Initially, it seemed to me that Goodman was claiming there can be no hierarchy whatsoever between any opposing realities or claims. This belief in complete subjectivity is a major part of Postmodernism with which I am unable to agree.

However, upon further reading, I found this quote, “That right versions and actual worlds are many does not obliterate the distinction between right and wrong versions”. Therefore, I decided that this essay could be read as having more to do with a human perception of reality than with reality itself. It seemed to be concerned with different ways in which one might crop or edit a view.

If a person is only able to view tiny, pieces of a vast and expansive whole then it would follow that many small fragments might appear to be in opposition with one another, even though they are a part of the same larger substance. The first visual example I thought of involved a Gary Hill video where one begins to get the sense of a room through cropped images of various objects and fragments of walls. By the end of the video, one thinks one has a sense of the room he was in when documenting. However, this is a question that remains open, for who is to say that the photos in the video were all taken in one room? There is something in this ideology that has to do with the way in which scientists work, isolating variables and testing results.

I am interested in what Words, Works Worlds had to say about the distinction between “saying or representing on the one hand and showing or exemplifying on the other”. I think I am more interested in works that achieve the latter. Illustration is often less revealing than an embodiment. Similarly, a fictional work can often get at realities that nonfiction is unable to touch, because fiction does not operate under the guise of carrying an untainted truth.