>In his problem, Taylor presents us with a situation and an argument. Suppose that I am an admiral. Suppose that, in the context of the totality of circumstances obtaining, if I issue a certain kind of naval order, a sea-battle will inevitably occur tomorrow. The giving of such an order we designate O, the state of affairs in which a battle occurs tomorrow we designate B, and the relation in which O is sufficient for B we designate (O → B). Suppose further that, if I issue any other kind of naval order, here including no order at all, this will ensure that no sea-battle takes place tomorrow. We designate the any-other-kind-of-order O′, the state of affairs in which there is no battle tomorrow B′, and the sufficiency-relation between the two we designate (O′ → B′). By presupposition 4, since O is sufficient for B, and O′ is sufficient for B′, then B is necessary for O—this means that (~B → ~O)—and B′ is necessary for O′— meaning (~B′ → ~O′). And presupposition 1 allows us to import LEM/PB to say that either it is true that there will be a battle tomorrow, B, or, if not, then it is true that there will not be a battle tomorrow, B′; that is, that either B is true or B′ is true: (B ∨ B′). We note that this is an exclusive disjunction, that if B is true then B′ will be false (since B′ is the same as not-B), and vice-versa. We also remind ourselves of Taylor’s presupposition 5, that no agent can perform a given act if there is lacking some condition necessary for that act, which certainly looks reasonable, and then as I stand on the deck of my destroyer we ask ourselves whether it is now in my power to do O if I choose and also now within my power to do O′ (instead) if I choose. Taylor’s answer is no: >I-1) If B is true, then it is not in my power to do O′ (since if B is true then there is, or will be, lacking a condition necessary for my doing O′, namely the condition of there not being a battle tomorrow). >I-2) And if B′ is true, then it is not in my power to do O (for an obviously similar reason). >I-3) But either B is true, or B′ is true (since presupposition 1 licenses the application of LEM/PB to future contingents). >I-4) So either it is not in my power to do O, or it is not in my power to do O′.
Any math undergrad could write this shit, dont be so scared of new symbols
Sebastian King
God its fucking atrociously written too, extremely redundant.
Anthony Allen
>But there is a further distinction to be drawn, that between two at least potentially different types of physical modality. There seems to be a difference between what is just physically possible in general and what is physically possible for a given agent to do in a given set of circumstances. The former might be termed physical possibility simpliciter. It concerns what is and is not consistent with the laws of nature per se. (It is physically impossible simpliciter to travel faster than the speed of light. It is physically necessary simpliciter that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.) The latter type of modality, on the other hand, might be termed situational physical modality. It concerns the modal character of events, actions, and states of affairs, taking into account not only general and unchanging physical laws, but also the situations and circumstances that can affect what is possible and necessary at certain places at certain times. For instance, exactly three weeks ago it was situationally physically possible for me, at 3:50pm, to lay both hands on the front wall of Amherst College’s Johnson Chapel. Today it is not now possible for me to lay both hands on the Chapel at 3:50, because it is now 3:49.30, and I am not even in Massachusetts. It is, of course, physically possible simpliciter for a human being to lay hands on our Chapel, and this fact never changes, so long as there are hands and a Johnson Chapel. Any constraints on the physical possibility of touching the chapel would have to be situational constraints. These sorts of considerations might lead one to argue that there is really no such thing as a physical modality simpliciter, divorced from the context of a time-and-situation. This may or may not be true, but it is not very important for my purposes here; my aim has been to introduce and characterize the notion of situational physical possibility. I would ask the reader merely to recognize the intuitive difference in modal character and modal force between: “It is not possible for me to be both a human being and a quartz crystal”; “It is not possible for me to travel faster than the speed of light”; and “It is not possible for me, now in Champaign, Illinois, to be touching a building in Massachusetts thirty seconds from now.”
damn....... really boiled my lobster
Connor Ward
Which do you like better, academic-sounding jargon babbling Dave, or inane platitude Dave?
Carson Long
Logic he's using isn't hard. It's a little hard to follow when it's in the prose like that though.
But read even the analytic phil papers ABOUT logic and math and it's not written this poorly. I mean when I say DFW had a "people need to know that I'm smart" complex sand THAT is the key to understanding Infinite Jest this kind of shit is exactly what I mean.
The guy was a hardworking psued. Yes, that's a thing. He thinks appearances are all that matters. That the grammar of a sentence is more important than it's content.
Wish he was still alive so I could watch public opinion get wise to him and turn on him and watch him slide into obscurity.
Christopher Morgan
>really boiled my lobster fukn cec the first. i'm sometimes tricked into reading the latter
Parker Allen
I agree that DFW spent a lot of energy on appearing smart. I feel like Ive had this same pathological need to appear smart and wear all my knowledge on my sleeve at various points, usually stemming from a massive desire to be special. Feel like ive mostly outgrown it by now.
The bit where the tennis kid starts playing up his intellect to the recruiter, the part with "to the library and step on it" reads like a fictional rendering of the moment he imagined and most deeply sought.
He said in an interview that he tries to tell his students how tiresome it gets reading papers that only try to be smart.
I dont envy that mans pathology, what a tangle.
Bentley Ross
>that pic related
Why tho?
Oliver Peterson
so he's not daunted by the page length and/or proud of himself for reach page n, etc.
(the assumption being this is the longest book most people have heard of or read [pathetic, I know])
Grayson Nguyen
the sad thing is there's a couple jokes that involve the page numbers, e.g. p. 64 ends iwth "untimely suicide at fifty four was" and then has 64, which rhymes with fifty four and is 46 backwards
Jack Carter
>Screencapped >Infinite Jest is actually a book of prophecy
Juan Rogers
Simple ideas poorly written to make them sound complicated.
Bravo, Dave.
Dylan Gonzalez
"This was my basic situation. I both wanted help and didn’t. And I made it hard for anyone to help me: I could go to a psychiatrist one day in tears and desperation and then two days later be fencing with her over the fine points of Jungian theory; I could argue with drug counselors over the difference between a crass pragmatic lie and an “aesthetic” lie told for its beauty alone; I could flummox 12-Step sponsors over certain obvious paradoxes inherent in the concept of denial. And so forth." (from an anonymous letter almost certainly authored by DFW about his recovery)
"‘My application’s not bought,’ I am telling them, calling into the darkness of the red cave that opens out before closed eyes. ‘I am not just a boy who plays tennis. I have an intricate history. Experiences and feelings. I’m complex.’I read,’ I say. ‘I study and read. I bet I’ve read everything you’ve read. Don’t think I haven’t. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM-drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, “The library, and step on it.” My instincts concerning syntax and mechanics are better than your own, I can tell, with due respect. But it transcends the mechanics. I’m not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opinions. Some of them are interesting. I could, if you’d let me, talk and talk. Let’s talk about anything. I believe the influence of Kierkegaard on Camus is underestimated. I believe Dennis Gabor may very well have been the Antichrist. I believe Hobbes is just Rousseau in a dark mirror. I believe, with Hegel, that transcendence is absorption. I could interface you guys right under the table,’ I say. ‘I’m not just a creatus, manufactured, conditioned, bred for a function.’" (from Infinite Jest)
Is that not exactly the same voice? His intense drive for authenticity was just a ploy to skirt his intense (and very obvious) drive for literary recognition and intellectual ability.
Obsession with authenticity is a hobgoblin of pretentious minds, perhaps.
Xavier Johnson
>Obsession with authenticity is a hobgoblin of pretentious minds, perhaps. thiiiis
we've cracked it, boys. there's really nothing else to say about the guy at this point. run-of-the-mill neurotic.
next
Caleb Garcia
Everyone realizes that he was writing in a pretty normal mode for an academic philosophy paper, right? Especially for someone with a background in first-order logic. He was what, 22 or 23, and doing his honors thesis. So if the problem with it is that it's
>Simple ideas poorly written to make them sound complicated
I assume you would have the same problem with a lot of undergrad philosphy papers.
Oh, and plus he was drunk, which didn't help anything.
Cameron Cooper
I always wanted to catalogue every time he says that and why he's going to off himself, or for instance makes very oblique reference to it in a book that's nominally about mathematics, but it would get pretty depressing pretty fast.
Jonathan Flores
>My instincts concerning syntax and mechanics are better than your own >My instincts concerning syntax and mechanics >My instincts concerning syntax and mechanics >My instincts concerning syntax and mechanics >are better than your own Is this intentionally bad writing? It's hard to tell with le post-sincere man
Asher Bell
Do you mean it looks grammatically incorrect or that all the /ks/ sounds sound bad? I sort of like the way it trips up the tongue when you say it but idk
there is plenty of good academic philosophy with logic in it, but none of it manages to sound quite as bad as he makes it sound. he's writing in the mode of a mathematics paper as if it's all about the rigor of the formalism, which is actually really inappropriate for the topic.
he sounds as insecure in what he's doing as his fiction.
he compensates for his lack of confidence with excessive demonstration of technique, when no such technique is needed. technique without purpose is worthless, just like you.
Hudson Cruz
DFW might be an insincere shit, but this is his undergrad work. All undergrad work is insincere shit
Aaron Parker
:( meann
I didn't understand FT&L all that well, plus I don't have it with me, but let me devils advocate. Maybe he's using formal mathematical language to excess so that he can illustrate a mathematical/philosophical mode of thinking that reduces important & understandable concepts to a game of letters and symbols. That way he can illustrate what's wrong with the system he's using, sort of breaking it from the inside. "Godelian" is an annoying term which would maybe apply.
Maybe that's giving him too much slack but I know he liked to take ways of writing to excess, like in Westward where he deliberately overdoes self-conscious metafiction to show what he disliked about the way people at his MFA program & Yaddo thought about writing. I didn't like Westward either but you can at least tell what he's doing.
Come to think of it I didn't finish FT&L. Do you know what he says in it? Can someone maybe break it down?
Lucas Morgan
Godel could've smelled the stink of this shit when he was 8, not even exaggerating. Godel's standards for philosophical writing were so intense that he barely published.
His mathematical work is easily on the order of an Einstein or Von Neumann.
This pretty much nails it. DFW is a victim of a cult of genius. We love the idea of the twisted, troubled genius in his authentic struggle against an intellect beyond his control. But young (mostly men) who imagine themselves of special intellect play a dangerous game. If they fake it well enough, then people will buy it. The writer lets the reader down lets the writer down.
==== All of the great writers are insane egoists: the whole point of becoming a great writer is to transcend earthly persona by canonization. It's to beat all competition to absolute submission. That means dominating their readers and dominating their influences. Lazy readers make a tragedy like DFW possible.
He should have been called out a long time ago. The math references in IJ are clearly forced, often irrelevant, and are attempts to make up for DFW's lack of literary knowledge. Math is mystifying to most people and acts to demonstrate genius more convincingly than words.
Wallace obviously isn't on the order of Godel in intelligence, he wasn't a very good mathematician. But like say Hofstadter (who was also pretentious) he liked the idea of Godelian paradoxes in a sort of narrative way, where you use the language of a system to prove that the system is somehow flawed.
And yes he overreaches with the math & makes many mistakes, because he stopped studying it about a year into undergrad. But Infinite Jest isn't a math textbook, it's an autobiography slash brain scan. All the math comes from the narrator's horribly annoying friend, who cuts an antagonist type figure because he represents parts of Wallace that he could at least tell were flawed and self absorbed, but couldn't get rid of easily. Notice that Pemulis is also how he delivers a lot of the metafiction and page decoration.
Brayden Lewis
>what is satire
IJ is a joke.
Lucas Carter
Hofstadter is a giant compared to DFW. He's literally everything DFW wished he was.
Hofstadter has an actual PhD in physics, did actual physics research for a while, is mathematically literate enough to read Godel's original papers, and is one hell of a wit when it comes to writing. He might've reached a bit with music theory, but he loves Bach and plays piano, and generally has an enthusiasm which is so innocent and immense that one can't help but be infected by it. That's because it has the proper externalized kind of obsessiveness that makes for real interesting work. Internalized obsessiveness leads to shit tier solipsistic meandering. That's DFW's game.
Brandon Gray
Wow, you're right. Sorry, I was going by the sense I got from the writing itself in GEB, which I did not enjoy. I think I interpreted enthusiasm as pretension.
Colton Ward
(except about the meandering of course, IJ has a very precise structure which no one can ever see because its author died as a prank)
Nicholas Carter
>Come to think of it I didn't finish FT&L. Neither did DFW. >Can someone maybe break it down? Maybe. But I'd rather just keep copypasting bits and pieces of it like a huge jackass. Here, have the ending of the essay:
>Taylor’s claim was never really that fatalism was actually “true,” only that it was forced upon us by proof from certain basic logical and semantic principles. This essay’s semantic analysis has shown that Taylor’s proof doesn’t “force” fatalism on us at all. We should now recall that Taylor was offering a very curious sort of argument: a semantic argument for a metaphysical conclusion. In light of what we’ve seen about the semantics of physical modality, I hold that Taylor’s semantic argument does not in fact yield his metaphysical conclusion. And now the fact that it appears as though he can get his metaphysical conclusion from his semantic argument only by positing at the outset the truth of a doctrine thoroughly metaphysical, seems to warrant the following conclusion of our own: if Taylor and the fatalists want to force upon us a metaphysical conclusion, they must do metaphysics, not semantics. And this seems entirely appropriate.
Eli Thomas
I'm an English major and I'm fairly interested in math. I would be taking calc 3 if I wanted to this fall. How far away is math concerning foundations away from c3? And would I be able to teach it to myself in my spare time with my background (as a right brained person who has completed c2)
Jeremiah Davis
The two parts of math are pretty far away from each other, so don't worry about needing a background, but also don't expect calculus knowledge to help too much. I don't know how well you could teach foundational stuff to yourself without a background in proof-writing, which is hard to do yourself. I'd start with an intro Logic textbook. Better would be taking your university's Intro to Theoretical Math class (whatever they call it) which as a bonus will definitely make you better at writing in english. Every math major I know has seen their essay-writing drastically improve after taking their first introduction to proofs class.
I'm now remembering why I put the book down.
Bonus: find the phrase "the semantics of physical modality" in the first ten pages of another book by Dallas/Fort Worth
Lucas Barnes
Students do this shit all the time to try and stand out.
Andrew Cruz
not far away at all actually >basic logic >basic set theory >basic number theory >definition of limit >calculus
Christian Hall
you lack literacy or life experience or maybe you just don't know the definition of the word if you call hofstadter pretentious. you can be smart and not pretentious. someone like DFW doesn't know that. maybe you're the same. in that case, take a hint and arrange your manuscript
Thomas Wright
I'm not calling Hofstadter pretentious, you're right that I misjudged him based on skimming what I'm sure is a very fun book about metacognition. But DFW really did get out of the pretentious mindset, where you treat other people as somehow inferior later in life, especially after he'd been in AA for a while. I think he was a lot more self-aware than you're giving credit for.
Ofc they're connected, but the connection is distant enought that it won't affect someone studying the basics of logic and calculus separately.
