Fate, Time, and Language

by David Foster Wallace

  VII. CONCLUSION: IMPLICATIONS FOR THE MODERN FATALISTIC ARGUMENT.

  What response, given this essay’s system for understanding the semantics of physical modality, and my analysis of the Taylor arguments in light of that understanding, is left the fatalist? I believe that system J pretty convincingly demonstrates the invalidity of the fatalist’s most potent argument to date—the Taylor argument. Thus I think the fatalist can preserve the argument only by rejecting system J, by claiming that system J does not correctly characterize the nature of the physical universe and the causal relations that obtain between states of affairs therein. The fatalist’s claim here, then, will be a metaphysical one.

  The most obvious and effective fatalist-claim here would be that a “physical possibility structure” that accurately characterizes the universe should not be understood as composed of distinct but intersecting causal paths-through-time, but rather should be understood as comprised by only one such path, that from actual-world-at-time to actual-world-at-time. That is, the claim will be that, given the total physical situation that actually obtains at one temporal point, there can be one and only one situation-at-the-next temporal-point physically compatible with it. The diagram for such a structure would look something like this:

  Within this sort of structure, and by the rules that would go along with it, Taylor’s sea-battle-and-order argument would indeed be valid. Since the set of all “possible mothers” of W4 here would be identical with the set of all “possible daughters” of W2, there would be no hope of finding order O in some world-at-t3 joined in a path jy with W2 but not joined in a path jx with W4.

  The reader should be able to see that the above diagram is a kind of visual representation of the metaphysical doctrine of determinism, the idea that, given a precise and total state of affairs at one instant, and the physical laws that govern the causal relations between states of affairs, there is one and only one possible state of affairs that could obtain at the next instant. The fatalist, then, would appear to be able to preserve the validity of his Taylor-argument against a J-analysis only by embracing the metaphysical doctrine of determinism, by being a determinist.

  And what exactly is a determinst? Let’s have a look at Richard Taylor’s own definition:A determinist is simply, if he is consistent, a fatalist about everything; or at least, he should be. For the essential idea that a man would be expressing by saying that his attitude was one of fatalism with respect to this or that event—his own death, for instance—is that it is not up to him whether, or when or where, this event will occur, that it is not within his control. But the theory of determinism, once it is clearly spelled out and not hedged about with unresolved ‘ifs,’ entails that this is true of everything that ever happens, that it is never really up to any man what he does or what he becomes, and that nothing ever can happen, except what does in fact happen.47

  So what are we to say about the fatalist’s asserting the truth of determinism in order to save the validity of an argument for the truth of fatalism, when determinism, by Professor Taylor’s own enthusiastic admission, is simply a stronger, more general version of fatalism? At our harshest we might simply reject the fatalist’s response here as assuming in the first place the very thing for which he purported to have an independent argument. We might accuse the fatalist here of just begging the question, precisely the charge we saw the fatalist level at his poor critics in section (II).

  But it is more fair to an ingenious and very important argument (and I think more interesting) to say something else. 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.

  David Foster Wallace

  Champaign, Urbana, Illinois

  Amherst, Massachusetts

  1984-1985

  NOTES

  1 Examples of historically important pieces of work on the problem include Aristotle’s On Interpretation, IX; Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy; some papers by the fifteenth-century Louvain philosopher Peter de Rivo, collected in L. Bauday’s 1950 La Querelle des Futurs Contingents; Jonathan Edwards’s Careful and Strict Enquiry, Part II; A. J. Ayer’s The Concept of a Person; and Arthur Prior’s Past, Present and Future, Chapter VII.

  2 See Susan Haack, Deviant Logic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), p. 73.

  3 Reprinted in Storrs McCall, ed., Polish Logic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 53.

  4 The work referred to here is Taylor’s “Fatalism,” Philosophical Review, 71, 1962; reprinted in expanded form as Chapter 5 of Taylor’s Metaphysics (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1963), pp. 54-69. Hereafter references will be to the widely available Metaphysics.

  5 Metaphysics, p. 55.

  6 See Susan Haack, following van Fraassen, Lambert, McCall, in Deviant Logic, p. 66.

  7 See Metaphysics, pp. 57-59, for the presuppositions.

  8 Ibid., p. 64.

  9 Ibid., p. 61.[1.] Note: In DFW’s original typescript the symbols for situational necessity and possibility were distinguished with internal dots. Strikethroughs are used here in order to make it easier to reproduce the symbols.—eds.

  10 Ibid., pp. 66-67. The quote is from p. 67.

  11 See Steven Cahn, “Fatalistic Arguments,” Journal of Philosophy, 61, 1964, pp. 295-305, and Chapter 7 of Cahn’s Fate, Logic and Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967). References hereafter are to Cahn’s “Fatalistic Arguments.[”]

  12 Richard Taylor, “Comment,” Journal of Philosophy, 61, 1964, pp. 305-307.

  13 See Metaphysics, pp. 64-66.

  14 Bruce Aune, “Fatalism and Professor Taylor,” Philosophical Review, 71, 1962.

  15 See Taylor, “A Note on Fatalism,” Philosophical Review, 72, 1963, p. 497, and Cahn’s “Fatalistic Arguments.”

  16 John Turk Saunders, “Fatalism and Ordinary Language,” Journal of Philosophy, 62, 1965, pp. 211-222.

  17 See Note 14.

  18 G. H. von Wright, Causality and Determinism (New York: Columbia University Pres, 1974), pp. 24-25.

  19 Professor Willem de Vries in conversation.

  20 Raziel Abelson, “Taylor’s Fatal Fallacy,” Philosophical Review, 72, 1963, pp. 93-96.

  21 See for example Cahn, “Fatalistic Arguments,” p. 302.[2.] DFW adds the Chrysippus paradox to the quotation here.—eds.

  22 Ibid., pp. 302-303.

  23 David Lewis, in “Causation” (see Ernest Sosa, ed., Causation and Conditionals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 180-191), does not think they can, particularly in the modus tollens instance, but he turns out to be willing to jettison certain physical laws if necessary to preserve this account (if we have not-B then perhaps we do have O, but O in this case simply does not “act as a cause,” even though laws are supposed to dictate that it always does), which seems equally strange.

  24 Abelson, p. 96.

  25 Cahn, p. 302.

  26 In the Journal of Philosophy, 62, 1965, pp. 349-353.

  27 Ibid, p. 351.

  28 See for instance Saul Kripke, “Semantical Considerations on Modal Logic,” Acta Philosophica Fennica, XVI, 1963, pp. 83-94.

  29 As this difficult work is explained in Dowty, Wall and Peters, Introduction to Montague Semantics (Dordrecht:
D. Reidel, 1981).

  30 Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1976.

  31 The especially observant and picky reader might eventually notice that many of the formal and semi-formal “propositions” presented up to page 52 [this volume, page 190—eds.] turn out strictly speaking to be ill-formed under the rules of system J, because of the stipulation that all wffs in the language must begin with a temporal operator specifying the index of temporal evaluation. This problem could have been avoided had I simply introduced system J at the beginning of the essay and gone from there, making sure each formula followed every rule. But since system J is itself so very new, different, and potentially weird-looking, I have elected to build up to its introduction gradually, in order both to show clearly the motivation behind the system, and to keep the whole project within the context that renders the system relevant to this essay’s goals (this is the context of the Taylor problem). That this involves calling some things propositions that turn out later not technically to be real wffs seems to me an acceptable price to pay.

  32 See Alan R. White, Modal Thinking (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 19.

  33 I should note that these are not strictly speaking formal model-theoretic rules for the system being constructed, but rather rules for the perspicuous representation of natural-language sentences in the logic of that system. Real rules are coming up. ...

  34 See Michael Loux, ed., The Possible and the Actual (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), pp. 23-24.

  35 The number of temporal units we go “back” to determine the possibility-now of p-now is to be understood as contextually determined. Usually it will be a very small interval. In no foreseeable case would we wish to license a move all the way back to the “beginning of time” to establish what is possible-now. In this essay the move back will be designated by “a few moments ago.”

  36 The formal properties of system J were largely conceived by Mr. Jamie Rucker and were first successfully formulated by Professor Jay Garfield.

  37 Metaphysics, p. 55.

  38 As characterized by Fred Landman in “Data Semantics,” an as-yet unpublished lecture at the University of Massachusetts, 10 October 1984.

  39 Metaphysics, p. 56.

  40 Ibid., p. 62.

  41 Ibid.

  42 In Mind, 1964, pp. 390-398.

  43 Ibid., p. 390.

  44 Ibid., pp. 390-391.

  45 Ibid., pp. 394-395.

  46 Ibid., p. 397.

  47 Metaphysics, p. 55.

  PART III

  EPILOGUE

  16

  DAVID FOSTER WALLACE AS STUDENT: AMEMOIR

  JAY GARFIELD

  THIS WAS all a long time ago, and I cannot be sure that my memory is entirely accurate, especially regarding details; but David was memorable enough that I think that most of our time together is burned into my brain. I was teaching then at Hampshire College. My close friend and colleague Bill de Vries, then teaching at Amherst College phoned (e-mail was still a rarity) late in the fall semester to ask me if I would be willing to talk with an honors student he was advising. Much of my work at the time was on natural language semantics and logic; Bill knew that I was supervising another student—Jamie Rucker—on a semantics thesis; and he suspected that his student’s thesis was headed in that direction. He did mention that this student was uncommonly talented, that he was the son of the renowned philosopher James Wallace, that he was simultaneously writing honors theses in philosophy and English, and that the English thesis was to be a novel. I agreed to meet with him, and a few days later David Wallace turned up in my office.

  It was evident immediately that Bill was right about the talent. David’s passion and aptitude for philosophy were obvious. He wanted to talk about Taylor’s fatalism paper, the many failed attempts to refute its argument, and he proposed to explore a new refutation. David came prepared. His grasp of the literature was sure, even professional. His insight into the reasons that prior attempts to reply to Taylor failed was not just accurate but also nuanced and precise. He felt that Brown was on the right track but also saw the inadequacies of his approach and wanted to talk about how to develop Brown’s ideas. It all came out in a torrent, but a carefully constructed torrent. I probably guessed at the time that it was rehearsed, but over the ensuing months in which I worked closely with David, it was clear that he simply thought and spoke so clearly that I now guess that this unlikely introduction was most likely spontaneous.

  I was also struck by the fact that David’s reaction to Taylor’s argument and to the failure of so many philosophers to have solved it was righteous indignation. He was outraged that Taylor sought, and claimed to have derived, an explicitly metaphysical conclusion from purely logical or semantic premises; and he was genuinely offended by the failure of professional philosophers to have put things right. His depth of feeling about this circumstance, and his identification of the nerve of the problem as this derivation of substance from form, as opposed to the commitment to fatalism itself, bespoke an unusual combination of philosophical passion and intellectual maturity. I was very happy to take him on.

  David agreed with my suggestion that a solution to this problem would have to be both philosophical and formal. But at that time, he had a background only in elementary logic. So we began with a tutorial on tensed and modal logic so that he would have the formal tools necessary to solve the problem. We met at least once, and often twice weekly for the remainder of that semester and for most of the spring, often overlapping our meetings with those I held with Jamie. David quickly, with Jamie’s help, mastered the basics of Montague grammar and tensed modal logic and was immediately ready to apply his newly acquired formal skills to the problem at hand. Those meetings were energetic, involving much leaping to the blackboard, sometimes with chalk—though often with erasers, given our many false starts—and we made steady progress.

  It is hard at this point to say with any certainty who introduced what ideas into those conversations, and would probably have been difficult to do so at the time. These were discussions among colleagues, not ordinary supervision meetings between teacher and student. We established early on the importance of physical modality to the argument, and the need to distinguish between situational possibility and general possibility in order to model the interaction between tense and modality. In one of those conversations early in the spring we hit upon the difference, so central to his solution, between “couldn’t have” and “can’t have,” and that insight opened the doors to the solution.

  I am pretty sure, but not positive, that I proposed system J and the broad sketch of its semantics (that is probably the reason David calls it J); I am also pretty sure, and a little more positive, that as soon as I did, David ran with it and showed both how it solved the central problem of demonstrating the invalidity of Taylor’s argument (as well as vindicating Brown’s basic intuition) and how treating time and physical modality this way makes sense of a number of other related puzzles about physical modality and time. His philosophical instincts were sure; his thought was precise. The thesis came together in a matter of a few weeks. David’s initial ideas were all confirmed and made precise. I regarded his argument as decisive then, and I still do.

  I knew at that time, as I mention above, that David was also writing a novel as a thesis in English. But I never took that seriously. I thought of David as a very talented young philosopher with a writing hobby, and did not realize that he was instead one of the most talented fiction writers of his generation who had a philosophy hobby. Of course, he returned to philosophy for a while years later, and I am sure that had he stuck with it, and had he lived, he would have been a major figure in our field. I cannot understand what drove David to take his own life; his ending is a source of great sadness; but the memory of our brief time as colleagues is one of pure joy.

  APPENDIX

  THE PROBLEM OF FUTURE CONTINGENCIES

  RICHARD TAYLOR

  Wallace concludes his essay by challenging Taylor to “do metaphysic
s, not semantics.” But Taylor’s sixth presupposition, which denies the efficacy of the mere passage of time, is a metaphysical claim, one he himself did not accept. His reasons were explicitly rooted in metaphysics, and in this article, published five years before “Fatalism,” he explains his position and its origin in what he took to have been the metaphysical outlook of Aristotle.—S.M.C.

  ARISTOTLE BELIEVED that any statement which asserts or denies, concerning a contingent event, that it is going to occur, is neither true nor false, the world being as yet indeterminate with regard to the existence or nonexistence of such things.1

  Few doctrines from antiquity have engendered more controversy than this one, as indicated by the rash of polemic that has broken out over it again in the last few years.2 Medieval philosophers, following Boethius, found in it a thorny problem of reconciling liberty with divine omniscience; Lukasiewicz, more recently, revived Aristotle’s arguments to provide an interpretation for his three-valued logic, while other writers still find it necessary to take account of essentially the same arguments in dealing with metaphysical problems of time. Nearly all the Scholastics discarded Aristotle’s arguments as inconsistent with Christian presuppositions, while modern logicians have tended to dismiss them as paralogisms. C. A. Baylis rejected all of them, as reinterpreted by Lukasiewicz, as fallacious,3 and W. V. Quine has disdained one of the conclusions as “Aristotle’s fantasy.”4 Applying them to metaphysical puzzles, Gilbert Ryle treats such arguments as confusions of categories,5 while Donald Williams hasTHE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW 66, NO. 1, 1957.