(1911-) US writer and social critic whose many works (novels, plays, essays) express his anarchist, antiauthoritarian ideas. He studied young offenders in Growing up Absurd 1960.

(Benjamin David) (1909-1986) US clarinetist. He was nicknamed the “King of Swing” for the new jazz idiom he introduced with arranger Fletcher Henderson (1897–1952). In 1934 he founded his own 12-piece band, which combined the expressive improvisatory style of black jazz with disciplined precision ensemble playing. He is associated with such numbers as ‘Blue Skies’ and ‘Let’s Dance’.
Born in Chicago, he studied classical clarinet with Franz Schoepp of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra before embarking on a successful freelance solo career 1921, influenced by the New Orleans style. He introduced jazz to New York’s Carnegie Hall 1938. In the same year he embarked on a parallel classical career, recording the Mozart Clarinet Quintet with the Budapest String Quartet, and commissioning new works from Bartók (Contrasts 1938), Copland, Hindemith, and others. He also recorded jazz with a sextet 1939–41 that included the guitarist Charlie Christian (1916–1942). When swing lost popularity in the 1950s, Goodman took a series of smaller groups on world tours, culminating in a US-government-sponsored visit to Moscow 1962.

(Abraham) (1913-1995) English lawyer and political adviser. Once described as the most powerful man in Britain, he was adviser to three prime ministers: Harold Wilson, Edward Heath, and John Major. He has the unique distinction of having been made a peer by a Labour prime minister and a Companion of Honour by a Conservative one.
Goodman was born in London and studied law at University College, London, and Downing College, Cambridge, where he obtained a double first. A tall man of considerable bulk, he often used his size as a lever in difficult negotiations. Although Goodman advised governments of all political persuasions, he is best remembered for his links with the Labour Party, and particularly Harold Wilson. Perhaps the key to his success as a lawyer and negotiator was that he carried very little ideological baggage, thereby winning the trust of people with widely differing backgrounds and persuasions.
A lifelong bachelor who thought women intellectually inferior, he said that he could accomplish so much in a day (he was chair of the Arts Council, master of an Oxford college, chair of the Observer newspaper, director of two national opera houses, cofounder of the National Theatre, government negotiator in dealings with Rhodesia (as it was), chair of the Newspaper Publishers’ Association, and of the Housing Association, and lawyer to labor unions and popular media stars) because he had no domestic distractions and no need to consult a companion before taking decisions.

Množina: Goodmen

(1906-) US philosopher who tried to dispel the confusions of everyday language by the use of formal logic. His alleged “new riddle of induction” (Goodman’s paradox) posits the lack of justification for the way in which we prefer one of the many conceivable characteristics of a set of things we have observed to other, less obvious ones when we generalize about the set as a whole. In esthetics, he attacked the idea that art represents reality by resembling it.
Goodman was born in Somerville, Massachusetts, and initially worked as an art dealer after graduating. He taught at Harvard for most of his career, before becoming a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
His most important work is The Structure of Appearance 1951.

Množina: Goodmen

1. Town in Mississippi (USA); zip code 39079.
2. Town in Missouri (USA); zip code 64843.

Množina: goodmen

The master of a household

Množina: Goodman's paradoxes

Riddle of induction (reasoning from the particular to the general) formulated by US philosopher Nelson Goodman. He invents a property “grue”, which applies to any green thing examined before a given time and also to any blue thing at any time, and uses it to show that in inductive reasoning some events do, and some do not, establish regularities from which we can make predictions, and that what determines our habits of classification is how deeply a property is entrenched in our thinking.
A prediction that all emeralds examined before the given time will be green, and a prediction that they will be “grue”, are both equally likely to be true. However, if, after the given time, we examine an emerald and it is “grue”, it must be blue and not green. Moreover, if the confirmation of predictions is defined in terms of past success, anything can be made to confirm anything else by inventing strange properties like “grue”. Some philosophers have criticized the device of a time-linked property as artificial.