Hey guys, I saw DFW's undergraduate thesis in philosophy posted here yesterday, so I thought you guys would appreciate a couple screenshots of excerpts from it. You should read it, it's not much different form his novels tee bee eytch
>not caring about the compositional interaction of temporal and modal operators
you're not a fucking pleb are you? This is part of the full DFW experience
This one has a watermark on it
This just doesnt make sense to me. What is it?
Reading this was daunting but I consider myself a DFW fanboy for life and if I was going to 100% his oeuvre, I had to do it. I can't claim that I understood it completely, but I got through it and there (cool robot voice) Achievement Unlocked.
it's supposed to disprove fatalism, if i recall correctly.
So what you're asking is
>what did he mean by this?
this one has a watermark too
Yea pretty much. Is any of this stuff layered in infinite jest or his short stories?
wtf does it mean? what is he trying to say?
>And finally, it was discovered, that he was a man of infinite jest.
Fucking hack, man. I had to read all of those arguments for necessity and possibility based on an ontological framework of possible worlds and he ends the monograph with that remark? It absolutely triggered me.
I don't really understand what is this about but don't really care
By the way, where did you get that thesis? Can you provide a link?
t. logician who did not know DFW had written anything using a real language
I have no fucking clue what any of this says. Fuck off STEMfag
How are you a logician who hasnt heard of the most famous take down of Taylor's fatalism?
well now I have to read this shit...
DFW is the most annoying author alive. probably doesn't say anything interesting either. maybe i'll learn some notation.
>alive
Should we tell him?
Lmao
I don't know where to find a raw PDF of it, but I'll look.
Last excerpt.
For those really interested in what this is about, it's an application of modal logic to show that certain claims about necessity are time-sensitive, so that e.g. claiming 'it is now not possible that x happened' is logically distinct from 'it was impossible that x would happen.' Wallace argues that a famous argument for fatalism from the 60's -- the thesis that everything that one can do, one necessarily does -- is false because the argument only derives conclusions of the first, weaker sort, and traded on an ambiguity that acted as if it derived conclusions of the stronger second sort.
forgot pic
I study mathematics, not philosophy.
Ahhh that's very patrician you logician, what do you do day to day?
I'm actually just a grad student pursuing work in model theory. So my day to day is basically procrastinating instead of actually writing my thesis.
What draws you to model theory? What draws one to model theory?
At least he did some actual philosophy as opposed to the muh feelings crap of conticuckage
>conticuckage
?
He was joking. No one in philosophy pays attention to this alleged "take down" by DFW.
Yeah, my assessment of DFW went up a notch - at least he was trying. His book on infinity is still horrifically bad, though.
>His book on infinity is still horrifically bad, though.
what's wrong with it
The book is filled with errors large and small. He simply does not understand the relevant mathematics. But he pretends to. Very cringe-inducing.
I don't believe you could point out even one error.
I havent read it but I heard it was more about the dangers of abstraction than any mathematical principles and what not.
continental I assume
>I havent read it
then don't say anything, idiot
it literally explains mathematical ideas
When Wallace lists the standard axioms of set theory from which mathematicians derive theorems about the iterative conception of a set, he gets the very first one wrong. (It is not, as he says, that if two sets have the same members, then they are the same size. It is that two sets never do have the same members.) From there it is pretty much downhill. He goes on to discuss Cantor’s unsolved problem. There are many different, equivalent ways of formulating the problem; Wallace gives four. The first and fourth are fine. The second, about whether the real numbers ‘constitute’ the set of sets of rational numbers, does not, as it stands, make sense. And the third, about whether the cardinal that measures the size of the set of real numbers can be obtained by raising 2 to the power of the smallest infinite cardinal, is simply wrong: we know it can.
OK, check this review of it by SF writer and math professor Rudy Rucker, a guy who actually DOES understand the math.
I tend to take kindly memes on Veeky Forums, eventually. DFW has been an exception; I have had zero interest in reading any of his work although he's been a lit meme for some time.
This thread may have changed that. If a young man is attempting some large-scale (potentially very wrong) logico-mathematical structure, in the tradition of Witty, Gödel and Spinoza, then I would like to know more about it, however flawed. links and info plx.
More generally, a review of modern philosophy establishes that many important works exist as shorter, bulleted items: Lockes' second treatise of Government, Debord's Society of the Spectacle, Witty's Tractatus, and more generally Spinoza (after Euclid), Kant's Prolegomena, and I'll just throw in the Federalist and both the Commie Manifesto and Mao's book to make my point about an accpted structure for modern philosophical works: do a paragraph, or a page or two, and constantly bullet your short items somehow, so people can readily look them up again. Legalese.
A lower poster indicates that Wallace didn't know what he was talking about, with respect to serious math. this is also of interest.
t. math autist
It's not large scale. Just another hair-splitting analytic philosophy of language laugh-fest with gratuitous formal logic to "back it up."
Still it has notation and figures and shit and it attempts some sort of philosophical synthesis in logical terms, hence my interest in it. I did hold open the possibility of "a term paper" since he was in undergrad and all, but the notation seems to me to be fairly original at least, regardless of how bad he did or didn't screw up.
I see symbols 'n shit, I'm automatically interested, even if it's bullshit.
It's only complicated because the language we use to talk about possibility is complicated if you try to formalize it. But really anyone knows it's simple as pie if you just take on an ontological picture which can be formalized in much simpler terms. This is a parody of analytic philosophy if it's anything at all.
Also >impressed by symbols
Grow the fuck up
>Analyticals
guys, you can't just understand a paper in modal logic if you haven't taken modal logic. this paper will mean nothing to you if you don't have a decent background in analytic philosophy. and that's okay.
if cormack mccarthy used to be an electrical engineer, you wouldn't expect be able to understand any of the papers he wrote in electrical engineering. not without some background in electrical engineering and certainly not with jpeg screencaps from the paper as all you have to go on
This doesn't make you better and it doesn't make you worse than someone who has a background in analytic philosophy. different people know different things and reading james joyce isn't going to give you intellectual horsepower that you can use to overcome any cognitively difficult task.
just shut the fuck up guys, you have no idea what you're talking about, go to sleep
>Still it has notation and figures and shit and it attempts some sort of philosophical synthesis in logical terms, hence my interest in it
Just like every other published work of analytic philosophy in the past 100 years.
dude travis
Hahahaha even from just reading the quotes (prepare yourself) I can tell that DFW was being entirely acerbic but this math autist loser failed to see that and wrote an entire review essentially proving his point about academia, can't see the forest for the trees
loooool
I support this opinion. Although it is clear Wallace wasn't an expert and probably didn't figure out some points correctly, the fact he isn't simply “wrong” but also “erratic” or “chaotic”, along with making sense on advanced topic—how could he fail to understand the most basic principles yet have a fair opinion regarding more complex matters?—lead me to believe he is purposely butchering the formal logic into some ironic paper.
Stop talking to yourself you fucking spastic.
>taken modal logic
Fucking pathetic...
Anyone with background in those topics can tell you it is a fine book and you will not find a more readable yet technical introduction to the subject. Idiots who know nothing will assume the worst because they live in fear of being wrong, which ironically they are.
acerbic doesn't mean the same thing as sarcastic or sardonic. if you think dfw's thesis is somehow sarcastic, you don't understand it. if it looks like a parody of analytic philosophy to you, that's cause you don't understand it. whether or not you think analytic philosophy is worthwhile, he obviously did--the phil grad school application process is an arduous process. that he failed to finish his phd is pretty common--top grad programs in phil have graduation rates of around 25 percent.
that dfw's undergrad thesis was wrong should not be surprising; almost everything ever written by professional analytic philosophers turns out to be wrong, and he was just a 21 year old kid.
if you think his paper is somehow otherwise acerbic, I don't even know what that would mean or why seeing that would be crucial to understanding his paper.
I hope your post was a joke
He's not even talking about the paper shit-for-brains.
o sorry thought it was relevant to the thread
>anyone knows it's simple as pie if you just take on an ontological picture which can be formalized in much simpler terms
bad philosophy general
>it's a "STEM guy tries to solve philosophy"episode
That is standard philosophy as it is actually practiced. There's nothing "STEM" about it.
>Anyone with background in those topics can tell you it is a fine book and you will not find a more readable yet technical introduction to the subject
lol no. It's a piece of dogshit. Deep down DFW knew the book was a fraud, which presumably contributed to his suicide.
The same comment applies to the book. DFW did not write it "ironically". He wrote it sincerely as a popular exploration of the mathematics of infinity. The problem was, he didn't actually understand what he was talking about and made numerous errors throughout the text.
>it's an ''Anti-STEM boy embarrasses himself'' episode
+1
...
Why the fuck is it that the more I learn about how retarded DFW is, the more I love him? He is essentially the most ironic human being in existence.
Is this a troll thread? I have never seen that kind of gibberish in a philosophical treatise, it looks more like advanced mathematics
He died for our sins
Does t2 die at the end?
>though the number of possible daughters of a given world-at-time could very well be inifinite
H O L Y S H I T
Dat effing foreshadowing
Mind = Blown
>not understanding basic logic and quantificatiors
>"I basically spent four years of my young life squatting over the stubbornly unhatching egg of advanced logic, something my father had studied and taught not only to his better students but to his retrospectively overly curious son who basically wanted to know what daddy did all day at work. The whole quote unquote genius thing gets thrown around a lot but really looking back at the work I did at Amherst in my early twenties I can see something there that I don't see a whole lot of: capital-G Genius"
analytic, you are not welcome here
on the off chance this is real, where is this from?
T2's already dead user
>quantificatiors
just stop
This isn't the one that he based The Broom of the System on, is it?
>quantificatiors
fucking lol
>quantificators
Is this supposed to be math or philosophy? I don't get it.
It's the intersection of both
>he fell for the suicide meme
lol?
Maybe because you are clinically retarded?
OP here, I just finished reading it, it's good, but it seems like DFW overestimated the novelty of what he was doing and the formal system he proposes has some technical errors and some foundational issues that make it not quite coherent. But conceptually his refutation of the fatalist argument he was addressing seems right to me, maybe even decisively right. He just didn't quite have the formal tools to express his intuitive argument completely precisely. Ambitious for an undergrad thesis, just needed a logically literate proofreader to go through it.
It's in pic related if anyone's interested.
Man asks for a helping hand and you kick dirt in his face.
god, dfw is the biggest pseud on the planet
why does he say quote unquote sometimes, but other times he says quote unquote?
is he trying to portray the narrator as an obnoxious psuedo-intellectual?
DFW is the pseud's pseud. Which is why he is the #1 author on Veeky Forums.
If you read like in OPs pic, you can be pretty sure that's a Kripke frame and this is the semantics of modal logics and developed and used in philosophy departments
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Mathematicians could well use modal operators, but they generally don't do (or even learn about this tool) because Frege defined a his predicate logic (second order, at first, 1879, "Begriffsschrift") and a few decades later it was shown how you could more or less define set theory in it and build up the rest of math in terms of sets.
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Thus mathematicians never switched their formal logic. And modal logic stayed in the philosophy departments.
t. theoretical physicist
What exactly is pseudo here? The use of both unpredictably, or the use of either at all? How is it obnoxious? Heck, I use both in conversation sometimes.
DFW really didn't care too much about this book on infinity. It was just some writing gig
the use of both interchangably.
it was from that rape story from hideous men and it always kind of irked me.
Brekekek
you just don't understand the rhythm and flow of speech
>I tend to take kindly memes on Veeky Forums, eventually
I'm glad they met with your approval, good sir
the specific form of fatalism advanced and defended by richard taylor
>advanced and defended by richard taylor
Afaik Taylor didn't put it out there to defend fatalism, he was making a point about certain premises or ideas that were popular necessarily lead to this kind of fatalism. If anything it's a kind of critique, tho he's now so associated with it many believe he was a fatalist because they don't know his other work.
desu it looks like basic kripke style semantics
interersting potatoes