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  1. Several months ago I made a post in the Metaphysics and Epistemology thread called "Is this about Right?", where I copied a capsule summary of some points re. Objectivism as I understand it, that I'd given to a hostile interlocutor. I thought some of you might enjoy the following, which is more of a defense of Ayn Rand in general against another hater. I wasn't quite sure where to put it, this sub-forum seemed the most neutral - and anyway, as with the previous thread, I would (again) appreciate feedback as to whether I'm "getting it right" on the philosophical points, so my posting this is sort of questioney, in a sense. In what follows "MRM" = Mens' Rights Movement (a small but growing movement supportive of redressing legal gender rights imbalances that have gone too far in the female direction, particularly with regard to the things like child custody, that strongly rejects Third Wave Feminism and other associated Social Justice and Politically Correct twaddle). "Karen" is a lady called Karen Straughan, a Youtuber who is one of the leading lights of the movement. "Red Pill" (a Matrix reference of course) is a shorthand MRAs (Mens' Rights Activists/Advocates) use to encapsulate the experience of the scales falling from one's eyes when one realizes how all-pervasive and deleterious, indeed positively evil, the influence of radical Feminism has been on society. "Virtue signalling" is a term used in the broad Alt-Right/anti-Feminist/anti-SocJus movement, to denote the way people perpetuate and internalize dogma by vigorously displaying assent to it (even if they don't believe it in their heart of hearts), for fear of social shaming (or simply to be able to carry on making a living). Enjoy! ********************* Actually she was an extraordinarily intelligent, courageous, profound and sharp thinker. Her writing is definitely uneven, and she had a tendency to belabour points, but she's far from lousy, she was capable of writing quite powerfully on occasion. She's as wildly misunderstood and slandered as the MRM. And her philosophy dovetails with the red pill stuff, in several ways. Notice how much of what the MRM talks about relates to how men (and women, albeit in a different, subtler way) are conditioned/forced to be dutifully self-sacrificing - i.e. altruistic. You have to understand that Rand was in no way opposed to being kind, helping people, to compassion, etc. She "altruistically" helped many people in her life - she supported her husband in his aspirations, as well as many of her "acolytes". She sent money home to her family up to the point when it became impossible, and she tried many, many times to get her family over to the States with her - again, up to the point when it became impossible; and when it did eventually become possible (by which time her entire family had died, except her youngest sister) she got her sister to the States (sadly, after an initial joyous reunion, the poor woman was so conditioned by that time, she hated the vertiginous freedom of the US and went back to Russia). In fact she was manifestly compassionate, since her entire oeuvre was partly inspired by her experience of the appalling human suffering she experienced in Soviet Russia, and she constantly paints the picture of what happens to society as a whole, including the poor and disadvantaged, when what she considered to be the root of evil (the altruism/collectivism "axis") holds sway; it's just that the main focus of her compassion was the "prime movers", the people (mainly men, as we know) who conceive, initiate and manage the production of, the stuff that enables us to survive and thrive (including intellectual and aesthetic "products"), but who are considered as undeserving of the fruits of their labour. But she was not at all blind to the suffering of ordinary schlubs, the people who do the grunt work - it's just that she didn't virtue signal that they were the only ones worthy of compassion. For example, there's a moving passage in Atlas Shrugged where she describes quite vividly the decay of an entire town and the factory that supports it, as a result of the implementation of potty collectivist ideals, and the horrific effects on the people who lived in the town, including the ordinary folks. In one of her earliest interviews, when she first became somewhat famous, she compared the life of an average, ordinary woman in Soviet Russia, to the life of an average, ordinary woman in the States. What she was opposed to was the idea that compassion and self-sacrifice should be a (collectively forced or internalized) MORAL DUTY, i.e. altruism (as defined by, e.g., Kant, Comte, and many others throughout history). When you really, really get that, the revelation is in itself quite a red pill moment of sorts. The reaction people have to her saying altruism is evil, is quite analogous to the "eeek, Satan!" reaction people have when they hear MRAs say they want to take mens' rights seriously, and read that as MRAs necessarily saying that they're against women, or hate women, etc. i.e. when people hear "altruism is evil", how it filters through to their minds is "compassion, kindness, etc., are evil". When people hear her saying that the opposite of altruism is selfishness, what filters through to their minds is that she's recommending people ride roughshod over others, and devil take the hindmost. Whereas, what she's actually saying is that when it comes to MORAL DUTY, what you MUST do, what you HAVE to do, is sustain and fulfill your own life as a rational being first of all, since that's the precondition of doing ANYTHING (including things like helping others, if that's what YOU HAVE FREELY, RATIONALLY CHOSEN TO DO - as opposed to doing it because you think it's your MORAL DUTY). In a nutshell, what she's saying is that what morality and ethics are, is totally misunderstood, since it's the answer to the question "how MUST I live, how OUGHT I to act, day to day, moment to moment, under typical circumstances?". In fact, when it comes to Trolley/Lifeboat (etc.) type problems, she concurs with most peoples' intuitions, but she calls that "the ethics of emergencies", and claims that such contrived toy problems, far from being "stress tests", are actually irrelevant to day-to-day, moment-to-moment life, and therefore offer little insight into the central moral question, "How ought I to live?" Another way in which she links up with this stuff is her constant insistence on the primacy of reality (as opposed to our private experience of reality), and that reason, working on the only evidence of anything we have, the evidence of the senses (as opposed to faith, mystical intuitions, etc.) is the only viable tool for understanding reality, taking knowledge not just as a collaborative product, but as something each and every individual has to actively pursue in their own life, in order to build up their own, accurate model of the world, and steer their own path through the world using that model; and this, not just for the great productive geniuses among us, but, as above, for everyone, including us schlubs. Now, you might say "well doesn't everyone sensible and rational think that?" Well, kind of, at least most people would pay lip-service to the idea (although she was very clear that some philosophical ideas have been very much against the ideas of reason and sensory evidence, on very flimsy, contrived philosophical grounds, and that that's had really bad effects throughout history). But are we consistently logical about it? Do we apply it to our own lives as consistently and thoroughgoingly as we can? And that's the kicker - because for her, acknowledging reality, and dealing with it, and with other people, using reason, evidence, argument, persuasion, etc., as opposed to faith and force, is itself part of the MORAL DUTY described in the previous paragraph - for geniuses, for schlubs, for everyone. (Again, this echoes Karen's insistence on everyone equally owning their shit being the moral thing to do.) I am not an Objectivist in the "joiner" sense, I've just absorbed and integrated a lot of her philosophy, and respect it, and her. It's obviously true that the Objectivist "Collective" (as she jokingly called it) was quite cult-like, and perhaps it's true that she had character flaws that exacerbated that. But surely we understand that any set of ideas can turn cult-like, when expressed by a persuasive person, and parroted by awestruck people. It's also true that her acrimoniously-ended affair with Nathaniel Branden was a bit of a mess, and doesn't reflect well on her philosophy as a proposed guide for living life. But on the other hand, consider this: when she was 9 or so she decided to become a great novelist, specifically in order to present to the world her ideas about the ideal way to live (which she concretized as "the ideal man"), in an inspiring and artistic way, and she struggled for many years and actually achieved that, in the teeth of tremendous opposition, hatred, vilification, etc.. That's no mean feat, as the fulfillment of a deliberate, long-term life-plan conceived by a 9 year old girl, raised first of all in deeply, cloyingly religious Czarist Russia, and then immediately afterwards, in the hellish kafkatrap that was Soviet Russia. That does speak well for her philosophy as a guide for life - for a successful, fulfilling life. Also consider this: very, VERY few intellectuals of any note went against the consensus that Communism was a fantastic thing in those days - even the "useful idiots" who were invited over to inspect the wonderful fruits of the collective workers' paradise were taken in. Bertrand Russell was one of the few. But just as she'd rejected religion when she was 8 or so, Ayn Rand consciously, articulately and vehemently rejected Communism when she was 12 years old. I would say that's the sign of quite a high IQ.
  2. Good stuff. I think the crucial thing about concepts is that they are (as Piekoff says somewhere) more or less like mental files, and that's what makes them open-ended, and that open-endedness is what makes them time-binding (beyond the range of the present moment) and space-binding (including things not experienced, that may never be experienced, yet about which we can say things with certainty). In my previous way of thinking, concepts seemed unimportant and merely "psychological", because of the crucial argument that the thought-content of different people using the same word may be different. That's true in the sense that the mental associations and images they have with a word may be different, but if you think of concepts as mental files, if people (e.g. the paradigmatic developing children) associate the same OBJECTS with the word, then you have the real root of the co-ordination of language, without having to rely wholly on Wittgenstein's idea of shared rules. IOW, one doesn't need to posit a pre-established harmony of (and therefore thought) at the rule level, as social habits or games of symbol manipulation, in the sense of us all being induced into the same "language games." Yes that happens, but it happens in conjunction with individual children coming to have the same mental files into which they mentally plonk things in the world around them, because they all (as rational beings) use the same process of sifting the more different from the less different (similar). They then associate their mental files with the symbol-manipulating games they're given by adults. IOW, people can be induced to have the same mental filing system just by severally encountering the same reality, so concepts in the good, old-fashioned sense, really are the foundation of thought and language, not the other way round. There's a bit of an irony here in that the removal of "psychological" considerations from philosophy did contribute to the development of the science of computation (and then a double irony in that, say, Turing, partly based his ideas on a sketch of human psychology!). But in the long run, I think we've got to reintroduce that psychological element back into philosophy, as Rand did; we have to understand the psychologically-oriented component of philosophy, as being crucially important, for concept-formation, and also for philosophy as a normative discipline (and ultimately good for liberty, as Bacon would have said).
  3. Kant is a tricky topic because while the majority interpretation of him is as an Idealist (pretty much as Rand outlined, main modern representative being Paul Guyer), there's also a minority interpretation that takes his 7 or so disavowals of Idealism seriously, and stresses the "Empirical Realist" side of him (main representative Henry Allinson, with I think the best explication being by a chap called Arthur W. Collins, who goes a bit further than Allinson in a fascinating little book called Possible Experience). So much depends on which Kant you're talking about, and when it comes to the baneful influence of Kant, that might actually be more like the baneful influence of a tragic misunderstanding of Kant. Not that he's completely innocent even on this reading - he certainly did want to "make room for faith" in some sense, but certainly not in the realm of ordinary, everyday experience (which is where Objectivism lives too). He was also a fan of Rousseau, and there are definitely elements of collectivism and altruism, etc., in his thought. However, as he states plainly, where he wants to "deny reason" is in being competent to discuss God, the immortality of the soul, etc., and that's the only extent to which he's "Idealist", i.e he's "idealist" about matters that don't touch on empirical reality anyway. The key to the alternate reading of Kant's epistemology is to understand what the "dogmatic slumbers" he felt Hume had awakened him from were. Bear in mind the historical context: he was a rationalist in the tradition from Descartes to Leibniz, but shared the starting point of Cartesianism with the British Empiricists, the starting point of methodological solipsism and representationalism. If you read Kant as someone trying to step outside that starting point, and you take "Empirical Realism" seriously, then you start to understand Kant as a revolt against Cartesianism in a sense roughly parallel to Thomas Reid, with Kant's innate categories being roughly parallel to Reid's Common Sense. (It's interesting that Kant only knew of the Scottish school via Beattie, who he despised - it would be interesting to see what his reaction to Reid himself might have been.) And both of those as roughly parallel to Objectivism. Obviously not in detail and jargon and working-out, but in the sense that these three philosophies are closer to each other than any of them are to either rationalism as such, or empiricism as such. All three are stepping outside the Cartesian starting point that makes the rationalist/empiricist division seem compelling, and stepping back into a kind of - well, Empirical Realism. The trouble is, while Kant was revolting against the Cartesian tradition, he was using jargon terms derived from a mixture of that and the older scholastic tradition. And this is why you can have a sort of "double vision" while reading Kant. At times it really, really seems like he's an Idealist, particularly when he uses words like "Vorstelling" (representation). But if you calmly recall to mind his disavowal of Idealism, then you can start to see how for him, the vorstellung is more like the "form of appearance" of Rand, which is more or less like the "sign" of Reid. Also, there's the factor that it's just a really difficult problematic he was working with, so he did get confused himself sometimes. As to the famous thing-in-itself, of course if you understand Kant in Cartesian terms, then it's all as Rand says, you have this sharp disjunct between representations being the things we perceive and experience, on the one hand, and a world "behind" that "flat plane" of representations that may or may not correspond to it. But if you take Kant in Direct Realist terms, or as he called it himself, Empirical Realist terms, then there is no such sharp cut. The thing in itself is precisely the thing we experience. "Experience" isn't used in a way that latches onto the internal representation, but rather onto the object out there that's independent of the mind. The thing-in-itself and thing-of-experience distinction is then purely epistemological, it's purely a way of conceiving things. Which is why Kant never saw the obvious howler that so many think they see: that the proposal that causality can come from the in-itself and cause phenomenal experience is unjustified. It would be unjustified if the distinction between thing-in-itself and thing-experienced were metaphysical. But for Kant - the real Kant - it's actually not. Something that adds to the confusion here is the notion of the noumenon. Most commentators have elided the distinction between noumenon and thing-in-itself - THEY ARE NOT SYNONYMOUS. The concept "noumenon" already contains within itself a proposal as to means of verification, i.e. the noumenon is the thing-in-itself considered as susceptible to being understood by a God-like intuition, i.e. precisely a kind of mystical perception, as Rand would have understood it. That is all Kant denies about the thing-in-itself - that we can intuit the thing-in-itself by means of such a God-like awareness. Anyway, the upshot of it is that for the real Kant (in this view) we are not in any way metaphysically cut off from things, the thing-in-itself and the thing-of-experience are one and the same thing, simply conceived in different ways. And what Kant is saying is that we have no way of conceiving of things that isn't in terms of possible experience, in terms derived from possible experience, or in terms of what makes experience possible: but that's not a problem. A simple way of putting this would be to consider thinking of a presently-unexperienced object. Is it coloured "outside of experience"? It depends on how one thinks of colour, as the phenomenon that occurs when the surface reflectivity of objects interacts with our sensory/perceptual system, or as that surface reflectivity as a property of the object alone. However, even though we can understand the surface reflectivity as the property of the object that's there independently of our experiencing it, we can think of it (e.g. picture it) only in terms of being coloured in the former sense, as notionally giving off, outside our experience, that interactive causal effect its surface reflectivity has on us while we experience it. And that's actually ok. It's simply conceiving of the object as an object of possible experience. This admits of an active conscious aspect to the process, but it doesn't deny the metaphysical independence of the object from consciousness, it just denies that that metaphysical independence can have "its own way of being spoken about", a way that's not in terms derived from possible experience.
  4. Hi Grames, thanks for your comments. Yeah it's an odd thing with me and Objectivism. I'm someone who's always had an amateur interest in philosophy (I'm 57), and I've been round the houses many times with many philosophical positions in the course of my life. I've always thought of Objectivism as a strong, if idiosyncratic contender, and to my mind most of the criticisms of it do miss the point, e.g. often they're just arguments from authority ("that's not how we do things around here", as it were) - as if the whole point of what Rand was doing wasn't to positively challenge the received wisdom! But lately, I've really been going through a major revulsion against the representationalism that's been so captivating for most of my philosophical life, and getting more and more into the "swing" of Objectivism and starting to think of it as an example of a thin but strong line in philosophy - starting of course with Aristotle, but going through flashes of prominence like Bacon, Thomas Reid, even Pierce (his pragmatism was quite a different beast from what eventually got called that name), etc. (Incidentally, I think of all the philosophers between Aristotle and Rand, Reid is probably the closest to Rand, if you look at what he says about Common Sense, it's sometimes uncannily close to what Rand says about the axioms.) The more I understand Objectivism, the more I see that while Rand as a philosopher definitely didn't speak the approved "lingo", and might have benefited from more engagement with philosophers like you see at the end of ITOE, she is subtler and deeper than the received wisdom would have it. And actually from my observation, I think the academy's gradually swinging round to similar lines of thought. The kinds of philosophy Rand excoriated 30 years ago (e.g. Logical Positivism) are now not very highly thought of in the academy either. The names that seemed so "big" then have faded (who remembers Donald Davidson? ). There's renewed interest in Aristotle, particularly in ethics, there's exploration of things like Direct Realism, and I think actually that even Externalism (e.g. of Putnam's semantic kind, or Dennett's cognitive kind) are also somewhat friendly to this approach (there's a logical link between J. J. Gibson's view of perception, which is itself akin to a form of Direct Realism, and Dennett's cognitive externalism). There's actually nowhere else to go. An amusing side-light on this is how the later Wittgenstein once lamented the irony that he was a professional philosopher who didn't know any Aristotle. But the double irony is perhaps that what he was doing towards the end of his life (particularly in On Certainty) was tending towards Direct Realism. Once you step outside the representationalist problematic (as Witty did in his own way), there aren't many options other than Direct Realism, and I think the academy will eventually catch up to Rand. In the long view, it's really only been a tiny blip of time (relative to the millennia humans have been rational animals) since philosophy (guiding life by means of reason rather than faith) started, it's understandable that with such difficult problems we've sometimes veered off into blind alleys. The cost has been horrendous, but there have also been huge gains. It's still all to play for and the fat lady hasn't even gotten out of her taxi yet.
  5. Just to revive this topic, as I've been thinking about identification myself a lot recently, in the course of thinking over the axioms again. The real problem with the Objectivist understanding of identification is that it can easily be construed as a "reading-off" of the identity from things, in which case it does look like a version of intrinsicism (or the "diaphanous" model of consciousness Kelley talks about). The trouble is, reading-off the identity of things in everyday life is only possible wrt to perception and wrt to the kinds of identifications we learn from school/education/culture - both of which we can be confident are largely accurate, but only at the cost of a) our genetic and cultural evolutionary heritage, and b ) that heritage applying roughly at the level of "middle-sized dry goods" (or the "furniture of the world" - ironic, in view of Rand's use of furniture examples in ITOE ). Once we're outside that comfort zone, reading-off is no longer possible. Which means that knowledge-discovery, discovery of objectively correct identity, can't fundamentally be a reading-off process. To put this another way: if we already have the concept chair, then it's easy to read less/more, similar/different, as signs of (unit) chairhood off of actual chairs; only then do the perceptual discriminations of ordinal less/more, cardinal x amount, or similarity/dissimilarity, have meaning as objective signs of some particular unit identity. Only if we already have a concept that's reliable and trustworthy, can certain perceptually picked-out aspects of an object appear as objective signs of metaphysically real unithood under that concept. But if we are faced with something (again, perceptually picked-out in a rough primary sense - spatiotemporal, causal, sensory) that we've never encountered before, then we can't read off its identity, because no aspect of its perceptual qualities can be construed as signs of an identity unless we already have some identity in mind. Our only option under those circumstances is to punt an identity from our side, and see if the shoe fits. At that point, while we certainly can build up to a conjectured identity by means of the conceptual process of distinction of similarities and differences, ordinal/cardinal measurement, etc., that doesn't have any bite to it, in the way that our former readings-off of signs did (because of the evolutionarily-guaranteed or culturally-guaranteed reliability of the concept); we could be wrong and misidentifying in any number of ways. But that's the actual logical situation we're in, that's the ground floor of epistemology, not the reading-off of identities, but the conjecture and refutation of possible identities. Not reading-off perceptual qualities as signs of kinds of "somethings" we already know exist, but conjecturing a new kind of "something" that such perceptual qualities as those could be signs of. IOW, I think you can have the following process be objective in the important metaphysical aspect (primary of existence), yet still involve a certain element of the subjective in a epistemological sense:- we punt, or conjecture the identity of a thing (with our aim being precisely to get at the metaphysically real identity of it), and on the principle of existence=identity we deduce particular logically necessary likely responses of the thing consequent upon particular moves, pokes, proddings and interventions of ours, at a level at which they can be confirmed/disconfirmed directly by perception. If the thing passes the tests, then we are rationally justified in continuing to use that identification (nothing speaks against it, everything for it: ok use it). The greater the degree of rigour, the higher the level of abstraction, the less confirmation and induction are valid (because we are now in rarified air that hasn't been settled by the prior, largely reliable evolutionary processes we've inherited), the more Popperian disconfirmation becomes the only viable method (actual winnowing-out, or like sculpting by removing material that's definitely false, to reveal something that we are rationally justified in holding provisionally true). The long and the short of it is that it's generate-and-test all the way up and down As a side-note: I would keep this sort of idea strictly apart from representationalism, though. There is (it seems highly likely) an abstract kind of "representation" at the level of the brain (registers and values of some kind arising from the neuronal machinery), but we don't have conscious access to that, what we have is the direct presentation of objects - the perceptual form of reading-off - as the product of our inherited identification machinery at the perceptual level, which then forms the foundation for either common, comfort-zone (school/work/university-level) reading-off of identification or the more exploratory, conjectural, scientific conceptual process of identification at the bleeding edge of science.
  6. Thanks for your response William O, it's helpful, I'll get back to this when I've sourced a few references. As a start: the tabula rasa thing was in response to my interlocutor saying that it's an inappropriate term for Ayn Rand to use because it had a fairly specific meaning in Locke that Rand doesn't seem to intend, because for Locke only the senses give us knowledge through experience, and conceptual reasoning doesn't, whereas I think Rand intended that both senses (or rather perception) AND concepts give knowledge through experience, so concepts have contact with reality via perception just as the senses do, only it's mediated by the process of concept formation, which is built wholly on the material from the senses, and doesn't get any alien material from elsewhere for the construction. I think since Rand bundles senses and reason together to give a complete understanding of reality via experience, it's fair enough for her to use Locke's concept in an adapted way.
  7. Hey folks, I'm not an Objectivist but I've always been mentally friendly towards Objectivism. I actually hung around here some years ago, but I hadn't thought much about Objectivism since then. I recently got into discussion with a critical philosopher where I was defending Objectivism and I ended up doing a sort of summary of how I understand some key elements of Objectivism. I'm quite pleased with it and I think it's pretty decent, but I'd like a reality check from experienced Objectivists here, to see whether I'm along the right lines or not. Here goes:- _____________________ Rand rejects apriori reasoning as a source of knowledge. For her, all knowledge is gained empirically, including conceptual knowledge, so the tabula rasa concept fits well enough. You have to understand that she's an Aristotelean, so she works with essences and natures, like Aristotle or Aquinas. She doesn't agree with the idea that concepts are intrinsically detached from perceptions, like random puzzle pieces or algorithms that could happen to fit or not fit with reality. IOW, she doesn't understand conceptual thinking as being like a set of intrinsically meaningless symbols plus rules for their manipulation, which must then be given an interpretation to connect them to reality (or not) and make them meaningful. With that view, the only logical necessity is in the rules for pushing the symbols around. In her view, the logical necessity is in the essence or nature of the object itself. It's a bit of a strange way of thinking to us nowadays (essence/nature is way out of fashion, especially since the later Wittgenstein), but it makes sense in its own terms. This is the mistake that most hostile interpreters of her make who are blind to this aspect of her philosophy because they're so steeped in post-Fregean analytical philosophy. If you argue with Objectivists you'll always be pointed at and laughed at for not getting this fundamental point: when you perceive or conceive of an object without error, you are grasping its essence or nature, and that's where the logical necessity comes in (A=A). A thing is what it is, its nature and behaviour is always logically consistent, and that consistent nature/behaviour is what you're getting a glimpse of of via perception, and grasping the whole of via concept (which sums up all your perceptions). And that's also why she doesn't hold with the is/ought dichotomy. Since our essence is to be rational animals, but rational animals whose exercise of rationality is a free choice, the LOGICAL NECESSITY to choose to survive and flourish in order to actually survive and flourish via our only means of surviving and flourishing (our perception/reason - especially with respect to the time-binding nature of conceptual reasoning, on account of our having grasped an essence that is the same in all times and places) is part of our nature, and actually making that choice is what she calls "moral", whereas the choice to not act rationally (i.e. to not grasp and act upon, and in conformity with, our own nature and the natures of things around us) in order to survive and flourish, is what she calls "immoral". Because that choice is part of our nature, then both the moral AND the immoral options are inherent in our nature. The only problem is that the less we exercise our rational faculties, the more they atrophy. We become something else, something less than human, with a stunted, slightly different nature. Eventually we lose even the capacity to choose and we become subhuman, living at an animal, perceptual level only. We become a thing whose nature is more or less simply animal and reflexive, and we are at the mercy of reality, no longer its master, aware only of present perceptions (having lost our ability to grasp essences, time-bind and predict, etc.) and subject to random whims, pursuing momentary pleasures. But note that we only come to understand what our nature is through the perceptual/conceptual knowledge-gathering process itself: at some point we come to maturity, reflect on and realize what sort of thing we are, then we have the choice to act in conformity with our nature or sabotage ourselves. The prior choice to be and act rationally that enabled us to discover our true nature, supposing we did in fact make it, is then retrospectively understood to have been a moral choice, and we understand that we're perpetually on the hook for that same moral choice now that we've woken up to our true nature. For her, education is supposed to give us a "helping hand" to get to the stage of self-realization, to nudge us in the direction of (effectively) choosing to understand our nature and live full lives. That's why she was incredibly angry at the state of education, which she saw as a form of child abuse and mental torture, because it doesn't encourage us to come to our natural inheritance, it doesn't draw out (educare, root of "educate") what's innate and natural to us. It prevents children who aren't strong enough in intellect and courage to go through this process themselves from becoming fully human (analogous with foot binding - she uses a Chinese "making a man in the shape of a jar by keeping a child in a jar until they've grown into that shape" example from Victor Hugo). Incidentally, this is an example of the fact that while she isn't altruistic, she is fundamentally compassionate - although she is on the whole more concerned about the right conditions for the best of us to fulfill our natures, that's partly because movers and shakers' doing well is a precondition for everyone to be able to fulfill their natures, and while the main benefit of that, in her view, is that it reflects benefit back to the movers and shakers themselves (because of human co-operation and interdependence), there are lots of examples in her work where she vividly paints the horror of how the failure of intellectuals to take responsibility for their specialty inexorably results in tremendous suffering for ordinary/weak people who don't have the intellectual's gifts. She wishes everyone well on their own trajectory, so to speak - to the degree that they are able and willing, and to the degree their capacities allow.
  8. Hey Grames! Yes, this is beautiful, and it agrees with a number of other philosophies. (e.g. Schopenhauer comes to mind as one of the first philosophers to clearly delineate the difference between what he called "understanding" - i.e. the kind of automatic - and on the whole pretty accurate - perception of what we call "things" and "objects" as spatiotemporal entities/identities, which we share with animals - and "knowing" - i.e. conceptual knowledge that can more characteristically be right or wrong.) I think a fair amount of modern science and philosophy wouldn't cavil either. The sticking point is usually that the automatic summations of the sensation-perception system can occasionally be wrong too. I think we went through this a bit in an earlier discussion last year. So yes I agree that the conceptual volitional level is characteristically the level at which we can "get things wrong" by conscious thinking. But perception can also "get things wrong" - only it does so much less frequently (on its own level of "medium-sized furniture of the world"), because - as we now understand - it evolved to be pretty accurate in all currently-existing animals (including us). By this I mean "illusion" of course - think of animal camouflage! There you have an "arms race" between, say, prey colouration, etc., and this automatic "thing"-noticing function (predator mistakes prey for mere foliage, or vice-versa). The trace of that in us is the usual visual illusions we have fun with (but also aural illusions etc., and maybe for dogs olfactory illusions!). Agreed. It took me a while to understand this different use of "certainty" in Objectivism from the "traditional" (basically Cartesian) philosophical use - but I do now think the Objectivist use is actually closer to "ordinary language"/common-sense! (It's mostly what people mean by saying something like "I'm morally certain that P" - i.e. it is way of saying that one has conscientiously gone through a volitional process of thinking before uttering the proposition in question. Also think of "beyond reasonable doubt".) Yep, this all makes good sense. I'd just add that perception is necessarily (i.e. by stipulation, i.e. that's what we call "perception" if and when it happens) contact with some kind of reality, but - as illusions show - the actual reality (i.e. its true identity) may be different from the perceptually-summed one (the identity we or an animal think the "thing" has); and as hallucinations show, something can seem to be a perception, but not be a perception. Again, sound common sense. Yes - think about how we test a hallucination. It will be noticed that hallucinations generally occur when the subject is fixated, or rooted to the spot, as it were (often because the hallucination is so weird!). As soon as you move around, the hallucination usually dissolves. (If there were ever a reason for an Objectivist to try LSD it would be for the intrinsic epistemological interest of noticing this phenomenon as a limiting case of seeming-perception! ) "Moving around", triangulating, is the right method (generally) to distinguish a hallucination from a perception. And science is, in a sense, just an expansion of that, in its attempt to distinguish right identifications from wrong ones. Not only do we ourselves triangulate (move around, test) as individuals, but we have a division of labour where we triangulate between ourselves ("do you see what I see?" - replication, peer review). Again, I think the only sticking point is this: there is no logical necessity in induction, there is only logical necessity in deduction. This is really the gist of Hume's point, according to Popper, and is the basis of Popper's "criterion of demarcation" between science (as a practice that rigorously uses logic in application to the world) and other activities; and the upshot of it all is that universal laws/theories (which one might say are proposed identifications of what the world is at a high level of abstraction) can't logically be confirmed, only disconfirmed (logical necessity only operates in that disconfirming direction, given an "if .. then" posit). The only way it looks like there's logical necessity in induction is because the implications of a given identity are logically necessary in a deductive sense! But that is only in the context of an "if ... then" application to reality! IF the identity of this "thing" (perceptually summed) before me is what I think it is, THEN it necessarily must behave so-and-so. But that's the "gap" - DOES IT IN REALITY HAVE THAT IDENTITY? Here, there is no logical necessity, no compulsion reaching out into the world, from what we say, that the identity we posit for the "thing" is the correct identity. (Hume's problem, in a nutshell, translated into essentialist (in this case Objectivist) language.) It must have some identity (so long as we are doing things we call "investigating", discussing", it must have some character, behave in a characteristic way - this much comes from the axioms implicitly granted in the very process of investigation, discussion, etc. - and this is where we'd rightly part company from Hume in his version, his exposition of the problem he noticed); but it need not (logically) necessarily have the identity we posit for it.
  9. As I said, an identification based on perception is less fallible than an identification arising out of a highfalutin' theory, so we test highfalutin' theories by deducing from them (as hypothetical identifications of what is) what eventuating circumstances (that are perceptually noticeable) would eventuate if the identification was correct. If reality doesn't pan out the way we expect, then provided our checking perceptions are correct, and our apparatus is functioning (and our "auxiliary hypotheses" are correct), our theory must be wrong. And that's a hard, logical "must". Now, of course, our checking identification might itself be wrong (our perception may be in error, our apparatus may not be working correctly, or the science behind the apparatus might not be good), but that's not really a problem - that's what double-checking and peer review are for. However, even then, it's wise to keep things open to revision (though again, no need to stay up at night worrying about it). So there is no certainty re. identification (as there is with deductions of the implications of hypothetical identifications or theories) but it doesn't matter, because we approach the truth (i.e. the identity the thing really has, as opposed to the identity we might fondly wish it had ) gradually, by generate-and-test. (Curious: does this type of explanation make you feel like you're on shifting sands or something like that?)
  10. Do we really need to say something about all knowledge here? This responds to the Duhem-Quine idea too (and to Putnam's - I think it was - criticism of Popper before that). If you are testing one hypothesis, then your testing involves accepting as true a bunch of other stuff (about the testing equipment, and the theories backing that, for example). But is it a problem that you don't have some cast-iron guarantee about the truth of those other things? (In real life, do we not often adjust something now here, now there, till we get the whole thing right?) Bear in mind: Objectivists would surely agree that there's no reason to doubt until and unless there IS a reason to doubt, until a reason to doubt exists (i.e. some anomaly with the present picture of things, some clash between what we expect according to our logic, and what pans out). The panoply of sceptical arguments has no bite because mere logical possibility alone is not itself a reason to doubt. IOW, the sceptic says "what justification do you have?" (e.g. as per Duhem-Quine, for believing in the truth of the auxiliary hypotheses, or for trusting the science backing the technology that backs the meter readings in experiments), and he attempts to cast doubt on our trust/reliance ("contextual certainty"?) on these things, by enlarging on a bunch of logical possibilities that "for all we know" might be true, since we can't distinguish right now between their being true and what we now believe being true. But we don't need to make that distinction, we don't need to justify our reliance, because no rational doubt has yet been introduced by the sceptic. (i.e. All we have to do is ask the sceptic: "Is there a reason to believe our auxiliary hypothese are false? Is there a reason to believe the science behind our instruments if wrong? Do we have a reason to believe we might in reality be a brain in a vat?) But all this (it seems to me) is exactly the same for both the Objectivist solution to Hume's problem and the Popperian solution. (I know some people here take David Stove's view of Popper as an irrationalist and nihilist, but I think that's wrong.) Yes, volitionally adhering, I agree. And that's what scientists generally do in their work, or businesspeople generally do in their work - or for that matter artists, when they follow the internal logic of their work in the process of creation. And I think that Rand is correct in identifying a sort of malaise in society to the effect that peoples' rationality is compartmentalised, and while they may be rational in some professional area, they may be irrational in others. I think that has a lot to do with the part of us that's a herd animal - we are willing to sometimes abrogate our rationality for the sake of fitting in, or even just appearing to fit in. (This has sound evolution backing it - solo survival in primitive times would have been a desperate affair, and division of labour instantly gives us, in groups, a huge advantage. But the psychology behind that clinging to the herd becomes a liability in an open society of relative strangers interacting according to liberal - in the strict sense of individualist - rules.) "Reduce the fallible to the infallible" - I'd rather say, reduce the fallible to the less fallible. Infallibility looks like it cannot be found and is anyway not a necessity at any point in the process of knowledge gathering. Agreed re. integration into heirarchy. And the deliverance of our senses is indeed the very standard which grounds more complex and fallible judgements. (The philosopher Mark Johnston has the senses as "truthmakers" of judgements - i.e. the sentence "there's a cat on the mat" is made true by our seeing a cat on the mat - see here. What this means, is that this is the convention we have, this is the bedrock of how we dub as "true" subsequent judgements - and this position is not at all troubled by any of the sceptical arguments like those from hallucination, etc. I posted about Mark Johnston a while ago here but nobody seemed to be interested. I think Objectivsts might find some of his ideas congenial.) As to the last, of course we can trust inductive reasoning:- 1) we have in us a deeply-inculcated-via-evolution sense that things generally behave consistently; that's one point, based on our natural history and our psychology. 2) Another point is that we can be absolutely certain of inductive reasoning from a given identity - there's iron logical necessity in that (i.e. given concept X, its corollaries necessarily follow). So those two points are good reason to be confident. But it still has to be said that there isn't any iron logical necessity that we have identified anything correctly, or that any identity (concept) we posit for a phenomenon (regardless of how we've come to think it up - e.g. through observation and integration) actually applies to anything. Therefore our trust must always be provisional and open to revision (if there's a good reason to revise it - not, of course, a mere logical possibility as per sceptical arguments).
  11. Hello again Objectivists! I recently browsed through my posts and responses from my previous sojourn here, trying to get clearer on things. I've also been browsing some of the latest threads here, and I noticed the following exchange, which re-sparked thoughts relating to a post I made before. I hope neither Mindy nor Mikael will mind me using their bit of discussion in another thread as a jumping-off point for this post. I'm still wrestling with Objectivism's answer to the "Problem of Induction" (as I understand it of course - and that's always open to correction if I've gotten it wrong), and with what I'm calling a "gap" between identity and identification. I don't think that's the implication of what Mikael is saying. The implication is that the world may simply turn out to have a different identity from the one he thought it had (it may still be a consistent identity). We may have mis-identified the nature of reality as being consistent in way A, when it's actually consistent in (the somewhat similar) way B. Suppose (as we have no good reason to believe will happen!) the sun didn't rise tomorrow. We'd all be in big trouble of course since this would imply either that the earth had stopped spinning, or that some other weird, unforeseen, maybe hitherto-unconceptualised event had occurred. But supposing some scientists survived the disaster (in humanity's last redoubt in cave complexes ), then they would be busy re-jigging our idea EITHER of what the universe is like as a whole (the over-arching scientific "laws") OR of what some specific things are like (e.g. the nature of the earth) OR they'd be including some hitherto unforeseen entity into knowledge (e.g. the giant space monster that batted the earth and stopped it spinning), depending on the specific context. It comes down to this: the logical implications of a given identity are absolutely rigid (i.e. they are logically necessary). ("If this is an A then it will do x, y, z") But whether we have identified something correctly has no logical necessity about it. ("IS this in fact an A?") Nor does an affirmative answer to the question of whether this identity we've concocted ("A") actually applies to anything in the world, have any logical necessity about it. IOW, you can think of things in terms of identity and induction, but that doesn't really get rid of Hume's problem, it just throws it back a step and talks about it in a different way. (In Nelson Goodman's version of this, the "grue/bleen" business, he's not talking about identities but simply of conceptually isolatable properties, just as Hume's original version talks about events - it really doesn't make any difference in what terms you couch it, the problem is still there.) None of this means knowledge isn't possible; it just means we have no certainty other than the ("contextual"?) certainty that if it is an A, then it will x, y and z. But we cannot have certainty that we have identified the thing correctly as an A, or that there are any As in the Universe (e.g. we might have mistaken them for the closely-similar Bs). Which is as much as to say: any candidate for knowledge that we have is always provisional. We simply have nothing better to believe, if we have a candidate that's withstood testing to destruction so far (Popper of course ). But isn't this just another way of saying (what I think Objectivists would find unobjectionable) that we can be contextually certain until there's good reason to doubt?
  12. There is no loop, and no trap. It is perfectly logical and consistent to say, "I don't think there's any sure way to knowledge, but I could be wrong."
  13. (Apologies for late response - been busy. I'll have to leave these conversations at this point.) If I say "the tree is sucking up water through its roots", is that inappropriate because it's really only the roots that are sucking up water? There are different part/whole logics, different ways in which parts can be related to wholes. When there are bonds of causal necessity involved (as there is with intelligent utterance, which depends on countless physical and chemical conditions), when you have an integrated system, it's not at all illegitimate to think of the whole as "doing" what the part is "doing".
  14. Largely by generating-and-testing, or conjecture and refutation. If one were to start from zero knowledge, as a true blank slate, that would be the only way to acquire knowledge. Of course we don't start from that position of zero knowledge, we already know a good deal, and so we can, under most circumstances, know by simply identifying correctly. One could answer this either by "by the method of conjecture and refutation", as above, or by saying that "when the world is the way one says it is, then one can be said to know". The former is the practical condition of knowledge, the latter the metaphysico-epistemological condition. It could come by any number of means. How one comes about the possible-way-it-is that one conjectures is irrelevant to the truth or falsity of the conjecture.
  15. (Apologies for late response - I've been busy recently, and I won't have time to continue this discussion.) If I say "there's a bee in the garden" and there's a bee in the garden then I've spoken the truth. If I guessed there's a bee in the garden, does that make "there's a bee in the garden" untrue?
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