Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will Read online

  Even Taylor himself had been troubled. He had put forth the argument with ambivalence, certain of his assumptions and reasoning but uneasy with where they took him. It initially appeared to him that, to avoid his own argument’s disagreeable conclusion, he would have to abandon the assumption, indispensable to most systems of logic, that every statement is either true or false (though he was later convinced that this extreme “solution” had intolerable ramifications of its own). There was a kind of anguish for Wallace in the prospect of a world so out of whack. “He was very level-headed in so many ways,” Willem de Vries, a philosopher now at the University of New Hampshire and the principal adviser on Wallace’s thesis, told me. “He wasn’t attracted to philosophy because you could construct these weird, mind-bending arguments. He was quite wary of the mind-bending. Maybe because his own mind could bend so easily.”

  So how to straighten out Taylor’s fatalism? In the early to mid-1960s, Taylor’s paper attracted a number of critics and defenders, but neither camp succeeded in swaying the other. (One of the defenders was Taylor’s student Steven M. Cahn, now a philosopher at the City University of New York and an editor of this volume.) Surveying the scholarly responses to the paper, Wallace became convinced that Taylor’s critics had blundered by making arguments that Taylor’s camp could dismiss as merely begging the question. The critics would claim, in essence, that Taylor’s argument was faulty because it ended up entailing fatalism—and fatalism just couldn’t be true. They dismissed the argument but failed to disprove it. Wallace was sympathetic to their cause, and watching Taylor and his defenders effortlessly brush off these objections was hard for him to stomach. “If you read the Taylor literature, it’s really ulcer-city,” he wrote in a letter to William Kennick, the Amherst professor who had taught his Wittgenstein seminar, a month before submitting the thesis. What Wallace took to be right-minded but poorly formulated objections were repeatedly “shot down as rejection rather than refutation.”

  One such objection, raised by the philosopher John Turk Saunders, took issue with one of Taylor’s innocuous-looking assumptions. In the absence of a necessary feature of an action, the assumption goes, the action isn’t possible. If turbulence in the water is a necessary feature of swimming in it, and there’s no turbulence in the water, then it’s not possible for you to have been swimming in it. So far so good. But upon reflection, Saunders argued, it seemed this humble assumption was doing great damage to our intuition about what it means for an action to be in our power. If there is no turbulence in the water, yes, that means it’s not possible that you just swam in it; but that doesn’t mean that you lacked the know-how and the wherewithal to have done so—that your capacities were constrained, that your swimming was made impossible—by virtue of the fact that the water was subsequently placid. That conclusion just doesn’t accord with our everyday intuition about what sorts of things can count as a constraint on what we could have done.

  This seems commonsensical enough. But the fatalist camp had a powerful rejoinder. The intuition to which Saunders was appealing (namely, that a future event can’t serve as a constraint on the present) is the very intuition that fatalism seeks to challenge. The fatalist endorses the opposite intuition and also has an actual argument for that intuition. You may well have the know-how and the wherewithal to do something (the training and attributes to swim), but if your physical capacities are trumped by certain other physical circumstances (the absence of turbulent water in the future), which is what the fatalist argument claims to show, then why shouldn’t we revise our intuition about what sorts of things can limit what is possible? Isn’t that what a good argument is supposed to make us do?

  For Wallace, to be sure, this reply was infuriating. “Whether this is fair or not I haven’t even tried to argue about,” he wrote to Kennick. Nonetheless, the fact that the reply was exasperating didn’t make the fatalist’s argument any easier to dispose of definitively, to solve with a “click.” Resolved to find another approach, he set out, as he put it to Kennick, to “bend over backwards to avoid the fatalist’s reply,” which would mean accepting as much of Taylor’s reasoning as possible yet still showing that the dreaded result didn’t follow—that you couldn’t, in fact, deprive the universe of possibility with just a bit of logical and linguistic finesse.

  One of Wallace’s assets as a philosopher was his instinct for collaboration. Unlike many undergraduate students, he didn’t presume that he could advance a longstanding philosophical debate by mulling over the ideas alone in his dorm room. His thesis not only drew on his own original thinking but also benefited from his resourceful use of the existing literature on Taylor’s paper and extensive consultations with a variety of professors and fellow undergraduate “philosophyheads” (as one of his Amherst classmates called them). He operated, in other words, like a professional scholar. Kennick was not one of the primary advisors on the thesis, yet Wallace engaged him with no less seriousness, responding by letter with painstaking care to questions that Kennick had raised. (Wallace to Kennick: “p.5: Whether a deliberation that is necessitated is still a deliberation is to me unclear. The crux here is that the sufficiency-necessity relation that obtains between order O and battle B seems, if LEM is applied to B modally, to restrict both B and O.”) One of the few giveaways in their exchange that Wallace is also a goofy college kid is that he alludes to Descartes as “Monsieur D” and Kant as “the Big K.”

  As Wallace worked toward what he believed to be the solution to the Taylor problem, he sought increasingly specialized help. He realized that his argument would require, among other things, the development of a novel formal apparatus (something called an intensional-physical-modality system), and he was modest enough to admit that, not being a logician by training or disposition, he couldn’t entirely see his way to building it. Ultimately, of the five “rules” needed for this system (Rule 1: “[[tnp]]w = 1 iff [[p]] w, = 1”), Garfield devised three for Wallace, and the other two were worked out with help from Jamie Rucker, a logically gifted undergraduate at neighboring Hampshire College whom Wallace had met in a philosophy class at Amherst. Without Wallace’s spirit of scholarly cooperation, he wouldn’t have been able to do first-rate work. “He came from a philosophy family,” Garfield reminded me. “Some students are able to grasp the ideas, but not grasp the professionalism.”

  How, then, did Wallace ultimately crack Taylor’s “Fatalism”? Like many fruitful philosophical endeavors, Wallace’s took as its starting point a somewhat naive-sounding question: What do we mean, in the context of Taylor’s argument, by “necessity” and “possibility”? Often, when discussing these concepts—which are known as modal notions, or modalities—philosophers will draw a distinction between logical modalities and physical modalities. Things that are logically impossible are those that violate the laws of logic (say, 2 and 2’s summing to 5). Things that are physically impossible are those that violate the laws of nature (say, an object’s traveling faster than the speed of light). Each modality, in its own way, concerns strictures that are eternal and unchanging: something that is physically impossible is never the case at any time or place in the actual world we inhabit; something that is logically impossible is never the case at any time or place in any world we can conceive of.

  This is all pretty standard. But Wallace wondered, What do I mean, while sitting, for instance, at my desk in Brooklyn at 9:59 A.M., when I say, “It is impossible for me to touch the Eiffel Tower at 10 A.M.”? Obviously, I don’t mean that the act described is logically impossible (it’s perfectly easy to conceive). But I also don’t quite mean that the act described violates the laws of nature (touching the Eiffel Tower at 10 A.M. is a perfectly ordinary physical act). What I mean is something like: Given the prevailing circumstances now, it is physically impossible for me to touch the Eiffel Tower at 10 A.M. Wallace dubbed this kind of modality “situational physical modality.” Unlike logical modality and plain-old physical modality, situational physical modality, he observed, is not eternal and u
nchanging but rather highly sensitive to details of time and place (as the Eiffel Tower example illustrates). This was a critical distinction, Wallace contended, for the notions of necessity and possibility with which the Taylor argument is concerned are those of situational physical modality. Whether it was possible for me to have fired my handgun is a question the fatalist considers by taking into account certain specific physical and temporal circumstances (such as whether we are measuring its temperature before or after the matter of the gun’s firing).

  Scrutinizing the “Fatalism” paper with this distinction in mind, Wallace became attuned to an equivocation in Taylor’s argument, a logical slippage. Because Taylor had failed to see that his argument concerned questions about situational physical modality, Wallace argued, he ended up treating two possible conclusions to his argument as if they were the same when in fact they needed to be distinguished and treated differently. Consider the alternative conclusions “It was the case that I couldn’t fire my handgun” and “It cannot be the case that I did fire my handgun.” At first they may sound similar, but they are different assessments, concerning different moments of time and different sorts of impossibility. “It was the case that I couldn’t fire my handgun” refers to a past situation in which discharge is deemed impossible in the same way that it would be if my gun had been broken. “It cannot be the case that I did fire my handgun” refers to a present situation in which discharge is deemed impossible because my gun is cool to the touch. The first notion involves an earlier, physical constraint on firing (equivalent to the gun’s being broken); the other involves the current absence of a necessary consequence of firing (namely, a hot barrel). A discerning observer of language, Wallace noted that there is a subtle indicator of this distinction already at work in English: the fine differentiation in meaning between “I couldn’t have done [such and so]” and “I can’t have done [such and so].”

  Which of these conclusions did the assumptions and reasoning of Taylor’s argument yield? “It was the case that I couldn’t fire my handgun” is the conclusion that worries us; we shrink from the suggestion that a future event constrains the firing of a gun in the same way as does its being broken. The other conclusion, “It cannot be the case that I did fire my handgun,” is not a concern: it merely asks us to believe that a future event can be reliable evidence of whether a past event actually did happen. The lack of turbulence in the water would mean only that you didn’t swim in it, not that you couldn’t have. What Wallace needed to do, then, was demonstrate that Taylor’s argument, despite its insistence to the contrary, yielded the one conclusion but not the other.

  This was easier said than done. Though Wallace’s basic line of attack was intuitively promising, the appeal to intuition, as Saunders’s thwarted objection had demonstrated, was an ineffective weapon. What Wallace needed to do was make each step of Taylor’s argument perspicuous and explicit so that a fatalist couldn’t find any wiggle room. This was methodical and complicated work, made more challenging by the absence in the scholarly literature of established conventions—specialized symbols, notations, logical “operators”—for formally expressing the special kinds of necessity and possibility that Wallace had identified. Devising these conventions wasn’t merely a matter of inventing a few new symbols; Wallace would also have to provide a coherent interpretation, a “semantics,” for these symbols. Just as the mathematician who introduces the radical sign (√) into mathematics has to explain that it stands for the concept of a square root, so Wallace had to demonstrate that his symbols were meaningful, that they stood for genuine concepts (in his case, the notions of situational physical necessity and possibility). And just as the mathematician can’t introduce the concept of a square root without showing that it sits comfortably within the existing framework of number theory, so Wallace had to show that his concepts conformed with our larger understanding of the workings of time and the physical world.

  The entire second half of the thesis is given over to this task. By the time Wallace worked out all the details, he had shown that Taylor’s argument, properly analyzed, allows us to draw only the humdrum conclusion (namely, that if my gun is cool to the touch, it means only that I didn’t fire it, not that I couldn’t have). Given the humdrum assumptions on which the Taylor argument is based, a humdrum conclusion is exactly what you would want and expect. Wallace had thus defused the threat of the “Fatalism” paper. Despite his triumph, however, he was not triumphal. He was quick to stress that he had disproved only “Fatalism” (the paper and its argument), not fatalism (the doctrine). Perhaps our actions are indeed fated, he conceded, but if they are, his thesis proved, we are going to learn that fact only through an argument that draws on something more substantive than the arid, purely logical moves Taylor made. An aspiring fatalist would have to roll up his sleeves and delve into reflection on more metaphysically rich topics like causation, say, or the directionality of time.

  In recognition of Wallace’s achievement, Amherst presented him with its philosophy thesis award, the Gail Kennedy Memorial Prize in Philosophy. (James Wallace, who also attended Amherst as an undergraduate, won the same prize in 1959.) The real accomplishment of Wallace’s thesis, however, was not technical or argumentative but more like a moral victory. His intellectual powers had been used to set aright a world momentarily upended by a conceptual sleight of hand. He had enlisted clinical argument in defense of passionate intuition. He had restored logic and language to their rightful places. “In light of what we’ve seen about the semantics of physical modality,” he wrote in the closing passage, “I hold that Taylor’s semantic argument does not in fact yield his metaphysical conclusion.” He then ventured 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.”

  Things, for the moment, were as they should be.

  One of the impressive aspects of Wallace’s achievement was that he was able to sustain his focus on the philosophy thesis long after having begun a countervailing transformation: from budding philosopher to burgeoning novelist. The transition was set in motion a few years earlier, toward the end of his sophomore year, when a bout of severe depression overcame him. He left school early and took off the following term. Wallace would suffer from depression for much of his life, and he tended to avoid public discussion of it. On a rare occasion in which he did allude publicly to his hiatus from Amherst, in his interview with McCaffery about a decade later, he described the episode as a crisis of identity precipitated by mounting ambivalence about his future as a philosopher. “I was just awfully good at technical philosophy,” he said, “and it was the first thing I’d ever been really good at, and so everybody, including me, anticipated I’d make it a career. But it sort of emptied out for me somewhere around age twenty.”

  A debilitating panic followed. “Not a fun time,” he went on. “I think I had a kind of midlife crisis at twenty, which probably doesn’t augur well for my longevity.” He moved back home to Illinois, “planning to play solitaire and stare out the window,” as he put it—“whatever you do in a crisis.” Though he now doubted that he should devote his life to philosophy, he was still drawn to the topic and found ways to engage with it, even dropping in on a few of his father’s lectures at the university, where he monopolized the discussion. “He came to some of my classes in aesthetics, and tended to press me very hard,” James Wallace told me. “The classes usually turned into a dialogue between David and me. The students looked on with ‘Who is this guy?’ looks on their faces.”

  During this time, Wallace started writing fiction. Though it represented a clean break from philosophy, fiction, as an art form, offered something comparable to the feeling of aesthetic recognition that he had sought in mathematical logic—the so-called click. “At some point in my reading and writing that fall I discovered the click existed in literature, too,” he told McCaf
fery. “It was real lucky that just when I stopped being able to get the click from math logic I started to be able to get it from fiction.” When he returned to Amherst, he nonetheless resumed his philosophical studies (eventually including his work on Taylor’s “Fatalism”), but with misgivings: he hoped he would ultimately be bold enough to give up philosophy for literature. His close friend Mark Costello, who roomed with him at Amherst (and also became a novelist), told me that the shift was daunting for Wallace. “The world, the reference, of philosophy was an incredibly comfortable place for young Dave,” he said. “It was a paradox. The formal intellectual terms were cold, exact, even doomed. But as a place to be, a room to be in, it was familiar, familial, recognized.” Fiction, Costello said, was the “alien, risky place.”

  Wallace’s solution was to pursue both aims at once. His senior year, while writing the honors thesis in philosophy, he also completed an honors thesis in creative writing for the English Department, a work of fiction nearly 500 pages long that would become his first novel, The Broom of the System, which was published two years later, in 1987. Even just the manual labor required to produce two separate theses could be overwhelming, as suggested by an endearingly desperate request Wallace made at the end of his letter to Kennick. “Since you’re on leave,” he wrote, “are you using your little office in Frost library? If not, does it have facilities for typing, namely an electrical outlet and a reasonably humane chair? If so, could I maybe use the office from time to time this spring? I have a truly horrifying amount of typing to do this spring—mostly for my English thesis, which has grown Blob-like and out of control—and my poor neighbors here in Moore are already being kept up and bothered a lot.”