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Boydstun

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Posts posted by Boydstun

  1. 15 hours ago, Boydstun said:

    Tad, that post is only an update addition to the information in this thread and a review of the history (when you scroll down in that link). I think you need to get in mind a wider and longer view of diasporas (black Americans and young men drafted during the American war in Vietnam) within the US and from the US to Canada and raise concern over the actual, physical, life-or-death concretes as in sharp distinction to the metaphorical and the myth-making of politicians du jour.

    Sell everything for tickets, get your family on the Katy, and get out.

    Exodus to Canada

  2. Apparently, another objective of the black men who took over the train was to try to intercept another lynch-posse in the area out to get a negro for another recent killing of a white woman. 

    As far as I’ve been able to find, no violence occurred in Caddo or Durant as the train passed. Many black residents of those towns quit those towns immediately on that occasion. I’ve not found that any black residents of Caddo heeded the “order” of the Klan to leave. In a couple more weeks, however, all black residents of Caddo and outward a radius of three miles did uproot and leave the area forever.

    I’d like to interject that it was apparently not only southern and eastern Oklahoma that was teetering on an all-out race war in those days, with very frequent mob violence at hand. It was evidently the same in north Texas. Black suspects were taken from law enforcement by mobs there also and burned at the stake (before the like case in Purcell, OK.) White youths toured black residential areas shooting any negro they saw in one Texas episode.

    The circumstances by which Caddo became a town of only whites and Choctaw are these: Note that dynamite was readily available, as it was used for railroad work and for “fishing”. A white farmer from Caddo, Horace Gribble, was killed 2 September 1911 in an exchange of gunfire between nine white men in the black neighborhood outside the home of the black family Daniels. Two of the Gribble party showed up to law enforcement and claimed that they had been passing the Daniels house when they were fired upon. Two black men a Daniels and Will Stevens were placed under arrest. They did not resist, and the sheriff spirited them safely out of the county to avoid muster of a mob. From the black men, the story was that the white party had been shooting in the neighborhood and had thrown a stick of dynamite at the Daniel home, which did not proceed all the way to full explosion, and the men in the home (women and children also at home) fired upon the attackers. The city Marshall found dynamite at the home, was inclined to believe the whites had started this, and arrested the two known of the party of nine.

    Meanwhile as word of the fatality spread, there was an overnight exodus of all black families from Caddo. They caught Katy trains northbound or southbound. The Katy added cars. Cattle, hogs, and crops of the negroes were sold at absurdly low prices. A large crowd of whites assembled at the station to cheer over each departing train. Passengers on the trains waved goodbye. I read one notice of tears on some black faces at the station, now driven out by terror from the only home they had ever known.

    Versions of these events appeared in newspapers across the country. I don’t recall any of them being told in my high school Oklahoma history book in the 1960’s.

    Filling the labor gap in Caddo was urgent. Some creditors were left in the lurch.

    The public-visibility heights of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in the region seems to have been 1921–24. Large parades and assemblies to cheering white crowds, you know. In Caddo, after the exodus, there was no more violence-work for the Klan. They popped into churches, bringing cash donations and words for the minister to read (which gladly those pulpits professed anyway) of how Christian were the ideals and services of the Klan, those being the ideals (some were deviations and diversions from practice): Protestantism, sanctity of woman, law-bound justice, free speech and assembly, separation of state and church, racial segregation, white supremacy, and singing “America”.

  3. Tomorrow is the last day of Black History Month 2024, and I’d like to share a bit of black history in a space of America I was familiar with as a child.

    I recall as a small child being on the wrap-around porch of my aunt who lived in Caddo, Oklahoma. This is in southeastern OK, not too far from the Red River and Lake Texoma. She and my father were reminiscing. They spoke of the time their Uncle John had jumped a N . . .  who was trying to steal a hog of John's. Uncle John slit the man's throat. "Near cut his head off, they said." John was a big guy and had been a Roughrider. So far I've not found whether anything legal was put in motion over this incident. I've gathered that racial hatred and fear of Black people (men especially) had crescendoed down there just before and during the childhood of my father (b. 1917).

    Our family lived just outside OKC. During my early childhood, in the 1950’s, I was often with relatives down in Caddo. From my memory, it would have been strange to have ever seen a Black person in that town. Yet decades later, thanks to the internet, I read in an old newspaper, from earlier in the century than birth of my father, of a Black-owned and operated retail store (groceries I think) in town. I imagine it was for Black customers. Story with it in it had come up in an incident against the owner/operator who lived above the store. One night a White guy broke in and lit a stick of dynamite in the store in the corner above which was normally the location of the owner's bed. By sheer luck, the owner had rearranged a week before, and his bed was that night in the opposite corner. He closed the store, and left town.

    My parents were born and raised on farms near the town of Caddo. The town was named after the Caddo tribe who had earlier been natives of the area. The town began as a rail depot (1872) in the Choctaw Nation within Indian Territory. The rails were lain by the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railway. Initially the town was a tent city. Box cars were used for freight storage until a depot building could be constructed. A sudden influx of white people and some black people occurred at that time: tenant farmers, coal miners, railroad workers, cowboys, and merchants. Whites quickly outnumbered Choctaw in this area.

    Law and order in Indian Territory among white Americans was near zero. It was hideout territory to many gunmen. U.S. Marshals worked for fees only, which they lost if their prisoner died on the way to court. Bogus arrests were pervasive. Not rule of law. The Indian tribes tried to provide the rule of law for their own members. In the early years of Caddo, the region was still Choctaw Nation, and treaties had to be honored in all developments undertaken in the region. The dealings of the railroads were with Choctaw tribal officials. The railroad improved the transportation of cattle, grains, and cotton. Locomotives and sawmills were by coal-fired steam engines.

    Newspapers were established very soon. I have seen in old newspapers advertisements addressed to Negroes of the South to migrate on over to Indian Territory. The Caddo area was advertised as having rich soil, plenty of work, schools within walking distance (if you have a horse, I’d say!), and a mild climate (Ha! Hot!). Freedmen (from Choctaw slaveholders) still resided in the area already. Businesses and churches came on quickly. I’m pretty sure there was plenty of sin.

    I mentioned that as a child in the 1950’s, I don’t recall any black people being in Caddo. Recently I have learned, thanks to Mary Maurer’s GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN – A HISTORY OF THE BLACK FAMILIES OF CADDO 1872–1911, where the black people had lived. It was across the railroad tracks. The town is at the intersection, in my times, of two main paved roads, and one of them runs along the railroad. I don’t recall anything across the tracks except the cemetery Gethsemane and then farms and their homes on and on. An older eye might have seen more right there across the tracks even in my time, and have known what had been.

    Actual emancipation of slaves in Indian Territory did not come until 3 years after the end of the Civil War. The Five Civilized Tribes had sided with the Confederacy. A peace treaty with them and the US government was reached in Fort Smith, Arkansas. The treaty stipulated that freedmen receive allotments of land and membership in the tribe. Choctaws and Chickasaws balked at the idea, but eventually (I don’t know when) many freedmen received an allotment of 40 to 160 acres.

    Choctaws and Chickasaws wanted black people moved out of the two nations. The Choctaws eventually granted citizenship to many of their freedmen. None (of the nearly 5000 from the Chickasaw) were ever adopted into the Chickasaw Nation.

    Choctaws did not provide education directly for freedmen; they provided education for former slaves through missionary organizations with funds from the federal government for teachers and supplies. The freedmen supplied the building. The first such school was run by the Baptist Mission Board, which opened at Bogey Depot (now a ghost town about 25 miles north of Caddo) in 1874. 

    In the 1870’s, Caddo got so civilized as to build a jail and establish a cemetery. The Oddfellows Lodge and Masonic Lodge were large contributors in getting the cemetery. My ancestors are buried there at Gethsemane, including my mother. I’ve noticed Choctaw names there such as the Maytubby family (one was a code talker in WWI).

    Statehood of Oklahoma began in 1907. In 1910, the state legislature (Democrats) had passed the “grandfather act” keeping a literacy requirement on Oklahoma black men for eligibility to vote, while removing the requirement for white men. (Native Americans were not allowed to become U.S. Citizens until 1924. Yet there were Choctaw code talkers in the U.S. Army in WWI ! Women were not allowed to vote until 1919.)

    The Caddo high school graduating class of 1911 had five students. One of them was a sister of my grandfather Boydstun. I have a faint memory of her from early childhood in the 1950’s, when she was elderly and residing in Durant, a larger town south of Caddo. She was crucial in preserving a lot of history of the area and of our family. Durant is home of a State college called Southeastern. In the era of my youth, it was known as the campus of a thousand magnolias. I’ve noticed from old newspaper photos that a lot of extremely attractive Choctaw women were in attendance there. Today Durant is also home of the Choctaw Nation headquarters (a corporation if I’m not mistaken) and home to the Choctaw Casino and Resort.

    On Independence Day of 1911, newspapers report, shops closed and many residents headed over to Blue River to cool off. When I was a child, everyone referred to that beautiful river simply as Blue. My father was baptized in it when he was 17. (He got baptized again later when, set to marry his second wife, he became high church.)

    For a year, publications had been discussing “the negro question”. A major newspaper out of OKC contained a piece on taxing and voting that included: “THE NEGRO QUESTION IN OKLAHOMA IS DEVELOPING A CRISIS. It is no longer presented in the form of theory, but as a grave condition. Unless the Negro is restricted, he will soon become a menace.”

    Caddo originally had over 200 black residents, mostly freed slaves of the tribes. Some of the women worked in prosperous white homes as cooks or nannies. Others took in laundry or worked in the fields. Men farmed as tenants, and some had specific skills for hire. Farmers in that vicinity raised mostly corn, oats, and cotton. In a dry year, corn will not make, but oats may still come through.

    The Kentucky LEXINGTON HERALD, August 15, 1911, had a story headlined

    “Race War Threatened in Oklahoma Towns”

    “Negroes Warned to Leave Caddo Following Murder of Another Woman”

    “Blacks Take Train”

    The assault against Mrs. Campbell, in Durant, included a gunshot wound of the woman eventuating in her death. While she still lived, a posse formed swiftly from all over the county, soon found and cornered the armed suspect and riddled his body with bullets. The body was taken back to Durant where Mrs. Campbell positively identified him as her assailant. A large assembly of men from all over the county built “a huge bonfire on which they threw the body of the negro, burning it to a crisp. Many spectators secured parts of the charred body as souvenirs.” CADDO HERALD, August 18, 1911 (Versions of this story appeared across the nation from MA to CA.) The identity of the man is unknown.

    (On August 24, at the Oklahoma town of Purcell, a black man suspected in a similar crime against a white woman was killed by being burned alive, to a crisp, while a crowd of 3,000 gleeful men, women, and girls applauded every move of the white men performing the execution. The only two law enforcement officers of the town, who had attempted to save the man’s life, had been locked up in the “booze room” of the courthouse. The name of the man so viciously and lawlessly executed is Pete Carter. –The Daily Oklahoman)

    Learning of the slaying of the accused man at Durant, some black men of Caddo began talking of revenge. The Kaddo Klan posted notices giving negroes of Caddo one week to leave. The membership of the Klan there was large. Later one member pleaded guilty to posting some of the notices, and he was fined $10.

    Meanwhile over in Atoka, which was evidently at that time almost entirely a black town, men were enraged at the posse killing and burning of the black man at Durant. They organized and when the MKT freight train came through, they put their guns on the trainmen and took charge. The conductor managed to send warnings to Durant and Caddo. And in those towns, nearly every man in town was armed and awaiting the arrival of the avengers.

    (To be continued, drectly)

  4. 1 hour ago, tadmjones said:

    But as a legal matter they would then be alleged to have forged the executive’s signature / state seal ? Was there also uncovered a plot to abduct the couriers that would deliver the documentation from the Secretary of State with proper seals , so their known fraudulent documents would then be delivered to DC , or would two sets just confuse Pence? Or was the preparation of the unsealed documents the same crime that a forgery charge would apply? 
     

    A reasonable reading of the situation , one hopefully provided by a prospective jury, should conclude that their intent was not that a blatant forgery would not be uncovered and the plot would by itself subvert the results of the presidential election.

    Given the clusterfuck that was the 2020 election , I’m not willing to stipulate the results out of Michigan with seal weren’t  just as fraudulent though “legal”.

    Count 2 is FORGERY: did falsely make, alter, forge, or counterfeit a public record, with intent to injure or defraud, to-wit: Certificate of Votes of the 2020 Electors from Michigan.

    There has been loads of evidence that the legally approved results out of Michigan, and indeed out of every State in both the 2020 and 2016 elections were correct. Same as in the election results in Florida in Bush v. Gore. The difference in 2020 was that our Subjectivist in Chief, with some yes-men legal counsel, cooked up ways to create fog by outlandish LIES (in the event legal election challenges brought in courts failed – 60 times brought and all failed around the country, as I recall) for the incumbent to remain in office even though this time he had lost. There was nothing special about the election process but the desperation brainstorming and execution of plans for creating delusion in minds of enough of his supporters to make them think there were "irregularities" in this particular election that threw the outcome to his opponent, and on that LIE (not mere falsehood), open an alternative, possibly legal process (such as Flynn, recorded on private video, brainstormed) by which to circumvent the vote result by the citizens in November 2020.

    I imagine defendants claiming that they were not aware of what they were signing or were deceived of the situation in which it would be used would be a complete defense against a charge such as 2, which contains intent, if the prosecution does not have evidence persuading a jury those claims are false and false beyond a reasonable doubt.

    PS – You don't always get out of criminal liabilities just because you did not succeed in the crime or even perhaps did not intend the intercepted crime. I recall a case that came up in the 1980's in which a worker entering some U.S. Nuclear Plant had a pistol in his bag which was discovered using the machines you go through when entering for work. I remember at our plant co-workers in nuclear longer than I chuckling at the offender's claim that he forgot the gun was in there; to which they replied: "the court will say 'Very funny. 15 years in the slammer'." There is a law against bringing any guns with you to that employment. Period. 

  5. 5 hours ago, tadmjones said:

    https://www.archives.gov/electoral-college/roles

    What is a fake elector? The specific form of the certificate of the ascertainment is not 'spelled out' federally, but the legal requirements that must be present in the documents are. So how did people conspire to submit 'fake slates of electors', are those being charged in Michigan alleged to have forged documents of this kind being shown to have submitted forms containing votes tallied? Were these documents signed/affixed with the state seal by the executive? If not how can they be considered to be 'fake' electors?

    I think you can indict a ham sandwich and these cases smell fishy like overcharged ham.

    The charges: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23880285/felony-complaints-redacted-combined.pdf

    The sixteen defendants are accused of producing and attempting to use a false certificate of ascertainment containing electoral votes for Donald Trump, who had lost the 2020 U.S. presidential election in Michigan. The defendants were indicted in July 2023 on criminal charges of forgery, uttering, and conspiracy in attempting a fraud, as I understand it. 

    One of the defendants is now cooperating with the prosecution. 

    Summary statement from the AG: 

    “The evidence will demonstrate there was no legal authority for the false electors to purport to act as ‘duly elected presidential electors’ and execute the false electoral documents,” Nessel continued. “Every serious challenge to the election had been denied, dismissed, or otherwise rejected by the time the false electors convened. There was no legitimate legal avenue or plausible use of such a document or an alternative slate of electors. There was only the desperate effort of these defendants, who we have charged with deliberately attempting to interfere with and overturn our free and fair election process, and along with it, the will of millions of Michigan voters. That the effort failed and democracy prevailed does not erase the crimes of those who enacted the false electors plot.”

    Some of the false electors have claimed they were not aware of what they were signing. Others said they believed signing the certification was in case a future court reversed the decision.

    In the federal case in DC, special counsel Jack Smith alleged Trump’s team attempted to persuade GOP electors to sign their names on an alternative certificate to make a “fake controversy” that would provide grounds for then-Vice President Mike Pence to throw out the electoral votes during the certification of results on Jan. 6, 2021.

  6. CNN got this new information on this 'unnamed co-conspirator' in the case that is the topic of this thread using the Wayback machine to retrieve posts of Chesebro when his twitter account had been a public one. Chesebro had not used his real name for that account, but has now admitted that it was he Chesebro posting.

    "Kenneth Chesebro, the . . . attorney who helped devise the Trump campaign’s fake electors plot in 2020, concealed a secret Twitter account from Michigan prosecutors, hiding dozens of damning posts that undercut his statements to investigators about his role in the election subversion scheme, a CNN KFile investigation has found.

    "Chesebro claimed to investigators he saw the alternate slates of Republican electors only as a contingency plan to have ready in case the Trump campaign won any of its more than 60 lawsuits challenging the election results — which it didn’t. He also told Michigan investigators that in his conversations with the Trump campaign, he made clear that “state legislatures have no power to override the courts.”

    "But just days after the 2020 election, BadgerPundit tweeted that the court battles didn’t matter and that Republican-controlled legislatures should send in their own GOP electors, predicting even then that then-Vice President Mike Pence could use them to throw the election to Trump.

    “You don’t get the big picture. Trump doesn’t have to get courts to declare him the winner of the vote. He just needs to convince Republican legislatures that the election was systematically rigged, but it’s impossible to run it again, so they should appoint electors instead,” wrote BadgerPundit on November 7, 2020, the day multiple media outlets, including CNN, called the election for Joe Biden.

    "Yet in his interview with Michigan investigators, Chesebro said the very opposite, claiming that the entire electors plan was contingent on the courts.

    "'I saw no scenario where Pence could count any vote for any state because there hadn’t been a court or a legislature in any state backing any of the alternate electors,' Chesebro said.

    "Pro-Trump attorney Kenneth Chesebro told Michigan investigators that he told the Trump 2020 campaign that the “alternate electors” should only be used in conjunction with ongoing litigation. But CNN found tweets from 2020 where Chesebro dismissed the role of the courts and said the electors alone could overturn the election.

    "The fake electors plot features prominently in special counsel Jack Smith’s federal election subversion indictment against Trump, who has pleaded not guilty. Chesebro has been identified by CNN as an unindicted co-conspirator in that case.

    "Chesebro was indicted alongside Trump in a separate 2020 election interference case in Georgia. He struck a plea deal there in October, agreeing to plead guilty to one felony count of conspiracy to commit filing false documents. He gave proffer interviews to Georgia prosecutors as part of the cooperation agreement, though it’s unclear if he was asked about his social media accounts.

    "Michigan investigators secured Chesebro’s cooperation in December, after previously charging the 16 fake electors in that state with multiple felonies. Chesebro has additionally met with investigators in Wisconsin and Arizona who are probing their fake electors, and he avoided charges in Nevada after cooperating with prosecutors there."

  7. Part 3 – Quine, Objectivism, Resonant Existence – Α

    A sharp distinction between analytic and synthetic statements, propositions, and judgments had been important in the modern empiricist philosophy received by Quine. In the present Part and the next, I set out the relation of Quine’s opposition to the distinction in the 1950’s to the Peikoff-Rand opposition to the distinction in the following decade. I emphasize a major problem, tackled earlier by Kant, as reason the dichotomous distinction had been important. That is, I emphasize the problem it had been set to solve in a way not Kant’s.

    The characterization and responsibilities of analytic statements in sharp contrast to synthetic statements put forth in Logical Empiricism (also called Logical Positivism) constituted an alternative solution to that old problem, alternative to Kant’s solution. I shall step back in the next Part to more of Carnap and the response of Quine to him, and step back to the epistemological problem that had arisen in Kant. I’ll formulate a new solution, one in some affiliation with Rand’s theoretical philosophy and her theory of value. Form and necessity will enter, and I’ll assess Peikoff’s ASD against my layout.[1]

    “[Quine] is perhaps best known for his arguments against Logical Empiricism (in particular, against its use of the analytic-synthetic distinction). This argument, however, should be seen as part of a comprehensive world-view which makes no sharp distinction between philosophy and empirical science, and thus requires a wholesale reorientation of the subject” (Hylton and Kemp 2023)

    Quine held that the best science we have garnered is the best ultimate truth at present we have of the world. He did not see logical principles such as the law of excluded middle as arising from ontology, but as a principle of convenience pervasive in knowledge. I should say that dichotomy between those two candidate bases is false. I go with Rand’s picture of elementary logic, as a certain pervasive character of method in successful identifications of reality. Such existence-based logic infuses any higher logic naturally appropriate in attainment of ordinary and scientific knowledge. I add that excluded middle is a tooling formality for a living mind. It is not a formality belonging to concretes in their actuality and independently of the existence of living mind discerning them, by thought, in their concrete identities. Further, in my system (2023), alternatives of any sort do not exist in the universe at all until life enters the scene, and all alternatives, however high in the intellect, are descendants of the fundamental alternative that Rand exposed as uniquely facing the living: continuation of maintaining life or termination of life. 

    We have mind, I say, capable of getting knowledge of concretes in part by use of principles of logic and mathematics tooled from formalities that belong to concretes. Identities of concretes—their characters, situations, and passages—can be formalities belonging to concrete existents, where discernment of those formalities is by thought engaged in elementary experience of ordinary objects in the world. Belonging-formalities such as a broad-form principle of identity “Existents have identity, and existence of the latter in full just is the former” can be assimilated and tooled by thought into further formalities tethered to belonging-formalities. The principle of excluded middle, for example, can have a tether to belonging-identities as well as to the high-powered human mind. In other words, we need not begin with logic, then use it in grasping the world, as Quine would have it. No, we begin with the world, including its identities in belonging-formalities, the world in ordinary human experience. When retaking the world in science, we wield formal tools with some tethers, by ancestry, from the world of ordinary experience.

    Which tooled formalities of logic and mathematics are best suited to which parts of the world is a further intellectual enterprise. Minkowski geometry can be weighed against 4D Euclidean geometry for most faithful and most effective tool for comprehending physical flat spacetime. Aristotle’s syllogistic and second-order logic can be weighed against Quine’s choice.[2] 

    Quine aimed to integrate knowledge historical, knowledge scientific, including psychology, and knowledge philosophical. I notice, whole truth be told, he ended up smashing against early-childhood cognitive developmental psychology in the second half of the twentieth century, from his armchair.  Elizabeth Spelke remarked: “Our research provides evidence, counter to the views of Quine (1960) and others, that the organization of the world into objects [in comprehension] precedes the development of language and thus does not depend upon it. I suspect, moreover, that language plays no important role in the spontaneous elaboration of physical knowledge” (Spelke 1989, 181).

    The reorientation between science and philosophy sought by Quine is wholesome, I should say. Ayn Rand remained in the old outlook from the philosopher’s chair. She took the sciences, including the modern hard sciences, to be in a one-way need of philosophy, especially in epistemology.[3]

    “Philosophy is a necessity for a rational being: philosophy is the foundation of science, the organizer of man’s mind, the integrator of his knowledge, . . .” (Rand 1975, 82; also ITOE 74). “Science was born as a result and consequences of philosophy; it cannot survive without a philosophical (particularly epistemological) base” (Rand 1961, 44; also 26–27). Rand acknowledged that scientific biology informed her concept of the general nature of life that she employed in her theory of ethics. (More generally, on the influence of biology on philosophy, see Smith 2017.) A bit of measurement theory informed Rand’s theory of concepts. A bit of Helmholtz, her thoughts on music.

    Rand acknowledges no cases in which science begat or informed philosophy in metaphysics or epistemology. I disagree. Harmonics, geometry, and astronomy existed before Aristotle, before his metaphysics or his theory of science or his organization of logical deduction. Aristotle’s empiricism was a boost to sciences (De Groot 2014), but harmonics, geometry, and astronomy were not inaugurated by systematic explicit philosophy (see e.g. Graham 2013). The idea of a physical law mathematical in expression was not invented by philosophers. Nor the need to look for certain symmetries and symmetry breaking in comprehending parts of physical reality (see Schwichtenberg 2018 [2015]; Healey 2007).

    From Plato-Aristotle to the present, where theoretical philosophy flourished, it was shaped by received mathematics and science (Netz 1999; Bochner 1966). Concerning science in our own time, contra Rand, it has not declined in comparison to advances in the nineteenth century, which Rand had maintained in support of the idea that bad strains of modern philosophy have led to a decline in scientific achievements (Rand 1975, 78). Modern hard sciences have continued their stampede to the present time, and cognitive developmental psychology arising in the second half of the twentieth century continues bringing new light to the present. 

    To be sure, scientists operate within a general metaphysics they hold, and as Michael Friedman has illustrated, this may be especially useful for resolutions during a time of fundamental innovations in the course of science (2001, chap. 4). Scientists have also been innovators in methods of investigation, theoretical, observational, and experimental. In that we might say they have on a philosophical hat. But I object to the picture that full-tilt philosophers come up with valid methods of rational scientific inquiry independently of existing science, methods not already in the heads and hands of scientists rolling back the darkness.

    (To be continued.)

    Notes

    [1] Recall that “Resonant Existence” is my own philosophy, whose fundamentals in theoretical philosophy are set out in my paper “Existence, We.” The overlap between my philosophy and Rand’s theoretical philosophy and her theory of value are extensive, although, the differences are substantial.

    [2] Bivalent, first-order https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-firstorder-emergence/ predicate logic with identity [such has been proven complete]) for best truth-preserving tool in science. I might add, it seems fine tooling-form logical structure of natural-language thought on the world, at least when this much classical logic is bound additionally to existence by relevance logic. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-relevance/

    [3] But consider Sciabarra 2013 [1995], 121–23.

    References

    Bochner, S. 1966. The Role of Mathematics in the Rise of Science. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Boydstun, S. 2021. Existence, We. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. 21(1):65–104.

    Friedman, M. 2001. Dynamics of Reason. Stanford: CSLI.

    De Groot, J. 2014. Aristotle’s Empiricism. Las Vegas: Parmenides.

    Graham, D.W. 2013. Science before Socrates. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Healey, R. 2007. Gauging What’s Real – The Conceptual Foundations of Contemporary Gauge Theories. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Hylton, P. and G. Kemp 2023. Willard Van Orman Quine. Online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

    Netz, R. 1999. The Shaping of Deduction in Greek Mathematics – A Study in Cognitive History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Rand, A. 1961. For the New Intellectual. New York: Signet.

    ——. 1975. From the Horse’s Mouth. In Rand 1982.

    ——. 1982. Philosophy: Who Needs It. New York: Signet.

    ——. 1990 [1966–67]. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Expanded 2nd edition. Meridian.  

    Schwichtenberg, J. 2018 [2015]. Physics from Symmetry. 2nd edition. Cham, Switzerland: Springer.

    Sciabarra, C. 2013 [1995]. Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical. 2nd edition. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press.

    Smith, D.L., editor, 2017. How Biology Shapes Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press.

    Spelke, E. 1989. The Origins of Physical Knowledge. In Weiskrantz 1989.

    Weiskrantz, L. editor, 1989. Thought without Language. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

  8. Part 2 – Morton White*

    Let me abbreviate the title of White’s 1952 paper by UD (for Untenable Dualism).

    White saw the myth of a sharp divide between the analytic and the synthetic as affiliate of an older mythically sharp division: the Aristotelian division between essential and accidental predication (1952, 330). He urged rejection of both of these affiliates due to the divisional sharpness falsely maintained for them.

    White noted two kinds of statements that had lately been regarded as analytic. The first are purely formal logical truths such as “A is A” and “A or not-A.” The second are cases of “what is traditionally known as essential predication” (UD 318). He ponders especially the example “All men are rational animals.” That statement is logically the same as “Any man is a rational animal” or “A man is a rational animal.” This last expression of the proposition is one of Leonard Peikoff’s examples of a purportedly analytic statement in “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy” (ASD 90). 

    White did not pursue in this paper whether it is correct to characterize logical truths as analytic (UD 318–19). It will be recalled that Peikoff held forth Rand’s conception of logical truth against that of A. J. Ayer, who had maintained: “The principles of logic and mathematics are true universally simply because we never allow them to be anything else. . . . In other words, the truths of logic and mathematics are analytic propositions or tautologies” (Ayer 1946, 77; ASD 94, 101, 111–18; Branden 1963, 7).

    Whether one were to take analytical truths to be identical with or based on logical truths, I say that the Objectivist view of logic (with which I agree) does not allow the inference of Ayer and others that logical truths are not informed by fact. Logic on our view is a tool we use in identifications of existents. Logical truths are in no way prior to other truths, ones having empirical content. We learn the logical principle of Excluded Middle in an elementary logic course, but that learning is really an explicit articulation of a principle we have already found effective and reliable in thinking about the world we are negotiating.

    Either there is a bear sleeping beside the mail box OR there is not. Either I will continue to work on this project non-stop for two more hours from now OR not. Either vampires exist OR not. But there is a limited proper vista on the world within which the principle is sensible if our use of it is in pursuit of identifications of existents. It is nonsense to say that either there are some things existing in the world OR not. The effectiveness and range of sensible employment of the logical principle is learned from experience, and the concept of existence and its totality is learned by experience. The fact that the sensible range of the principle is so wide that it is convenient to indicate its general form as “A or Not-A” does not give us license to suppose there are no limits on sensible “applications” of the Principle of Excluded Middle or to suppose we do not learn that principle by experience.

    With that Objectivist view of elementary logic, they can say one thing what Morton White did not say: One’s concept of what is an analytic truth by identifying the analytic with the logical or basing the analytical on the logical does nothing to show that any purported analytical truth is entirely independent of experience, that it bears no information about existence at all, or that a purported analytical truth is made true and derives its necessity of being true by social convention untethered from facts of the empirical world.

    As with Quine’s “Two Dogmas,” White undermined the distinction between the analytic and the synthetic by finding fault with various explications of what analyticity amounts to. They concluded there is no durable articulate way of classifying propositions and truths as analytic in sharp contrast to synthetic. 

    One way of conceiving an analytic statement is as expressing a proposition deducible from a logical truth by substitution of a synonym of one of its terms. (i) Every A is A. Therefore, (ii) Every man is a man. With “rational animal” as synonym for “man”, by substitution of identicals, we obtain (iii) Every man is a rational animal (UD 319).

    So some might propose that analyticity is explicated in terms of logical truth and synonymy, as in the preceding paragraph. White rejects the view that whether “man” and “rational animal” are synonymous is a matter of arbitrarily selected convention. Similarly, that “man” and “animal who can skip” (my example, demonstrated, along with other distinctly human moves here [Tina]) are not synonymous is not a matter of arbitrarily selected convention. Natural language is not like an artificial logical language in which meanings of terms are set entirely by stipulation (UD 321–24).

    Could analytic statements be defined instead as those whose denials are self-contradictory? (UD 325–26). White argues that denials of such propositions as “Not every man is a rational animal” are not contradictions, but his concept of contradiction is, in step with dominate contemporary views of logic, too narrow, as I have elaborated above in connection with Ayer.

    White did not relate this criterion for analyticity to Kant, but I should do so. One of Kant’s characterizations of analytic judgments is that in them the predicate is “thought through identity” with thought of the subject. Synthetic judgments connect predicate to subject, but not in the relation of identity (KrV A6–8 B10–12), where simple complete identity is meant, not Rand’s more expansive notion of identity as some or other distinctive traits belonging necessarily to anything that exists.[1] According to Kant, all judgments must conform to the principle of self-consistency, but only judgments certifiable by self-contradiction upon denial alone, apart from their truth in experience, are analytic (A151–53 B190–93; 1783, 4:266–70; 1790, 8:228–30, 244–45; Allison 2004, 89–93; Garrett 2008, 204–6).

    I object that contradiction upon denial is no genuine grounding of any truth. If we start with a truth and then show that upon denial of it we arrive at a contradiction, well isn’t that cute? But establishment of its truth is elsewhere. 

    Morton White found that appealing to synonymies in the language is not illuminating in the absence of objective criteria for synonymy (UD 324). If it is said that one’s sense of wrongness in “Man is not a rational animal” differs from one’s sense of wrongness in “Man is not a skipper,” White responds that that is surely only a matter of degree, not a sharp difference in kind. Between one’s response to contradiction of “Man is a rational animal” and contradiction of “Man is a skipper,” there is not a sharp difference in kind. If self-contradiction upon denial of a proposition is the criterion for analyticity of the proposition, then there is no sharp divide between the analytic and the synthetic (UD 325–26). Objectivism can add that there is no qualitative divide in the purported divide analytic/synthetic because elementary logic is based on the widest-frame, worldly facts that existence exists and existence is identity, in Rand’s expansive sense of identity. White did not surmise that the merely-difference-of-degree in our sense of wrongness in “Man is not a rational animal” and in “Man is not a skipper” might be because a thing is everything that it is, as was later underscored by Peikoff in ASD.

    White saw the myth of a sharp divide between the analytic and the synthetic as affiliate of an older mythically sharp division: the Aristotelian division between essential and accidental predication (UD 330). This kinship was also recognized in Peikoff (ASD 95), as I remarked earlier. But Peikoff went further: He observed that essentials of a thing do not exhaust what a thing is. No concepts of a subject are concepts of only what are the essentials in the definition of the subject.

    (To be continued.)

    Note

    [1] Joseph Butler (1692–1752) stated: “Everything is something or other.” Taken as the Principle of Identity, it is expansive. This expansive concept of identity is championed in Oderberg 2007, chap. 5. 

    References

    Allison, H. 2004 [1983]. Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. Revised and enlarged edition. New Haven: Yale University Press.

    Allison, H., and P. Heath, editors, 2002. Immanuel Kant: Theoretical Philosophy after 1781. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Ayer, A. 1946. Language, Truth, and Logic. New York: Dover.

    Branden, N. 1963. Review of Brand Blanshard’s Reason and Analysis. The Objectivist Newsletter 2(2):7–8.

    Garrett, D. 2008. Should Hume Have Been a Transcendental Idealist? In Kant and the Early Moderns. D. Garber and B. Longuenesse, editors. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Linsky, L., editor, 1952. Semantics and the Philosophy of Language. Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

    Kant, I. 1781(A), 1787(B). Critique of Pure Reason. W. Pluhar, translator. 1996. Indianapolis: Hackett.

    ——. 1783. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science. G. Hatfield, translator. In Allison and Heath 2002.

    ——. 1790. On a Discovery Whereby Any New Critique of Pure Reason Is to Be Made Superfluous by an Older One. H. Allison, translator. In Allison and Heath 2002.

    Oderberg, D. 2007. Real Essentialism. New York: Routledge.

    Peikoff, L. 1967. The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy. In Rand 1990.

    Quine, W. 1951. Two Dogmas of Empiricism. In From a Logical Point of View. 1953. Cambridge, MA: Harvard.

    Rand, A. 1990 [1966–67]. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Expanded 2nd edition. New York: Meridian.

    White, M. 1952 [1950]. The Analytic and the Synthetic: An Untenable Dualism. In  Linsky 1952. Included also in White 2004.

    ——. 2004. From a Philosophical Point of View. Princeton.

  9. Part 1 – Leonard Peikoff*

    By truths I mean, as Ayn Rand meant, “recognitions of facts of reality” which is to say “identifications of existents” (ITOE 48). Without living, fallible minds, there are no truths in this sense of the word. The world would have facts, but until some are recognized, no truth would have come into the world.

    Truth is sometimes used to mean what here is meant by fact. That is not the way I mean truth here nor the way Rand or Peikoff used it.

    Leonard Peikoff’s 1967 essay “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy” (ASD) set out the basics of the contrasting sorts of truths—analytic and synthetic—the way the distinction had been cast up to middle of the 20th century. Analytic truths had been lately taken as true in virtue of their meaning. Rationality and animality would be included in the meaning of the concept man. So the truth “man is a rational animal” would be an analytic truth, a truth made so by definition, which under contemporary nominalism had become a matter of social convention, pretty arbitrary, free of much constraint by facts of the world. Necessity in such a truth would be from the say-so in our definitional prescription.[1]

    That choice of convention, I notice, satisfies a necessity of self-consistent, coherent thinking and talking. Such necessity lies among the class of necessities for a purpose, necessities for an end. I call this class necessity-for.

    The truth “man has only two eyes” would not be analytic, the story went, because the feature of having only two eyes is not part of the meaning of the concept man. Such a truth is known as synthetic. Unlike analytic truths, which are necessarily true, a synthetic truth is said to be only contingently true.

    Peikoff argued this to be a false dichotomy among truths. The historical root of this widespread falsehood in philosophy, Peikoff maintained, is the Platonic theory that only essential characteristics of a thing are part of the form of a thing and its definition. The inessential, which is from the material aspects of a thing, not its formal aspects, are not part of a thing’s definition. 

    I concur in Peikoff’s discernment that the false dichotomy in truths between those analytic and those synthetic has a distant ancestor in a false dichotomy in Plato. In Cratylus Plato has Socrates uphold the principle that contrary attributes never belong to a fully real thing simultaneously and the principle that “things have some fixed being or essence of their own. They are not in relation to us and are not made to fluctuate by how they appear to us. They are by themselves, in relation to their own being or essence, which is theirs by nature” (386d–e; see also Euthyphro 6d–e; Phaedo 65d, 75c–d, 78d, 100c; Republic 475e–76d, 479–80). Each thing has attributes such as shape, sound, or color; but in addition, each thing has a being or essence. Indeed, “color or sound each have a being or essence, just like every other thing that we say ‘is’” (Cra. 423d–e). Plato maintained moreover that what each thing essentially is, such as Man, Good, Size, or Strength is not discovered by sight or hearing, but by reason when it is most free from bodily, sensory distractions (Phd. 65, 74–75, 78c–79d, 83, 86, 96–105; Theaetetus 184b–87a).

    The character of each thing that is always the same is a kind—call it a Form—that is “a being itself by itself” (Parmenides 135a–c). Sensory perceptions are as shadows and reflections of these intelligible forms, these intrinsic natures, these essences and being of things (Rep. 509d–e). Plato had no notion of ideas or concepts encompassing both visible forms (such as shapes, sounds, or colors) and intelligible forms.[2] Modern notions of concepts or ideas are, in Plato’s frame, only our thoughts grasping intelligible forms.[3]

    Peikoff acknowledged, correctly, that Aristotle breathed new life into this Platonic error by bringing essences down from some purely intellectual nether-realm to the material world open to regular senses.[4] Aristotle is the heavy-weight instigator of the necessary-contingent divide and the essence-accident divide. These doctrines constrained Scholastic theories of universals, concepts, and predication, and facilitated the modern A-S divide.

    Peikoff observed that Rand’s conception of the concept of a thing, and her conception of the essential in the concept, rules out an A-S partition of the kinds of conceptual truth in our possession. A thing is all the things that it is (ASD 98). I might add that Rand took a thing’s external relationships as part of what a thing is, a blunt contrast with Plato (ITOE 39). And in Rand’s epistemology, we can have a conception of all that a thing is, including all its external relationships and all its potentials, even though we know our present concept of the thing contains only a portion of that totality of its identity.  

    In Rand’s conception of right concepts, they are “classifications of observed existents according to their relationships to other observed existents” (ITOE 47).[5] Furthermore: “Concepts stand for specific kinds of existents, including all the characteristics of these existents, observed and not-yet-observed, known and unknown” (ITOE 65). Objectivist epistemology does not regard the essential and the non-essential characteristics of existents as simply given, as if in an intellectual intuition. Rather, that distinction is based on our context of knowledge of the facts of existents (ITOE 52; ASD 107, 101–103).

    “To designate a certain characteristic as ‘essential’ or ‘defining’ is to select, from the total content of the concept, the characteristic that best condenses and differentiates that content in a specific cognitive context. Such a selection [in Objectivist epistemology] presupposes the relationship between the concept and its units [its member elements in reality regarded as substitutable for each other under suspension of their particular measure-values of their shared characteristics]: it presupposes that the concept is an integration of units, and that its content consists of its units, including all their characteristics.” (ASD 103)

    Nelson Goodman had written in a 1953 footnote: “Perhaps I should explain for the sake of some unusually sheltered reader that the notion of a necessary connection of ideas, or of an absolutely analytic statement, is no longer sacrosanct. Some, like Quine and White, have forthrightly attacked the notion; others, like myself, have simply discarded it; and still others have begun to feel acutely uncomfortable about it” (60).

    I’ll examine the cases mounted against the A-S distinction by White and by Quine, and compare them to the Objectivist case, in the next two installments.[6]

    (To be continued.)

    Notes

    [1] Brand Blanshard’s book Reason and Analysis appeared in 1962. It was reviewed favorably by Nathaniel Branden the following year. Branden understood that Blanshard was some sort of absolute idealist, but the book offered access to contemporary positivist and analytic philosophy (including the A-S distinction), and it offered criticisms of them, which Objectivists might join. Against say-so free of constraints from conditions of the world being the source of necessity in necessary truths, see Rasmussen 1982. On the nature and need of understanding for truth, see Haugeland 1998.

    [2] Cf. Metaphysics 987b1–13; Notomi 2005, 193–201.

    [3] See further, Kraut 1992, 7–12; White 1992.

    [4] ASD 95. See also Peikoff 1972, 191, on Aristotle’s influential division of the necessary and the contingent. On medieval and early modern roots of the false A-S dichotomy, see Peikoff 1964, 15–16, 45–59.

    [5] Concept empiricism is defended and a version of it, thickly informed by pertinent modern science, is formulated in Prinz 2002.

    [6] White 1952 appeared originally in Hook 1950. Sidney Hook would a few years later become Peikoff’s dissertation advisor. Recent defense of the A-S distinction against the attack by Quine is Russell 2008. Additional contemporary debate on the issue is Juhl and Loomis 2010. I’ll not undertake assimilation of these in the present study.

    References

    Aristotle B.C.E. 348–322. Metaphysics. C.D.C. Reeve, translator. Indianapolis: Hackett.

    Branden, N. 1963. Review of Brand Blanshard’s Reason and Analysis. The Objectivist Newsletter 2(2):7–8.

    Goodman, N. 1953. The New Riddle of Induction. In Fact, Fiction, and Forecast. 4th edition. 1983. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Haugeland, J. 1998. Truth and Rule-Following. In Having Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

    Hook, S., editor, 1950. John Dewey: Philosopher of Science and Freedom. New York: Dial Press.

    Juhl, C., and E. Loomis. 2010. Analyticity. New York: Routledge.

    Kraut, R. 1992. The Cambridge Companion to Plato. Cambridge.

    Linsky, L., editor, 1952. Semantics and the Philosophy of Language. Illinois.

    Notomi, N. 2005. Plato’s Metaphysics and Dialectic. In A Companion to Ancient Philosophy. M. L. Gill and P. Pellegrin, editors. Wiley-Blackwell.

    Peikoff, L. 1964. The Status of the Law of Contradiction in Classical Logical Ontologism. Ph.D. ProQuest.

    ——. 1967. The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy. In Rand 1990.

    ——. 1972. Founders of Western Philosophy: Thales to Hume. Lectures by Leonard Peikoff. M. Berliner, editor. 2023. Santa Ana, CA: Ayn Rand Institute Press.

    Plato c. 428–348 B.C. Plato – Complete Works. J. M. Cooper, editor. 1997. Indianapolis: Hackett.

    Prinz J., 2002. Furnishing the Mind – Concepts and Their Perceptual Basis. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Rand, A. 1990 [1966–67]. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Expanded 2nd edition. New York: Meridian.

    Rasmussen, D. 1982. Necessary Truth, the Game Analogy, and the Meaning-Is-Use Thesis. The Thomist 46(3):423–40.

    Russell, G. 2008. Truth in Virtue of Meaning. New York: Oxford University Press.

    White, M. G. 1952 [1950]. The Analytic and the Synthetic: An Untenable Dualism. In  Linsky 1952. Included also in White 2004. http://www.thatmarcusfamily.org/.../White%20-%20Analytic... 

    ——. 2004. From a Philosophical Point of View. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    White, N. 1992. Plato’s Metaphysical Epistemology. In Kraut 1992.

     

  10. Necessity and Form in Truths

    In this study, I firstly examine the Objectivist account of how Rand’s theory of concepts dissolves the customary distinction of truths into ones true in virtue of meaning and ones true in virtue of experience. Although that particular character of concepts in Rand’s mold of them does dissolve that wrong divide of truths—the analytic-synthetic divide—I advance an additional character of her theory, one more peculiar to hers, that also dissolves the A-S division, at least when her theory is set in my ontology. In that residence, concretes as in the world, as in fact, possess form in their situation, passage, and character, I show that the two sorts of necessity traditionally attached respectively to analytic truths and synthetic truths are rightly dissolved and replaced by a single necessity attending a single compounded formula of truth familiar from Rand. This necessity is not a compound of the two necessities, logical and physical, characterized by supporters of the A-S division. It is, rather, a compound of necessity-for of life and of living mind in grasping fact, the realm of necessity-that. I exhibit this single necessity attending truths in logic, truths in mathematics, and truths of concretes tooled by logical and mathematical truths.

  11. "The Church says 'no' to IVF due to the massive destruction of embryonic life, the assault on the meaning of the conjugal act and the treatment of the child as a product not a gift."* Also, the church of Rome has long been opposed to sexual joy for its own sake, to capitalism, and to scientific and technological advances shrinking human helplessness against nature (which undercuts some of the jobs of the witch doctors.) 

    Alabama Supreme Court puts the secular sword behind the preposterous RC mystical view: frozen embryos are children.

  12. The Foundations of Quantum Mechanics by Roderich Tumulka

    Quote

    This book introduces and critically appraises the main proposals for how to understand quantum mechanics, namely the Copenhagen interpretation, spontaneous collapse, Bohmian mechanics, many-worlds, and others. The author makes clear what are the crucial problems, such as the measurement problem, related to the foundations of quantum mechanics and explains the key arguments like the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen argument and Bell’s proof of nonlocality. He discusses and clarifies numerous topics that have puzzled the founding fathers of quantum mechanics and present-day students alike, such as the possibility of hidden variables, the collapse of the wave function, time-of-arrival measurements, explanations of the symmetrization postulate for identical particles, or the nature of spin. Several chapters are devoted to extending the different approaches to relativistic space-time and quantum field theory. The book is self-contained and is intended for graduate students and researchers who want to step into the fundamental aspects of quantum physics. Given its clarity, it is accessible also to advanced undergraduates and contains many exercises and examples to master the subject.

     

  13. 22 hours ago, EC said:

    Awareness is a process of information processing and perception. . . .

    I'd think "perception" contains the idea of awareness, and is not helpful in a statement of what is awareness or how it comes about. But perhaps you just mean by "perception" here inputs from sensors bring information of things to the processing plant. That is OK.

    What is the relationship of information processing in neural networks and my information processing in awareness that I am typing a question ending at the question mark? If the information processing of the neural-network activity underlying my information processing in conscious awareness just is that conscious information processing, that identity needs to be established by argument and research results. On the face of it, it appears that when we are consciously taking in information and making it integral to our actions, we are not thinking about those underlying neuronal information processes (firing patterns of neural networks), but of things like what marks we are making on the computer screen and what worthwhile thoughts of worldly entities, characters, passages, and situations in topic (or tangentially) we are striving to attain and share.

    Perhaps you could show us where you think is the cutting edge of research on that question is today. (Please don't say "I'm the cutting edge". That is not credible nor informative, what one is aiming for is not what one has in hand, and it bespeaks a failure to look and assess beyond ones own thought in the enterprise of human knowledge.) I'm not aware that any well-founded right answer to my question has been reached, but I'm not really up to date on latest research. I've noticed the following works tackling the question or issues pertinent to it through some years now. Of any you have studied, do you find any to be getting somewhere (or for that matter, of any interest to you)?

    Artificial Intelligence – The Very Idea (Haugeland 1985)

    The Remembered Present – A Biological Theory of Consciousness (Edelman 1989)

    Consciousness Explained (Dennett 1991)

    The Race for Consciousness (Taylor 1999)

    The Quest for Consciousness – A Neurobiological Approach (Koch 2004)

    Consciousness (Hill 2009)

    Mind: Your Consciousness is What and Where? (Honderich 2017)

    The Feeling of Life Itself – Why Consciousness is Widespread but Cannot Be Computed (Koch 2019)

    Conscious Mind / Resonant Brain – How Each Brain Makes a Mind (Grossberg 2021). 

     

     

     

     

  14. PS – Any choice to live is made from one who is living. Whether it is a square-on choice or an indirect one, it is a choice of one with a living body and the vegetative values within it. Choosing to live in the larger-arch sense doable in conscious human choice is not made from nowhere, and making the choice as drawn by, according with, and overarching the vegetative values of one's body renders farcical all talk of such a choice being arbitrary or any talk of having the value of continued living get its value merely from choice-making.

  15. Additional Thought on the Choice to Live

    The choice to live is at hand not only in moments of contemplating suicide. One is in a continuous ongoing choice to think and to value, and these are choices to live. One’s thinking and valuing in one’s actions of the day are operations peculiar to life form, to those parts of the world that are living things. Nonetheless there is a bit from wider metaphysics than living things for consideration, a bit recurring in the question of any rational bases for choosing to live.

    There are things within the universe that do not apply to the universe as a whole. Such would be electric potential differences. The universe as a whole can have no potential difference with something not itself because there is nothing but the universe, or what Rand called existence as a whole (e.g. ITOE App. 273). We say that a thing within the universe has no electric potential difference with itself. Whether we think of the concept of a things’s electric potential difference with itself as absolutely nothing or as the limit of a thing’s potential difference with some other thing as the one and the other become the same thing, it is plain, again, that electric potential difference, an existent within the universe, does not apply to the universe itself, as a whole. The universe has no other with which it might have an electric potential, therefore, electric potential difference is not a trait belonging to the universe as a whole. 

    There are other things within the universe that apply also to the universe as a whole, at least if the universe is finite. These are things in the universe that can be summed over all the parts of the universe: such as electric charge, mass-energy, or angular momentum.

    Our question so perennial in Objectivism is whether value and the value of reason within a human form of life are sensibly ascribed in its moments to a human life as a whole. Is the choice to live, carrying in its wake the choice to value and to live rationally, itself a rational choice, a meritoriously rational one? Is talk of one’s life itself being a good thing actually sensible talk?

    The outgoing-beyond-itself of life (emphasized by Guyau 1885), the growth character of anything living (as talked of in N. Branden’s old essay “The Divine Right of Stagnation”), and the fundamental agape character of human love and creativity (as I’ve spoken of in the preceding post) seem characters extendable from within life to the whole of it. Not by summation, but by the characters of life just mentioned. Those characteristics recommend insistently the rationality and goodness of choosing life in the suicide fork and in the actions in each day of waking life down the river.

     

    Some Objectivist writings on the choice to live and criticisms of those writings: 

    Leonard Peikoff’s OPAR (1991) 211–14, 220–21, 233, 244–48.

    Roderick Long’s REASON AND VALUE which is OBJECTIVIST STUDIES V3 (2000).

    Douglas Rasmussen’s “Rand on Obligation and Virtue” in THE JOURNAL OF AYN RAND STUDIES (2002, V4N2).

    Tibor Machan’s “Rand and Choice” in JARS (2006, V7N2).

    Douglas Rasmussen’s “Regarding Choice and the Foundations of Morality” (2006 in JARS V7N2).

    Allan Gotthelf’s “The Choice to Value” in METAETHICS, EGOISM, AND VIRTUE (2011).

  16. The Legal Concept of Evidence

    Necovore, I don't know if the preponderance-of-the-evidence rule for civil suits is itself from the Common Law Mr. Brooks purports he would like to be maintained, but most tort law is developed by the Common Law. So he might well need to blame the Common Law for that standard of proof in a charge such as that brought by Ms. Carroll; I don't know. What was the evidence for her claims rated by the jury as having more than 50% likelihood of being true? (I'd imagine Mr. Trump's former boast that you can grab 'em by the pussy if you are a star [entered as pertinent evidence in the present case] probably added some weight against his claim of innocence in the present case.)

    Mr. Brooks provided no specifics to his claim that "over several generations Marxist intellectuals have been transforming the American justice system" to their political ends. Which intellectuals of any stripe transform the American justice system. Did Posner's economic analysis of law? Did Epstein's writings on the takings clause in the Constitution? (No on Epstein's, though I wish that they do, and I've still hope they will.) Where in Mr. Brooks's article are specified the law review articles by and names of these alleged Marxist intellectuals who have transformed the American justice system? Surely he knows that such Marxist intellectuals would have to be specific individuals, not air through which his hand waves, and surely he knows that if he speaks the truth in naming such individuals, he is defended against libel by the truth of his claim (proven by preponderance of the evidence). So far as I know, we've the same old common law in this sector of it, undermine confidence in the legal system day after day by hollering "Marxist", "prejudiced", or "rigged" for your political ends as a Mr. Brooks might.

    Are intellectuals who think there is "social justice" over and above "justice" (which is a myopic view of "justice") people who have influence on the American legal system? Specifics are lacking for the sweeping declarations of Mr. Brooks. Are such intellectuals all Marxist? Can't intellectuals have wrong-headed social ideas without being Marxist or brainlessly led by Marxists? Of course they can and do. It's easier to cry "Marxist"—and catchier to an audience stuck in whatever learning they or their elders got of social thought 50 years ago—than relaying Rawl's A Theory of Justice with its Principles, including the Principle of Liberty, or the writer in jurisprudence A. J. David Richards based on Rawls or relaying Nozick's counters to Rawl's theory. Or rendering the illuminating classics: Hart's The Concept of Law and Fuller's The Morality of Law. Of course Mr. Brooks likely has read much from those works at some point and has a fair guess as to what quarters hear which of them sympathetically or with hostility. His piece is the usual for broad public consumption: name-calling and lies for a political cause.

  17. 6 hours ago, George Adams CPA MBA said:

    Stephen,

    While I admire Rand's reverence for reason we must be careful. As Kant said, there are limits to reason. These limits have become clearer in the 20th century and here are two key points:

    (1) Kurt Godel's Incompleteness Theorem's showed that some propositions in math can neither be proved nor disproved. The piercing eyes of Math have a blind spot.

    (2) Quantum Mechanics, especially Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, shows that there are limits to knowledge at the physical level.

    Kant was far ahead of his time and operated mostly from insight and intuition in articulating the view that we should not make a God of reason, even though reason is the best tool we have to understand the world.

    Thanks for the response, George.

    Rand agreed that there are limits to reason, but she meant only that reason is tied to the senses. Reason in her meaning is the power of identifying and integrating what is given in perception (including in our actions). Such powers have definite limited characters. For Kant, reason usually means a narrower faculty which is boss of the faculty of the understanding, and this reason does not deal with what is in experience directly, only through the understanding. His reason and understanding together might approximate what Rand defined as reason (hers is a sort of theoretical and explanatory definition of reason friending the dictionary definition from ordinary usage).

    Even with his limitations on reason, Kant did make a top god of reason, both in his usual narrow sense and that reason in its commerce with the understanding. His ethical theory attempts to replace God with Reason. It is reason and its needed autonomy that is the source of true morality in his view. As for his idea that knowledge, which is product of sensory experience, the understanding, and reason, needed to be reined in from the German rationalists (Wolff, Moses Mendelssohn, . . .): that was for the purpose of shielding religious faith from the growing body of scientific knowledge and the philosophers assimilating it and weighing it. The limitations he argued were, accordingly, on letting knowledge intrude on religious turf (and especially while a religious zealot had the ear of the King). 

    Kant would be in one way sour over what Gödel discovered in his fabled incompleteness theorem, the one showing that some arithmetic truths we know to be true cannot be proven true in a purely deductive system. (The case of the unprovability either way of the Axiom of Choice in set theory is not the famed theorem of Gödel, if I recall correctly; maybe I'll look it up tomorrow.) For it strongly suggests that in arithmetic at least, we have some intellectual intuition after all, which Kant denied we have. On the other hand, he could smile and take this limitative result of Gödel's as showing that arithmetic as a science is synthetic a priori knowledge, Kant's way of characterizing it, not the way the Logicists were trying to characterize it. Kant would not take that Incompleteness theorem as supporting the limitations he was concerned to place on knowledge. I do not myself take it as limiting knowledge, but as adding to our knowledge of deductive systems, specifically some limitations of them. We seem still to have endless rational knowledge of arithmetic; there is no indication that there are any truths in arithmetic we as a species cannot come to know.

    Similarly, the Heisenberg Indeterminacy Principle is a discovery of fact about the nature of physical quantities having the physical quantity called 'action' as their product. Those are known as the canonically conjugate pairs in classical Hamiltonian mechanics. Such are the pairs: linear momentum of a body and position of that body; energy of a body and time of that occasion, if my memory is approximately correct. The discovery was that the quantity 'action' comes in a minute minimum value. The discovery and mathematical development and precise experiments in the physics that is quantum mechanics is one of the most extended and magnificent attainments in human knowledge.

     

  18. George Adams, like Peter, I was also wondering why you had the painting of Kant on the wall. It is natural to conclude that something in his thought found serious favor with you. Might it be his doctrine that individuals are ends in themselves and should be treated as that? Might it be the deontological character of his ethics? Might it be that he carries along the perfectionist school of thought among German ethicists?*

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