Skip Navigation

The Daily Dish - 2006-2011 archives for The Daily Dish, featuring Andrew Sullivan

Why Professors are Scruffy

By The Daily Dish
Oct 15 2007, 7:11 AM ET

Legal Theory Blog explains it all for you:

The reason why analytic philosophers (and similarly mathematicians and cognitive scientists) have a difficult time dressing themselves or dress poorly is that the satisfaction of any sentence involving the "goes with" relation is not finitely decidable. There is no algorithm by which one can in a finite amount of time, much less in the morning before you are too late for class, decide with deductive certainty whether an outfit is sharp and properly accessorized. Now, there are rules which by which we can rule out entire classes of ordered pairs, e.g., let x be a member of the class of checked clothing and y be a member of the class of striped clothing, it is fairly trivial to show that for all such x and all such y, Gxy must be false (I leave it as an exercise to the reader to provide a proof). But for the general case there is no finitely executable decision procedure such that for any two arbitrary articles of clothing one may determine the satisfaction of G.

(Hat tip: Harry.)



Presented by

More at The Atlantic

Celebrity Is Warping the Career Incentives for Politicians After the Campaign, The Pop Culture Pull
Love Stinks: An Economic Manifesto Love (on the Internet) Stinks
A Hauntingly Beautiful Zombie Love Story A Beautiful Zombie Love Story
In Memphis Classrooms, the Ghost of Segregation Lingers On In Memphis Classrooms, the Ghost of Segregation Lingers On
The Fight for a Fair and Free Internet The Fight for a Fair and Free Internet
Special Report
The Civil War National Portrait Gallery The Civil War
President Obama reflects on what Lincoln means to him and to America, in an introduction to our special issue. Read more ›
View All Correspondents

The Biggest Story in Photos

Valentine's Day 2012

Feb 14, 2012

Subscribe Now

SAVE 59%! 10 issues JUST $2.45 PER COPY

Facebook

Newsletters

Sign up to receive our free newsletters

(sample)

(sample)

(sample)

(sample)