In the process of editing, I find myself frequently stopping, putting down my blue pen, and scouring the Internet for nit-picky debates between grammarians and stylists about how to resolve different questions from the tedious domain of formatting minutiae.
One such question of policy lent itself to recursive humor, which happens to be my stock and trade; I report on this comical recursion here.
My question, silly though it may now seem, was whether to abbreviate "versus" as "vs." or "vs".
It might seem obvious to you, but just know that after hours of scanning text for tiny errors, one's confidence in such matters of policy is easily shaken. Shaken, I turned to the Internet.
However, it happens that whenever I have a question between two options concerning formatting, grammar, or style, (such as between whether to write "based on" or "based upon") I enter my search query as "based on vs. based upon".
Accordingly, I found myself asking google to hunt down "vs. vs. vs".
But then I thought: will writing the query this way color the counsel I receive?
Will my search yield results that favor "vs." if I use that manner of abbreviation to contrast my two options?
And if I choose to write "vs. vs vs" will I be playing into the hands of the other camp, who insist on dropping the period?
I realize I am faced with a new, disjunctional meta-query: "vs. vs. vs vs. vs. vs vs". Although, I guess I could pose it this way: "vs. vs. vs vs vs. vs vs"? I don't know--I can't decide between the two.
It's a face off: "vs. vs. vs vs. vs. vs vs vs. vs. vs. vs vs vs. vs vs".
Or is it "vs. vs. vs vs. vs. vs vs vs vs. vs. vs vs vs. vs vs"????
9.23.2008
9.22.2008
Sentential Puzzle: An Old Thought Exhumed.
Way back when I was struggling with my "Sentential Puzzle", I offered up the Ouroboros Solution as a way of getting around it. That week I spoke to Louis on the phone about it, and he had given me a good amount of guff. He said that there were gadzillions of terms I needed to define that I hadn't, that I was a nincompoop, that I should have been drowned at birth, etc. We talked about it, had a good time.
During said phone call, Louis, in his cleverness, proposed a method for generating an "Ouroboric" sentence by tampering with simple typographical parameters.
"Just bend the sentence into a circle, dude," he said just before hanging up in contempt.
After immediately calling me back, he discussed with me some putatively infinitely recursive claims in epistemology, which prompted me to propose a particular sentence for Louis' "circular" version of the Ouroboros solution.
Louis posts about the sentence here.
But don't jump to any happy conclusions yet. Louis wants to say that this kind of sentence spells the doom of the doom of Solution #1. But I'm not so sure. Question: what determines where you're supposed to start reading in such a sentence??? If you start on the word "that", at best you end up with an infinitely long incomplete clause, not a sentence.
The real trick, Louis, would be to write up a circular sentence that makes sense beginning on any word in the sentence. But then, you might think, you don't end up with one infinitely long sentence, but several.
I have further qualms about the sentence, too. But let this stand for now.
During said phone call, Louis, in his cleverness, proposed a method for generating an "Ouroboric" sentence by tampering with simple typographical parameters.
"Just bend the sentence into a circle, dude," he said just before hanging up in contempt.
After immediately calling me back, he discussed with me some putatively infinitely recursive claims in epistemology, which prompted me to propose a particular sentence for Louis' "circular" version of the Ouroboros solution.
Louis posts about the sentence here.
But don't jump to any happy conclusions yet. Louis wants to say that this kind of sentence spells the doom of the doom of Solution #1. But I'm not so sure. Question: what determines where you're supposed to start reading in such a sentence??? If you start on the word "that", at best you end up with an infinitely long incomplete clause, not a sentence.
The real trick, Louis, would be to write up a circular sentence that makes sense beginning on any word in the sentence. But then, you might think, you don't end up with one infinitely long sentence, but several.
I have further qualms about the sentence, too. But let this stand for now.
9.21.2008
A Problem with Lewis Carroll's "Symbolic Logic".
Lewis Carroll encounters a simple and classic problem in reducing everyday statements into "normal form", or "syllogistic form".The normal form looks like this:
[Quantifier] [Subject] [Copula] [Predicate].
Examples of statements in normal form (from Lewis Carroll):
A. All fully occupied persons are persons who do not talk about their grievances.
I. Some thin persons are not cheerful persons.
E. No pencils of mine are sugarplums.
O. Some poetry is not poetry producible at will. (A disputable claim. [my note])
Take statement A. The quantifier in A is "All, the subject in A is "fully occupied persons", the copula is "are", and the predicate is "persons who do not talk about their grievances".
Notice that A is the normal form for the "everyday" statement "Those who are fully occupied never talk about their grievances". Different forms; same proposition. (Or are they? [my note])
For a statement to be in the normal form, it must have substantive terms (or, terms that refer to a class of objects as a "name", to use Carroll's language) for both its subject and predicate.
Accordingly, the following statement (also from Carroll),
U. All the laws passed last week relate to excise.,
apart from having a suppressed copula, isn't in normal form, because its predicate isn't substantive. Presently, its predicate is "relate to excise", but that's a "name" at all! You can't predicate anything to "relate to exercise". Try it. You're attempt would look something like "Each and every relate to excise is altogether tedious." A simple example of a statement with a non-substantive term as a predicate is "All Cat Power songs are depressing". Welcome to the grammatical mire.
To put U in the normal form, we change "relate to excise" to "laws related to excise" and link it with the subject with the copula "are", like this:
U'. All laws passed last week are laws related to excise.
Incidentally, and just in case you wondering, we want to put statements into normal form while studying them within the realms of logic because by doing so we can come to generate and apply systematic rules for determining when a given proposition follows from another. Simply, by mandating rigid linguistic form we make statements ultimately easier to handle.
Alright. Now, Carroll comes across the simple and classic problem of how to handle proper names when it comes to reducing everyday language to normal form. We want to be able to make propositions about persons, about single-object classes, about "Individuals".
Like these (not from Carroll):
Y. Lewis Carroll is C. L. Dodgson.
W. Sarah Palin will give birth to the man who will lead humanity's war against the machines.
The problem presented by sentenced such as Y and W is how to treat the subject once you've slapped a quantifier in front of it.
Take this:
Y'. All Lewis Carroll is C. L. Dodgson.
Something doesn't sound right, right? It's weird. Unnatural.
But so is this:
Y''. Some Lewis Carroll is C. L. Dodgson.
What to do?
Well, traditionally, the trick is to make such statements into universal affirmative statements (statements like A, that have "All" as their quantifier) and to contort the subject into an awkward, yet nevertheless formally manageable substantive.
I learned (from Quine) to do it this way:
Y'''. All things identical to Lewis Carroll are things identical to C. L. Dodgson.
The class of things referred to by the substantive term "things identical to Lewis Carroll" is narrow, indeed. It has one member, the individual Lewis Carroll. (Carroll actually calls single-object classes "Individuals", which means the Individual "Lewis Carroll" includes only the individual, Lewis Carroll.)
A little roundabout, but it's true, and what's more important, it's formally manageable by the systematic rules of formal logic.
Now, Carroll seems to actually improve upon this method of substantivizing (I MADE THAT WORD UP!) terms. See, when you go with Quine on this one, bright students yelp, "Well, what do you do when there are two people named Lewis Carroll???!!"
You can hear the extra question marks in their voices. You see the exclamation points in their eyes.
Fair question.
What do you do?
Lewis Carroll avoids the problem altogether by playing the trick this way:
Y''''. All men referred to by the speaker when he mentions "Lewis Carroll" are men referred to by the speaker when he mentions "C. L. Dodgson".
Notice how this is better than the language Carroll sometimes slips into:
Y'''''. All persons represented by the name "Lewis Carroll" are persons represented by the name "C. L. Dodgson".
Y'''' is better than Y''''' because, of course, Y''''' is just as susceptible to the bright student's question as Quine's method of substantivizing terms.
In circumventing the more traditional problem (I might cover Quine's commentary on the problem when I have the book with me), Carroll encounters a new problem.
There are cases in which Y is true but Y'''' false.
Just find a speaker mistaken about Lewis Carroll's true identity; in such a case, who "Lewis Carroll" is and to whom the speaker refers by "Lewis Carroll" are two different things, making Carroll's proposed translation inaccurate.
Of course, you might insist that no such person would utter Y. But that's naive, isn't it? I mean, we utter daily plenty of sentences we don't "mean".
What if Dean Liddell at Christ Church College, Oxford, back in 18##, was completely in the dark about Carroll/Dodgson's whole write-fantastic-stories-about-and-take-naked-pictures-of-my-daughter thing, and simply thought that this Lewis Carroll character was some ne'er-do-well literary reprobate he met in a club one time (really, it was that dandy Max Beerbohm), while Dodgson was a distinct person to him entirely: the quiet, reserved, tedious, diligent Mathematics Lecturer.
Then, imagine what would happen if Dean Liddell were to get into a frivolous mental and verbal endurance contest with Oscar WIlde (who happened to be idling about the place with a live bear) as to who could utter more false statements in a row. Dean Liddell starts getting systematic in his approach around the five-minute mark, constraining himself to false personal-identity claims.
Mechanistically, in a trance, he intones:
...
114. Benjamin Disraeli is P. B. Shelley!
115. Lewis Carroll is C. L. Dodgson!
116. Queen Victoria is J. H. Newman!
...
Now, don't you want to say that Wilde would be justified in saying "115 is true! You lose!". However, if we translate Y will Carroll as Y'''', then we'd have to say that 115 is some strange way false, which is idiotic.
Here I have painted a biologically, physically, metaphysically, and logically possible situation in which an utterance of Y would be true but Y'''' false. Hence, the problem.
Note.
The title of the previous blog post is the subtitle to one of my favorite books, "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table".
"Every man his own Boswell."
Presently, I am multitasking.
Here are some things I'm doing as close to simultaneously as manageable:
1. Writing this blog entry.
2. Working on an at-least-3-months-old blog entry about Peter O'Toole, Daniel Walker, the Jamesian-like (the conjunction of the suffix 'ian' and the hyphen-attached word 'like' are intentional) employment of psychological states as tangible elements in plot as executed by a certain film (I do not, however, refer to James in the blog entry), and humor.
3. Listening to, monitoring, and refining a Pandora radio station.
4. Reading a volume which I recently received in the mail by Lewis Carroll about Symbolic Logic.
5. Reading/writing all over an article by Hofstadter about analogies and roles in human and machine thinking called "Analogies and Roles in Human and Machine Thinking".
6. Eating a blueberry muffin and drinking a Jones cream soda.
7. Working on a word document on my computer that is perhaps the dearest document to me of those I've worked on in the past 6 months, called "inventory.doc".
8. Breathing.
9. Procrastinating at doing 1-7 (sometimes 8 [sometimes 9]). (I thought listing 'procrastinating' as "doing" something would be entertaining and inductive of thought. Not sure if 'inductive' is a word. Can 'procrastinating' be an "active" thing, assuming that 1-9 exhaust my current behaviors [they of course do not; run with it] and that 9 does not simply come to performing one of 1-9 at the expense of the remaining members of 1-9? Is there any possible way 9 could simultaneously count as 'active' or 'productive' or as 'doing something' without entailing any of 1-8? [Hint: how do you think this parenthetical reference was generated?])....,..!..: (remember that one punctuation post? classic.).).).()()(==)
Oh, new question (let's assume this paragraph is still being written within parenthesis): does the presence of 9 undermine the claim that I am multi-tasking between all enumerated actions? You should be thinking about what it means to multi-task, now. Now you should be thinking about what you should be thinking now. You shouldn't yet be thinking about Shirley Temple, but now you should have been. (As always, feel free to stop me to ask a question at any time.)
I wanted to write this blog post to encourage you, reader. And you, reader.
Specifically, I wanted to encourage to live your life in a particular way.
More specifically, I wanted to encourage you to live your life in such a way that it was maximally interesting and entertaining for you, as a spectator.
Background:
Sitting in Panera Bread, multitasking
...
10. Answering my phone
11. Worrying about Jenny and her s-face car/Freeway Disaster.
...
Umm. Sometimes you've got to help how you can given your limited resources and abilities, and then let it go and hope for the best.
...
Okay. Background:
Sitting in Panera Break, multitasking, I thought to myself about how I really like being a spectator of my own life. I like listening in on my conversations, I like hearing my jokes, reading the articles I read, etc.
And I thought about how I wish I could share the full-fledged experience of beholding all the data and stimuli I take in, process, and interact with, and beholding me, from the inside-out, as I take in, process, and interact with it all. Thinking of my friends, I wanted to give them that experience. Others could enjoy this.
But then, of course, I realized that was impossible. And I thought what would be the next best thing. And it was for everybody to organize and execute their lives such that they were maximally interesting and entertaining for them to participate in as spectators. Lets all put on really good shows for ourselves, and even help each other with one another's productions.
So, that's why I want to encourage you, reader, to live such a life. Because I can't share mine with you in that way, but still want you to have something just as good or better for yourself.
Here are some things I'm doing as close to simultaneously as manageable:
1. Writing this blog entry.
2. Working on an at-least-3-months-old blog entry about Peter O'Toole, Daniel Walker, the Jamesian-like (the conjunction of the suffix 'ian' and the hyphen-attached word 'like' are intentional) employment of psychological states as tangible elements in plot as executed by a certain film (I do not, however, refer to James in the blog entry), and humor.
3. Listening to, monitoring, and refining a Pandora radio station.
4. Reading a volume which I recently received in the mail by Lewis Carroll about Symbolic Logic.
5. Reading/writing all over an article by Hofstadter about analogies and roles in human and machine thinking called "Analogies and Roles in Human and Machine Thinking".
6. Eating a blueberry muffin and drinking a Jones cream soda.
7. Working on a word document on my computer that is perhaps the dearest document to me of those I've worked on in the past 6 months, called "inventory.doc".
8. Breathing.
9. Procrastinating at doing 1-7 (sometimes 8 [sometimes 9]). (I thought listing 'procrastinating' as "doing" something would be entertaining and inductive of thought. Not sure if 'inductive' is a word. Can 'procrastinating' be an "active" thing, assuming that 1-9 exhaust my current behaviors [they of course do not; run with it] and that 9 does not simply come to performing one of 1-9 at the expense of the remaining members of 1-9? Is there any possible way 9 could simultaneously count as 'active' or 'productive' or as 'doing something' without entailing any of 1-8? [Hint: how do you think this parenthetical reference was generated?])....,..!..: (remember that one punctuation post? classic.).).).()()(==)
Oh, new question (let's assume this paragraph is still being written within parenthesis): does the presence of 9 undermine the claim that I am multi-tasking between all enumerated actions? You should be thinking about what it means to multi-task, now. Now you should be thinking about what you should be thinking now. You shouldn't yet be thinking about Shirley Temple, but now you should have been. (As always, feel free to stop me to ask a question at any time.)
I wanted to write this blog post to encourage you, reader. And you, reader.
Specifically, I wanted to encourage to live your life in a particular way.
More specifically, I wanted to encourage you to live your life in such a way that it was maximally interesting and entertaining for you, as a spectator.
Background:
Sitting in Panera Bread, multitasking
...
10. Answering my phone
11. Worrying about Jenny and her s-face car/Freeway Disaster.
...
Umm. Sometimes you've got to help how you can given your limited resources and abilities, and then let it go and hope for the best.
...
Okay. Background:
Sitting in Panera Break, multitasking, I thought to myself about how I really like being a spectator of my own life. I like listening in on my conversations, I like hearing my jokes, reading the articles I read, etc.
And I thought about how I wish I could share the full-fledged experience of beholding all the data and stimuli I take in, process, and interact with, and beholding me, from the inside-out, as I take in, process, and interact with it all. Thinking of my friends, I wanted to give them that experience. Others could enjoy this.
But then, of course, I realized that was impossible. And I thought what would be the next best thing. And it was for everybody to organize and execute their lives such that they were maximally interesting and entertaining for them to participate in as spectators. Lets all put on really good shows for ourselves, and even help each other with one another's productions.
So, that's why I want to encourage you, reader, to live such a life. Because I can't share mine with you in that way, but still want you to have something just as good or better for yourself.
9.18.2008
Feeling.
Sincerely, I feel as if I've never really finished reading a book. I don't mean this in some strange figurative, "meaningful" sense of "finish". But I feel like I've never gotten to the last page and felt done with a book. I feel as if I still need to go find and read the back end of every book I've read.
Comments.
I didn't check for spelling errors in the previous post. Let it be known.
Also, I won't say that Chapter 3A and 3B from Runes of Chaos are "coming soon", because honestly I haven't thought about it or worked on them that much. But I will say that I intend for them to exist and so they are in a very loose, uninteresting sense, "coming".
Also, I won't say that Chapter 3A and 3B from Runes of Chaos are "coming soon", because honestly I haven't thought about it or worked on them that much. But I will say that I intend for them to exist and so they are in a very loose, uninteresting sense, "coming".
Not Chapter 3. Unless I'm seriously flouting V-P Lit stipulations.
Short stories still exist. They are being churned out by gadzillions of pipe dreams across the globe. They are more frequent than murders in some of the 50 United States. What's more, I dabble. Not in writing--oh no, my sense of decency has not deliquesced to a state of inactivity; I have principles. No, I try reading some of these stories. I try. Try, try again.
It usually goes something like this.
Step 1. Read, sentence by sentence.
Step 2. Hit on a sentence that exhibits one of the following adjuncts
A. Employs "smart", "contemporary", stylistic devices (i.e., open anaphora towards the beginning of the story, unwarranted swear words, fragments, staccato single sentence paragraphs, [sometimes when i'm really picky] the first-person pronoun, etc.)
B. Employs "edgy" words or themes (i.e., "rape", "methamphetamine", "suicide", "Iraq"; Bad Parent-induced psychological trauma, self-deprecation, "making it" somehow in this meaningless world of emotional unrest, etc.,)
Step 3. Abandon Ship!
Usually stories don't make it very long. Two, three sentences maybe. Then I slam the book closed or click the [x] button, intone "DELETED" or "ERR!" or "FAIL", and move on. I don't think it's just a way to make myself feel superior; I genuinely want there to be really entertaining short stories written in the past 2 weeks by somebody someplace--in fact, I don't actually try to read contemporary short stories that much because it's little more than depressing. I'm not just into passing judgment on lousy thing. I want to pass judgment on excellent things.
Despite this, around once every three moon-cycles I find a tolerable story that is less than 30 years old. Sometimes less than 2 years old. This happened today, and I felt bested by it. I felt beat. I was getting a slight slight kick out of this story, and it clearly suffered from the usual stylistic and thematic symptoms endemic of sucky contemporary attempts at fiction. Nevertheless, I was enjoying it. It wasn't particularly tickling with it's style--it wasn't H. H. Munro. It was structurally simple and uninventive. It didn't even do the sorts of things with its content that make me giddy: it did not employ strict categorical distinctions, didn't employ set-theoretic concepts, it didn't include wry young self-indulgent geniuses who drop nice paradoxical aphorisms, it wasn't complex, it wasn't clever. Yet I slightly enjoyed it.
Once I realized all this, I thought I should write it out. For my benefit. So, I clicked the [x] button and decided to compose and publish this blog. I haven't crafted this blog with my usual eye for structural, stylistic, thematic, invention and wit; this was blatheringly written while I multitasked between 3 other things, listening to mustic, in shoes, indoors. But here it is. A blog. And sentence fragments.
It usually goes something like this.
Step 1. Read, sentence by sentence.
Step 2. Hit on a sentence that exhibits one of the following adjuncts
A. Employs "smart", "contemporary", stylistic devices (i.e., open anaphora towards the beginning of the story, unwarranted swear words, fragments, staccato single sentence paragraphs, [sometimes when i'm really picky] the first-person pronoun, etc.)
B. Employs "edgy" words or themes (i.e., "rape", "methamphetamine", "suicide", "Iraq"; Bad Parent-induced psychological trauma, self-deprecation, "making it" somehow in this meaningless world of emotional unrest, etc.,)
Step 3. Abandon Ship!
Usually stories don't make it very long. Two, three sentences maybe. Then I slam the book closed or click the [x] button, intone "DELETED" or "ERR!" or "FAIL", and move on. I don't think it's just a way to make myself feel superior; I genuinely want there to be really entertaining short stories written in the past 2 weeks by somebody someplace--in fact, I don't actually try to read contemporary short stories that much because it's little more than depressing. I'm not just into passing judgment on lousy thing. I want to pass judgment on excellent things.
Despite this, around once every three moon-cycles I find a tolerable story that is less than 30 years old. Sometimes less than 2 years old. This happened today, and I felt bested by it. I felt beat. I was getting a slight slight kick out of this story, and it clearly suffered from the usual stylistic and thematic symptoms endemic of sucky contemporary attempts at fiction. Nevertheless, I was enjoying it. It wasn't particularly tickling with it's style--it wasn't H. H. Munro. It was structurally simple and uninventive. It didn't even do the sorts of things with its content that make me giddy: it did not employ strict categorical distinctions, didn't employ set-theoretic concepts, it didn't include wry young self-indulgent geniuses who drop nice paradoxical aphorisms, it wasn't complex, it wasn't clever. Yet I slightly enjoyed it.
Once I realized all this, I thought I should write it out. For my benefit. So, I clicked the [x] button and decided to compose and publish this blog. I haven't crafted this blog with my usual eye for structural, stylistic, thematic, invention and wit; this was blatheringly written while I multitasked between 3 other things, listening to mustic, in shoes, indoors. But here it is. A blog. And sentence fragments.
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