[...] in a late interview about the philosophical preoccupations of his work, Wallace responded: if some people read my fiction and see it as fundamentally about philosophical ideas, what it probably means is that these are pieces where the characters are not as alive and interesting as I meant them to be," echoing Wittgenstein, who argued that philosophy should involve more than abstract phenomena, asking: "what is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life." [...] In other words, the end of philosophy, for Wittgenstein, is not simply the pursuit of academic study, but the better ability to live in and consider the world. [...]

Claude Sylvanshine in The Pale King, whose surname refers to a dappling of sunlight through leaves in autumn

An antinomy is a problem of language similar to a paradox

unwilling to allow the sequor ad absurdum approach espoused b Lenore Sr.

[...] The Vlad scenario also highlights what Rorty would regard as the misguided tendency to seek extrinsic (in this case divine) meaning in things that manifestly lack intentional significance [...]

Norris points out that Rorty is less trenchant than Baudrillard

In view of what Rortv sees as the incommensurability of different vocabularies, he is forced to view truth and knowledge as constructs of whatever vocabulary is seeking them (almost always collective rather than individual). A corollary of this view, however, is that each vocabulary phrases its own inescapable problems. This is a view Rorty clarifies in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, where he discusses the nature of truth as a property of statements, not of facts; for example, the color of an object is not true or false, but the statement that such an object is blue has the property of truth or falsehood. He argues further that language is made, not discovered, and as such, truth is a creation, not an extrinsic reality: "since truth is a property of sentences, since sentences are dependent for their existence on vocabularies and since vocabularies are made by human beings, so are truths:*

it can put "ironists" in danger of becoming what Sartre called "metastable"

Boswell referred to Broom as "first and foremost a work of metafiction," but I do not fully agree. While the "direct and immediate concern with fiction-making itself" that characterizes the metafictionist, is undeniably present in Broom, it is superseded by a much more pressing concern: how to actually live in a linguistically unstable world, the same concern Wallace observed in Wittgenstein's Mistress. Broom offers a structural meditation on exactly that instability, forcing he novel's form to replicate the linguistic labyrinth of its characters; the novel explores, and indeed exploits, the conventions of metafiction, but does not allow the work to be overwhelmed by its metafictionality. Rather, Broom is more a work that interrogates metafiction by means of its own devices, and finds it wanting. [...]