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THE COSMOPOLITAN VISION OF
YAŚOVIJAYA GANI
Jonardon Ganeri
Two ways of World making
Speaking of a multitude of irreducible "worlds,” Nelson Goodman draws our attention to the idea that there is no one unique way of describing, depicting, representing or otherwise capturing in thought the shared space we inhabit. Made worlds-versions, views, renderings - differ from one another as a novel might differ from a painting, or a poem from a news report. If that is right, and if we nevertheless want to be able to speak of conflict and consistency between worlds, then our standards of comparison and measures of rightness must appeal to considerations other than merely correspondence with the truth. Goodman therefore says that “So long as contrasting right versions not all reducible to one are countenanced; unity is to be sought not in an ambivalent or neutral something beneath these versions but in an overall organization embracing them."!
Goodman's notion of a made world performs some of the same conceptual work as is done by its counterpart in Jainism, the concept of a naya, a perspective, standpoint or attitude within which experience is ordered and statements are evaluated. The Jains argue that diferent philosophy, when they construct different philosophical systems, emphasize different stand-points.? (cf. Matilal 1998: 133). With the Jainas too, a prominent thought is that conflicting right views are to be brought together not by trying to show that there is, after all, some single truth underneath, of which the views are but different modes of presentation, but rather than there is a coordinating unity above, to which each view makes a proper but partial contribution.
This familiar distinction between top-down and bottom-up models of unity is one much in evidence in recent discourses about cosmopolitanism. In favour of a top-down approach, for example, it
