Althouse: "Wary of ideas ..."

December 14, 2008

"Wary of ideas ..."

"...perpetually on guard against the ways in which abstract thinking (especially thinking about your own thinking) can draw you away from something more genuine and real..."

17 comments:

George M. Spencer said...: “I hold that Taylor’s semantic argument does not in fact yield his metaphysical conclusion.” He then ventured modestly that his own analysis of the problem “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.”

“Let (a physical possibility structure) be a set of distinct but intersecting paths ji–jn, each of which is a set of functions, L’s, on ordered pairs t, w (time, world situation), such that for any Ln, Lm in some ji, Ln R Lm, where R is a primitive accessibility relation corresponding to physical possibility understood in terms of diachronic physical compatibility.”

The above sort of writing is the literary equivalent of Mr. Madoff's fund prospectus. It doesn't matter to me whether it's from Wallace's undergraduate thesis or one of his best-selling novels. It is gibberish, glop that sophisticates swoon into. Give me writing that is a fist to the jaw. I want to see stars, not mud.; 12/14/08, 7:20 AM
Bob W. said...: Joe Biden will apparently have a great deal of time for abstract thinking in the performance of his (non)duties in his new office.; 12/14/08, 8:10 AM
Godot said...: Stepped outside this morning. Snow. Silence. A traffic light cycling for no practical reason. Back inside the warm smell of the furnace. Watched some porn.

I am not wary of ideas. I am humbled by them.; 12/14/08, 8:30 AM
Ron said...: What did DFW in, abstraction, or that which was genuine and real?; 12/14/08, 9:03 AM
Bissage said...: It has been said that a man derives meaning the way a bird builds a nest.

I have read Mr. Ryerson’s essay four times.

Still, I have no nest.; 12/14/08, 9:30 AM
kjbe said...: You can hide 'neath your covers
And study your pain
Make crosses from your lovers
Throw roses in the rain
Waste your summer praying in vain
For a saviour to rise from these streets
Well now I'm no hero
That's understood
All the redemption I can offer girl
Is beneath this dirty hood
With a chance to make it good somehow
Hey what else can we do now ?

Except roll down the window
And let the wind blow
Back your hair; 12/14/08, 9:41 AM
Anonymous said...: Some people have a passion for great ideas.

Some people have a passion for the great books that contain those great ideas.

And some people have a passion for great libraries that contain the great books that contain the great ideas.; 12/14/08, 10:28 AM
Unknown said...: Sometimes I draw two globes on a piece of paper and show students, this is the world and this is theory. You live in the world. Never forget that.; 12/14/08, 10:51 AM
Palladian said...: He seemed more "clever" than intellectual, like a brainy child full of potential but without the mental structure that comes with age and effort. Mediocre intelligences like New York Times writers often mistake that kind of showy cleverness for intellect. Wallace never grew out of his desire to show off and because of that will not be remembered for what he was but what he could have been. Unfortunately his illness prevented him from getting there.; 12/14/08, 10:56 AM
Unknown said...: "If I fire my handgun, one second from now its barrel will be hot; if I do not fire, one second from now the barrel will not be hot; but the proposition one second from now the barrel will be hot is right now either true or false. If the proposition is true, then it is the case that I will fire the gun; if it’s false, then it is the case that I won’t. Either way, it’s the state of affairs in the future that dictates what I will or won’t do now."

This tripe shouldn't require a friggin' dissertation, it should require an "obvious bullshit".

You don't need to dissect the nuances of temporal language to see it was ignoring the fundamentally obvious point that the future does not exist yet and can't influence the past.

This is intellectual? It's much more like a third grader who prattles a sentence endlessly because he's trying to pull the wool over an adult's eyes.; 12/14/08, 11:22 AM
Unknown said...: And yes, I know that wasn't Wallace's, but what he argued (lengthily) against.

Neither needed publishing as anything but a comedic play on intelligence. So much time on tripe.; 12/14/08, 11:25 AM
Bob R said...: I have not read Taylor's paper, but the NYT representation of it indicates a pretty elementary error. The key is the assertion that "all statements are either true of false." That seems innocuous, but it's not the way quantum mechanics works. In quantum mechanics statements about the past can have a true/false value, but you can only make probabilistic statements about the future. To say that a statement about the future is either true or false is to tacitly assume that the world is deterministic. Since that is what Taylor thinks he has proven his argument is circular.

So the easiest refutation of Taylor is that I'm reading this on a computer, so semiconductors work, so quantum mechanics must be a good model for reality, so a fatalist universe must not be universally true.; 12/14/08, 12:10 PM
Anonymous said...: PatCA said...Sometimes I draw two globes on a piece of paper and show students, this is the world and this is theory. You live in the world. Never forget that.

And yet both globes are part of a theory. Like an Escher painting.

The world is the paper.; 12/14/08, 2:10 PM
Jen Bradford said...: Wallace's intellectual power wasn't merely cleverness, which has never made me laugh or cry. The clever child says "look at me!" whereas DFW said "look at that!" His piece on Federer is a great example of his capacity to combine all that wonkiness with humility, careful observation and real love.; 12/14/08, 2:26 PM
Darcy said...: I really treasure DFW's piece on Federer, Jen. Just exquisite, like the athlete himself.; 12/14/08, 3:21 PM
Unknown said...: Could be, jd... :); 12/14/08, 7:29 PM
Ann Althouse said...: "capacity to combine all that wonkiness with humility, careful observation and real love"

Yeah. I agree.; 12/14/08, 9:24 PM