Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will
Steven M. Cahn
Language: English
Pages: 264
ISBN: 0231151578
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In 1962, the philosopher Richard Taylor used six commonly accepted presuppositions to imply that human beings have no control over the future. David Foster Wallace not only took issue with Taylor's method, which, according to him, scrambled the relations of logic, language, and the physical world, but also noted a semantic trick at the heart of Taylor's argument.
Fate, Time, and Language presents Wallace's brilliant critique of Taylor's work. Written long before the publication of his fiction and essays, Wallace's thesis reveals his great skepticism of abstract thinking made to function as a negation of something more genuine and real. He was especially suspicious of certain paradigms of thought-the cerebral aestheticism of modernism, the clever gimmickry of postmodernism-that abandoned "the very old traditional human verities that have to do with spirituality and emotion and community." As Wallace rises to meet the challenge to free will presented by Taylor, we witness the developing perspective of this major novelist, along with his struggle to establish solid logical ground for his convictions. This volume, edited by Steven M. Cahn and Maureen Eckert, reproduces Taylor's original article and other works on fatalism cited by Wallace. James Ryerson's introduction connects Wallace's early philosophical work to the themes and explorations of his later fiction, and Jay Garfield supplies a critical biographical epilogue.
whether the following proposition is true: (B) It is within my power to do O, and it is also within my power to do O′ . Anyone, except a fatalist, would be inclined to say that, in the situation we have envisaged, this proposition might well be true, that is, that both acts are quite within my power (granting that I cannot do both at once). For in the circumstances we assume to prevail, it is, one would think, up to me as the commander whether the naval battle occurs or not; it depends only on
ability not to melt it, and so on, and thus being able, in that sense.” This, however, is not absurd; it is only an odd choice of words. Makepeace is rightly reluctant to use “within its power” in connection with inanimate objects. But this is a minor point. If he wishes to change the examples from animate to inanimate objects, Taylor can change the expression “within his power” to “within its capability.” Now, we find Makepeace repeating Saunders’s error, by disputing what Taylor has not
“condition of ” and the nonlogical “condition for” becomes even more obtrusive in the fifth presupposition, wherein Taylor states that we cannot perform any act in the absence of any condition (i.e., precondition) necessary for the performance of that act. He says, “This is no law of logic, and in fact cannot be expressed even in the contemporary modal logics, but it is manifestly true.” He persists, however, in using the words ‘condition necessary for’; but since the fifth presupposition by his
prepositional shift, we have equivocation on the one hand and such absurdities as death being a necessary condition for the ingestion of cyanide on the other hand. (3) If it is not the essential relationship then we have no reciprocity and, hence, no fatalistic argument. C5393.indb 132 10/19/10 11:59 AM PART II THE ESSAY C5393.indb 133 10/19/10 11:59 AM C5393.indb 134 10/19/10 11:59 AM 14 RENEWING THE FATALIST CONVERSATION M A U R E E N EC K E R T A FT E R THE publication in of
B4 C4 W4~(R>20) D3 D4 E4 F4 E3 G4 H4 Say that at index W—the actual world the day before yesterday— the actual situation that obtains includes such features as the nuclear weapon being brought onto the Amherst campus, its being rendered fully functional, the terrorists discussing what to do, the head terrorist limbering up his trigger-finger, etc. Features of W, the actual world-situation-at-t, include the head terrorist sitting with his finger resting on the trigger, the trigger and