ABSTRACT
The preceding two chapters have shown that pleasure, beauty, play, and emotional stimulation are all closely connected with art and our experience of it and all of considerable value, yet none of them adequately explains the value of art at its finest. The arguments that have shown this have brought us now to the idea that art is valuable as a source of understanding. Among prominent modern philosophers of art the best-known exponent of this belief is the American philosopher Nelson Goodman. In an influential book entitled Ways of World Making he says:
[a] major thesis of this book is that the arts must be taken no less seriously than the sciences as modes of discovery, creation, and enlargement of knowledge in the broad sense of advancement of the understanding.
