- Lived:
- 1906–1998 · Somerville, Massachusetts → Boston's art world → Philadelphia → Harvard
- Tradition:
- American analytic philosophy; nominalism, constructionalism, and the philosophy of art
- The Big Idea:
- Neither science nor art simply copies a ready-made world — both build versions of it out of symbols, and the hard question everywhere is not "is it a copy?" but "is it rendered rightly?"
- In their words:
- "The eye comes always ancient to its work."
- If you remember one thing:
- With one invented word — "grue" — he showed that evidence alone can never tell you which patterns to project into the future; our habits and histories are doing work that logic cannot do.