{"id":3334,"date":"2020-05-21T23:11:14","date_gmt":"2020-05-21T11:11:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/?p=3334"},"modified":"2020-05-21T23:11:18","modified_gmt":"2020-05-21T11:11:18","slug":"fate-time-and-language-david-foster-wallace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/2020\/05\/21\/fate-time-and-language-david-foster-wallace\/","title":{"rendered":"Fate, Time and Language — David Foster Wallace"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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In 1962, a short philosophy paper caused a little flurry in philosophical circles. Two decades later David Foster Wallace, armed with further developments in analysis, created an elaborate system of notation to solve the problem raised in the paper. This book contains Richard Taylor\u2019s original paper, the resultant flurry, and Wallace’s solution. It also contains a fair amount of background information about the whole exchange.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think most David Foster Wallace fans who pick up this book would enjoy the background info, and may be interested in the philosophical back-and-forth sparked by Taylor\u2019s paper. Probably the least engaging part is actually the bit written by Wallace. It\u2019s not surprising that he speaks the language of academic philosophy like a native; but that can be a hard language for the outsider to penetrate at times. This book is subtitled \u201cAn Essay on Free Will\u201d but it really is more a technical paper (it’s a thesis he wrote while at university). The title of section V, A formal device for representing and explaining the Taylor inequivalence: features and implications of the intensional-physical-modality system J<\/em>, gives a good flavour of the piece\u2019s uncompromising nature. And you thought Infinite Jest<\/em> was dense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So the whole thing started back in the \u201960s when the philosopher Richard Taylor came up with a ridiculous and somewhat convoluted argument purporting to show that, given certain reasonable-sounding assumptions, fatalism was true; in other words, we do not have control over our destiny. A simpler version of the argument could run as follows:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

  1. Tomorrow, either I will wear my hat or I won\u2019t wear my hat.<\/li>
  2. If I will wear my hat tomorrow, then I can\u2019t refrain from wearing my hat tomorrow; so I don\u2019t have a choice whether to wear my hat.<\/li>
  3. If I won\u2019t wear my hat tomorrow, then I can\u2019t wear my hat tomorrow; so I don\u2019t have a choice whether to wear my hat.<\/li>
  4. Both these cases lead to the same conclusion.<\/li>
  5. Therefore I don\u2019t have a choice whether to wear my hat.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    The same argument could be made for any other decision I could make. So therefore, I don\u2019t have any choice at all about anything. Fatalism is true. OMG FML.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Is this valid? Yes, I would say so. But is it fishy? Yes, definitely. And the reason is that it is not sound: the premise on the first line is false.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    As interpreted on line 2, to say that \u201ctomorrow I will wear my hat\u201d is already to assume that it is certainly going to happen, that is to say neither I nor anyone else has any choice about the matter. And the same is true about \u201ctomorrow I won\u2019t wear my hat\u201d. That\u2019s why in each case we can conclude that we have no choice in what happens. It\u2019s an unusually (perhaps unrealistically) strict interpretation of the word \u201cwill\u201d. Under this interpretation, yes, line 1 implies fatalism. But that doesn\u2019t matter because line 1 is not true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    We can accept as an axiom that every statement is either true or false. Therefore, either tomorrow I will wear my hat, or it is false that tomorrow I will wear my hat. But this is not the same as line 1. To show that it is, we would have to show that \u201cit is false that tomorrow I will wear my hat\u201d implies \u201ctomorrow I won\u2019t wear my hat\u201d. This implication is assumed by Taylor, and by all his critics, and causes everybody to tie themselves up in knots looking for problems elsewhere in his argument. But it\u2019s just a very basic problem in modal logic: false(tomorrow(wear my hat))<\/code> does not necessarily imply tomorrow(false(wear my hat))<\/code>. To show that it did, you would need to come up with some startlingly unorthodox arguments; Taylor doesn\u2019t even try. To be fair, I don’t think modal logic was really a thing until the 1970s, but it’s not that<\/em> complex (say I, 50 years later) and Taylor was<\/em> a professional philosopher.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Actually, I have just realised that my argument above is essentially the same as Wallace\u2019s. His preliminary statement in section III on page 164 is the same as the above, adapted to the (needlessly) more complex argument offered by Taylor. Wallace dots every i and crosses every t in his paper, compared to my hand-waving approach, which explains why his thesis is 80 pages long rather than one paragraph.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Anyway, once the above is established, we can see that any contingent statement about the future must be false. It is false that I will wear a hat tomorrow, and it is also false that I won\u2019t wear a hat tomorrow. This seems counterintuitive, but that\u2019s because normal usage of the future tense is a bit woolly (like my hat); we have to tighten up our meanings in order to draw rigorous conclusions. So:<\/p>\n\n\n\n