures at Stanford University provided the impetus for the present book and the basis for its last four chapters, although most of the final chapter is new. The first chapter was read at the University of Hamburg on the one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Ernst Cassirer; and the first four chapters have appeared as separate papers.
The list of those who have helped is, as usual, impossibly long and I can mention only Stanford University and its Philosophy Department, especially Patrick Suppes; my colleagues Israel Scheffler, W. V. Quine, and Hilary Putnam; and my Project Zero associates Paul Kolers and Vernon Howard.
Since the seven chapters have been written and rewritten during some seven years and are often variations upon recurrent themes rather than consecutive steps in an argument, repetitions are inevitable and I hope forgivable. My experience with students and commentators has not convinced me that reiteration is needless. Inconsistencies are less forgivable, and I trust fewer. Obvious inadequacies are for the convenience of critics.
Few familiar philosophical labels fit comfortably a book that is at odds with rationalism and empiricism alike, with materialism and idealism and dualism, with essentialism and existentialism, with mechanism and vitalism, with mysticism and scientism, and with most other ardent doctrines. What emerges can perhaps be described as a radical relativism under rigorous restraints, that eventuates in something akin to irrealism.
Nevertheless, I think of this book as belonging in that mainstream of modern philosophy that began when Kant exchanged the structure of the world for the structure of the mind, continued when C. I. Lewis exchanged the structure of the mind for the structure of concepts, and that now proceeds to exchange the structure of concepts for the structure of the several symbol systems of the sciences, philosophy, the arts, perception, and everyday discourse. The movement is from unique truth and a world fixed and found to a diversity of right and even conflicting versions or worlds in the making.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
The following abbreviations are used throughout the book:
SA for the third edition of The Structure of Appearance, D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1977 (first published 1951);
FFF for the third edition of Fact, Fiction, and Forecast, Hackett Publishing Co., 1977 (first published 1954);
LA for the second edition of Languages of Art, Hackett Publishing Co., 1976 (first published 1968);
PP for Problems and Projects, Hackett Publishing Company, 1972.