Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Sea Battle? Of Course I See Battle...

Kottke resurfaces the senior thesis of the later David Foster Wallace:
It offered a solution in how to deal with semantics and physical modalities concerning Aristotle's sea battle. If it is now true that there will be a sea battle tomorrow, is a sea battle necessary tomorrow? If it is now false, is a sea battle impossible tomorrow? It's a way to deal with propositions in the future tense in modal logic, since what is physically possible at a certain time is weird because one has to distinguish the time of the possibility of the event from the possibility of the time of the event.
All of which brings to mind my all time second-favorite headline:

Great Sea Battle Not Fought

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