A Definitive Criticism of Objectivist Epistemology

[dream_weaver]

20 hours ago, Eiuol said:

DW, I was talking about neutrality as in "absence of decided views", as in without assuming Rand is right. As if we're recreating what Rand may have thought about - absent of a decided view on if she is right. This is what SK seems to mean. Did you read the paper? She's not trying to -develop- an "impartial" theory of concepts.

So are you trying to reach an independent conclusion without the benefit of her contributions, or is it supposed to be in line with Objectivism Through Induction's identifying the evidence from which the inductions were made? I think the latter approach would be preferential.

As to reading the papers, I can only conclude that I must not be a very bright ninth grader.

[MisterSwig]

2 hours ago, DonAthos said:

Perhaps in the same way that someone who doesn't believe in angels isn't welcome in the thread devoted to discovering how many of 'em can Lindy hop on the head of a pin.

There's a thread on angels?!? How'd I miss that! I hope it's more in my league. Gonna check it out right now.

Lay-tah, skay-tahs!

[SpookyKitty]

6 hours ago, StrictlyLogical said:

Why does this referent require a concept? 

Why would you need to abstract away from the single unique thing?  What reason does one have to form a concept here?

The fact that a referent is defined abstractly (or is itself an abstraction) or is as of yet undiscovered is not in and of itself any reason for forming a whole new concept for it.

The referent can be defined and referred to with a proper noun.

Do you have an example where a unique single referent actually requires a concept, requires abstraction from the referents (over and above them) rather than a proper noun simply pointing at it?

 

I must admit, when I first read these questions, I had to think it through for hours, because they are almost nonsensical to me. They are questions so fundamental to the way I think that it took a lot of effort to figure out what exactly is wrong with your questions. But there are three things:

1) Things do not "require" concepts. People require concepts.

2) Concepts are not used to refer to things. Although they can be used that way, they are not merely file folders for percepts and other concepts.

3) We need concepts to reason about things.

In order to reason abstractly about the solutions of the given equation, i.e., make use of statements like "Consider the only real solution of the equation..." one needs the concept of "the only real solution to that equation". You can reason about things even if you don't know exactly what they are. And reasoning about them may help you eventually figure out what they are.

Edited January 6, 2017 by SpookyKitty

[SpookyKitty]

4 hours ago, Eiuol said:

Fair enough, but recognize that you are at least saying concepts are mental, so are distinguishing them from predicates that are not necessarily mental. I mean, that is some claim about the ontology of concepts. You're right that what concepts consist of is a different issue.

 

Well, yes that is a stance on the ontology of concepts, but I only added that in so that people would not get confused about statements such as "there exists a concept such that..." and think that I am implying that concepts somehow exist outside of minds.

Quote

To be more precise, a predicate or a set of predicates does not completely represent a concept. Does a set of predicates ever totally represent a concept? I think you've already recognized that predicates at best partially represent concepts. Or, you are restraining concepts to only be represented by predicates at the outset - a hidden premise - before saying what the conditions are for a fully represented concept. So, amend b to say "are concepts represented by things in addition to predicates?"

 

That's not a hidden premise, that's Axiom 12. While I would agree that concepts can be represented by things other than predicates, only predicates are actually needed.

Quote

Hmm, I see how I was skipping ahead to -normative- evaluations of one's concepts. But do you see that "at least two entities" is a normative claim and how a normative claim implies a notion of validity with regards to concept's relation to a referent or reality? To be sure, I was skipping ahead when we didn't even get to explaining what concepts are good -for- anyway. We're not there yet. At the end of the paper, you seem to cede that some concepts have a peculiar relation to reality in terms of their referents, with some lacking referents entirely. Rand offers a way to see if one's concepts are "normal", i.e. have an objective relation with reality.

 

Well firstly, I don't think it's just a normative claim. Rand does not say that a concept merely should have at least two referents but that all concepts have at least two referents.

Rand does not say that concepts with less than two referents have a peculiar relation to reality, but that they have no relation to reality at all. She says, I forget exactly where, that the use of any such invalid concept automatically falsifies any statement using it.

And I strongly disagree with all of these views.

[SpookyKitty]

3 hours ago, aleph_1 said:

My point is that often when we form a concept we do not know how many subjects are subsumed by that concept....

 

That's something I would agree with so I'm still not sure why it's being directed at me.

[SpookyKitty]

2 hours ago, MisterSwig said:

Sure you do. Concepts consist of the "mechanism" needed to output statements. And since statements are composed of words, a concept is best understood as a word-making mechanism. Concept itself is a word, therefore there must be some kind of a superconcept, a prime mover mechanism which either outputted itself or has always existed, and which originally outputted the very first statement to ever exist, which of course would have been about itself.

This stuff really isn't that hard to figure out. It's not like you're the first person to come up with this garbage.

 

Yes, you got me. I confess. I am secretly a theist, and I sacrifice babies to Telebrion under the blood moon.

[SpookyKitty]

3 hours ago, New Buddha said:

It has everything to do with this post if you believe that language, math, logic and physics are about the world and the universe that we live in and not just a nominalist game of symbol manipulation that may or may not end up having some meaningfulness or "truth-value" with regards to the real world.

From a previous post of yours:

"Imagine that the world was such that everything lay in the same plane. Nothing would be above anything else, but that does not mean that the concept of "aboveness" would be meaningless."

In this imagined 2-d world of yours (see Flatland, which is probably what Plasmatic was thinking about) you axiomistized  a world where "aboveness" would in fact be be meaningless.  But when Plasmatic pointed this out, your response was to arbitrarily throw in another axiom that space would be 3-d - thus preserving "aboveness".

 

No, I only said to imagine that everything lay in the same plane. I didn't "aribrarily throw in another axiom", that's just a result of your and Plasmatic's misreading.

But even if we were talking about flatland, the whole hyperspace point shows that "aboveness" is still definable.

 

Quote

Quote:

"As for the second part, just because everything happens to lie in a 2d plane, does not mean that space is not 3-dimensional, just that everything happens to lie in some 2d plane of a 3d space."

This type of thinking is the reason why I posted the Bertrand Russell quote regarding inconsistent logical systems.  In such systems, you can provide a proof for any theorem.  Because inconsistent systems have no limits, they also have no value with regards to reality.

 

For Pete's sakes, I have given a proof that the axioms I use are consistent. Read the goddamn paper, or don't bother.

Quote

Regarding String Theory and extra-dimensional hyperspaces, this represents the blurring of the line between mathematics and physics (but that's another post).  But related to this, you asked me if I doubted mathematics:

 

I doubt you know much about any of these things, so I really don't care much for your opinion on them.

Quote

"Your mistrust and lack of understanding of logic is your own. That an argument is formalized is not a point against it. Do you seriously doubt mathematics, or something?"

Your problem is that you are unknowingly blurring the line between three different domains: mathematics, formal logic and language - all of which, to be useful, must have limits.  I replied that I do understand the limits of formal systems (such as mechanics used in engineering).  Without these limits, these systems would be meaningless.  They would be inconsistent and could "prove" anything.  We could not tell a right answer from a wrong answer, true from false.  Beams may or may not resist loads....

 

Again, see proof.

Quote

From your paper:

"Before proceeding, let us explain what is meant here by “axiom” and what role they serve in the overall analysis. An axiom here is simply a common sense, although completely explicit, assumption we must make about concepts.
I do not claim that these axioms are self-evident nor that everyone must accept them. Rather, I hold that they are implictly regarded as true by any reasonable person, just as the axioms of arithmetic or geometry are implicitly regarded as true by any reasonable person."

This is precisely how not to form "axioms".  Axioms are arrived at through induction - that is from concretes to abstractions, and then by further abstracting from abstractions in order to form even more broad generalizations -  all via concept formation.  But without defined limits imposed by concrete reality, any deductive reasoning from these axioms would result in meaningless statements.  This is true for formal logic, mathematics, mechanics and language.

Your understanding of how knowledge is acquired is exactly backwards.

 

Well thank you for explicitly saying this, because it seems that you do, in fact, doubt logic and math. Or that at least you simply don't understand what it means to deduce something from something else.

Edited January 6, 2017 by SpookyKitty

[Eiuol]

3 hours ago, DonAthos said:

What do you mean by this, Eiuol?

I mean to say that while I understand Swig's claim, and perhaps would talk about it elsewhere, I think it demonstrates a severe misunderstanding or miscomprehension of the discussion. No one is trying to figure out if imaginary creatures have referents (they don't, hence imaginary), while Swig is actually claiming that descriptions in books or drawings are referents of dragons. Those are representations of how one imagines dragons, not a dragon itself any more than Smaug -is- a dragon.

I don't mind explaining, but not all things said are equal in value.

[MisterSwig]

22 minutes ago, Eiuol said:

No one is trying to figure out if imaginary creatures have referents

This whole thread is about imaginary creatures that fly around inside our heads and breathe statements.

[Eiuol]

29 minutes ago, SpookyKitty said:

only predicates are actually needed.

That's what I am questioning, why is it sufficient? I see no justification. (Your paper isn't easy to glance through from the structure/organization, so I wouldn't know where to see if you tried to justify it.) As a related thing, do you think non-propositional and non-statements are able to represent concepts at least partially?

33 minutes ago, SpookyKitty said:

Rand does not say that a concept merely should have at least two referents but that all concepts have at least two referents.

I still say it is normative because that's how she treats it. Worst case we just say it only makes sense as a normative claim, i.e. Rand was mistaken to suggest -all- concepts have referents, but justified ones have at least 2.

44 minutes ago, SpookyKitty said:

Rand does not say that concepts with less than two referents have a peculiar relation to reality, but that they have no relation to reality at all. She says, I forget exactly where, that the use of any such invalid concept automatically falsifies any statement using it.

At least when I say peculiar, I count "no relation at all" as peculiar.

What page is the quote on? I'd like to see it. My bet is that she was saying any knowledge that employs an invalid concept is false, or something to that effect.

Perhaps a nitpick: things with exactly one referent are better classified as proper nouns, and those can have a relation to reality.

By the way, while there is plenty I'd say you're wrong about, I think your questioning is good and productive as far as these being areas Rand didn't get to address, or possibly overlooked.

[SpookyKitty]

Just now, KALADIN said:

From your paper (blue is mine):

"Abstract: We show that Rand’s theory of concept formation, more specifically, the requirement that every concept subsume at least two entities..."

That requirement is not a part of Ayn Rand's theory of concept formation. Rand endorses metaphysical pluralism and never legislates entities as the only kind of existent which can serve as a unit. Because the argumentative vehicle for your criticism of Objectivism is (entirely) the rejection of this requirement you fundamentally miss the mark.

 

Maybe that is sloppy wording, but if you'd read the thread, you would have known that concepts can also serve as units is a claim that I agree with. I also make use of such statements in several proofs, if you'd bothered to read them.

Quote

"Definition 1. A set of statements Σ is philosophically neutral with respect to some set of philosophical positions Π if and only if all of the statements in Σ are logically independent..."

If indeed "the truth is the whole" then logical independence makes since only as a concept referring to a subject's lack of knowledge (like 'randomness'). This means then that only when you can not identify, say, the logical dependence of higher-abstractions upon more primitive ones is it possible to be philosophically neutral towards those more complex abstractions. Interesting..

 

Logical dependence has nothing to do with abstractions but with statements. Please look up the definition of "logical independence", because you're speaking nonsense.

Quote

"Both true and false statements are representations of reality."

One wonders at the standard of appeal by which we come to distinguish truth and falsity.

 

You are quote-mining and taking that statement out of context and drawing implications which do not follow and that I explicitly denied in that context.

Quote

"If subjects represent things, then predicates represent concepts."

Your entire section pertaining to "Definition 3." is very confused. It is merely because the three statements you make use of in turn make use of proper nouns (which can not represent concepts) as subjects that you feel licensed to regard subjects as necessarily non-representative of concepts. Subjects are things. Predicates are composed of concepts.

 

Subjects can also refer to concepts. Again, please read the thread.

Quote

"Definition 4. A concept is a mental phenomenon that which, given a subject, outputs a statement about the subject."

This definition, if held also as an operational definition and in conjunction with your "Definition 2.", leads to the impossibility of the beginning of concept-formation; one would require the constituent concepts of the outputted statement before one could have the concept which outputs that statement. Or maybe you think concepts output things to and exist apart from knowing subjects.

 

Please explain further, this doesn't make sense, but it seems like there's a genuine point here.

Quote

"It is possible to apply the concept “a red planet” to Earth and thereby obtain the false statement, 'The Earth is a red planet'."

This whole passage is ridiculously messy and your quotation actually makes pretense to concepts and predicates being identical but a concept is not the kind of thing that can be "said of some subject" unless you consider, per your own phraseology, every phenomenon "a mental phenomenon".

 

Sure, that can be clarified. It should say "It is possible to apply the concept represented by the predicate "a red planet" .... " but I would have guessed that the reader would already know the intended meaning without my having to use this extremely cumbersome wording.

Quote

"The third is that a concept does not represent anything . . .Instead, a concept is what connects statements to subjects."

1) How is something which represents nothing capable of connecting or "outputting statements" about anything? 2) And moreover how does a concept connect "statements to subjects" if, again by our own definition, a statement is already essentially composed in part by a subject? Perhaps what you meant was to connect statements to subjects which are alien to the ones of the original statement's composition but then again what would your non-representational, non-referential connective tissue even mean?

 

1) Well why wouldn't it be?

2) It connects the thing represented by the subject to a statement which contains the relevant subject. Yeah, this wording should be fixed.

Quote

"The role that these axioms serve in the overall analysis is to . . . 3) establish the truth of the conclusion."

See: Rationalism.

 

It's not rationalism, it's logic.

Quote

"For example 'red and a planet' and 'not neither red nor a planet' are equivalent predicates because: 'Mars is red and a planet' is true if and only if 'Mars is not neither red nor a planet' is also true, 'Earth is red and a planet' is true if and only if 'Earth is not neither red nor a planet' is true, ... , and so on for every other such statement."

Therefore, according to you (in virtue of logical dependency being a bar to neutrality), the determination of any equivalent predicates can not be philosophically neutral and must necessarily be "biasing the investigation beforehand". Also interesting.

 

Sure, two statements A and B for which "A if and only if B" is logically valid cannot be philosophically neutral towards each other, but that doesn't mean that the determination itself is somehow dependent on A and B.

Quote

"Axiom 7. (Axiom of Concept Representation) For all concepts c and all predicates ϕ and all predicates ψ, if ϕ represents c and if ϕ is equivalent to ψ, then ψ also represents c. What the above axiom basically comes down to is that people understand logic. If one understands every statement like 'Mars is red and a planet' then one cannot also fail to understand any logically equivalent statement such as 'Mars is not neither red nor a planet'."

Did you forget earlier where you said "Note that the word 'is' is not part of the predicate"? Note that the logical equivalence of these statements depends exclusively on "predicates ϕ and ψ" containing forms of the verb to be.

 

This is a limitation of the English language. In English you can't gramatically say "Red(Mars)" like you can in a formal language, nor can you use the word "is" without possibly confusing it with the "is" of identity. That's why I say that the word "is" is not part of the predicate, so that one does not confuse the statements "Mars has the color red" (Red(Mars))and "Mars is identiical to the color red"(Mars = red) like in "Mars is red".

Quote

"Since there is an infinite variety of predicates equivalent to each predicate..."

Being allowed to say this means rejecting your "Note that..." assertion just quoted above insofar as the very possibility of pairs of equivalent predicates depends precisely on what you've already banished from the predicate.

 

What?

Quote

I admit to being bored at this point and have decided to skip to the part of your paper where you supposedly actually talk about Objectivism.

" The Objectivist theory of concept formation makes at least the following claims:"

Here we go...

"Claim 20. For every concept, there are at least two (non-mental) subjects subsumed by the concept."

I guess the concept of concept isn't possible in Objectivism. *facepalm*

 

This has already been addressed in the thread.

Quote

"Claim 21. Existence exists. That is, the concept represented by the predicate 'has existence' exists."

1) First, the theory of concept formation does not claim "existence exists". 2) Second, that is perfectly not what the existence axiom means and your characterization of "has existence" makes pretense to existence as an attribute of things, an assertion which is clearly repudiated in Chapter 6 of ITOE where Rand says, "Existence and identity are not attributes of existents, they are the existents." [emphasis original]

 

1) It most certainly does. Rand claims that axiomatic concepts are "presupposed by all knowledge" and one must therefore conclude that it is also presupposed by her theory of concept formation insofar as that theory is knowledge.

2) The use of the phrase "x has existence" should be read as "x exists", strictly speaking. I use that phraseology in order to not confuse it with logical quantification. A predicate is anything that can be said of anything else. It does not mean that what is said of is necessarily an attribute. Nor do I claim that existence is an attribute of things.

Quote

"Claim 22. A is A. That is, the concept represented by the predicate 'has identity' exists."

See again response to "Claim 21" and substitute "existence exists" with "A is A" and "has existence" with "has identity".

Same as above.

 

Quote

"The predicate 'has existence' will be denoted by ex and the predicate 'has identity' will be denoted by id."

So we finally get to the part in your paper where you actually deal with Objectivism and you present three claims its theory of concept formation makes - all of them being abjectly wrong and clearly contradicted by primary Oist literature - then finish your "criticism" with three theorems all resting on perfectly inadmissible predications (e.g. "has identity", "has existence"). I don't know what it is you are critiquing (and I'm fairly sure you aren't either) but it isn't Objectivist Epistemology and it definitively isn't definitive

 

I think I have given satisfactory responses to all of your objections here.

[New Buddha]

57 minutes ago, SpookyKitty said:

 

No, I only said to imagine that everything lay in the same plane. I didn't "aribrarily throw in another axiom", that's just a result of your and Plasmatic's misreading.

But even if we were talking about flatland, the whole hyperspace point shows that "aboveness" is still definable.

 

 

For Pete's sakes, I have given a proof that the axioms I use are consistent. Read the goddamn paper, or don't bother.

 

I doubt you know much about any of these things, so I really don't care much for your opinion on them.

 

Again, see proof.

 

Well thank you for explicitly saying this, because it seems that you do, in fact, doubt logic and math. Or that at least you simply don't understand what it means to deduce something from something else.

Spiffy one-sentence responses, which are supposed to be so brilliant as to not need further elaboration, bore me.  I see that I'm wasting my time, so I 'll back out of the post now rather than continue to waste it.  Believe what you want to believe.  It's a good thing that you don't actually have to try and apply your beliefs to earn a living.  What you belief is purely academic.  If everyone on this forum were to concede that you are right, and Ayn Rand is wrong, what actual difference would it make?

The answer to this question should tell you the relevance of the issues you are wresting with.

[SpookyKitty]

Just now, Eiuol said:

That's what I am questioning, why is it sufficient? I see no justification. (Your paper isn't easy to glance through from the structure/organization, so I wouldn't know where to see if you tried to justify it.) As a related thing, do you think non-propositional and non-statements are able to represent concepts at least partially?

 

I don't give any justification, and I don't think I can. That's why I call it an axiom. The best justification I can give is that it makes sense to me and that the opposite doesn't.

Yes, I think there are many ways to represent concepts without the use of language, but language is the best way, in my opinion.

Quote

I still say it is normative because that's how she treats it. Worst case we just say it only makes sense as a normative claim, i.e. Rand was mistaken to suggest -all- concepts have referents, but justified ones have at least 2.

 

Yeah, then we agree, but I would still question whether or not it makes sense as a normative claim, but that's a topic for another thread.

Quote

At least when I say peculiar, I count "no relation at all" as peculiar.

 

Fair enough.

Quote

What page is the quote on? I'd like to see it. My bet is that she was saying any knowledge that employs an invalid concept is false, or something to that effect.

 

I'll have to dig through ITOE to find it now. Be back in a jiffy.

Quote

Perhaps a nitpick: things with exactly one referent are better classified as proper nouns, and those can have a relation to reality.

 

Wasn't it you who convinced me that proper nouns and concepts with just one referent aren't the same thing in the first place?

Quote

By the way, while there is plenty I'd say you're wrong about, I think your questioning is good and productive as far as these being areas Rand didn't get to address, or possibly overlooked.

 

Well thank you, and I think your responses have been top notch. It would definitely help if more people were like you and willing to read and understand first and then criticize, rather than just skipping to the conclusion, disagreeing with it, and then spewing whatever random thought comes to mind. I mean, I went through a heap of trouble trying to do half the work for everyone in figuring out what a disagreement with my argument would entail but most have ignored that in favor of baseless charges of rationalism and arguments over definitions or phrasing.

[SpookyKitty]

Just found this gem in ITOE:

Quote

conceptual awareness is the algebra of cognition.
The relationship of concepts to their constituent particulars is the same as the relationship of algebraic symbols to numbers. In the equation 2a = a + a, any number may be substituted for the symbol “a”
without affecting the truth of the equation. For instance: 2 X 5 = 5 + 5, or: 2 X 5,000,000 = 5,000,000 + 5,000,000. In the same manner, by the same psycho-epistemological method, a concept is used as an algebraic symbol that stands for any of the arithmetical sequence of units it subsumes. Let those who attempt to invalidate concepts by declaring that they cannot find “manness” in men, try to
invalidate algebra by declaring that they cannot find “a-ness” in 5 or in 5,000,000.

 

Which is exactly what I've been trying to get at with my definition of 'concept'.

Edited January 6, 2017 by SpookyKitty

[SpookyKitty]

@Eiuol I found the quote. It's in chapter 5 of ITOE:

 

Quote

The truth or falsehood of all of man’s conclusions, inferences, thought and knowledge rests on the truth or falsehood of his definitions. (The above applies only to valid concepts. There are such things as invalid concepts, i.e., words that represent attempts to integrate errors, contradictions or false propositions, such as concepts originating in mysticism—or words without specific definitions, without referents, which can mean anything to anyone, such as modern “anti-concepts.” Invalid concepts appear occasionally in men’s languages, but are usually—though not necessarily—short—lived, since they lead to cognitive dead-ends. An invalid concept invalidates every proposition or process of thought in which it is used as a cognitive assertion.)

 

Edited January 6, 2017 by SpookyKitty

[SpookyKitty]

Just now, dream_weaver said:

As to reading the papers, I can only conclude that I must not be a very bright ninth grader.

 

dream_weaver.... you're a smart guy. You can do it. I'm also here to answer questions.

[StrictlyLogical]

9 hours ago, SpookyKitty said:

 

I must admit, when I first read these questions, I had to think it through for hours, because they are almost nonsensical to me. They are questions so fundamental to the way I think that it took a lot of effort to figure out what exactly is wrong with your questions. But there are three things:

1) Things do not "require" concepts. People require concepts.

2) Concepts are not used to refer to things. Although they can be used that way, they are not merely file folders for percepts and other concepts.

3) We need concepts to reason about things.

In order to reason abstractly about the solutions of the given equation, i.e., make use of statements like "Consider the only real solution of the equation..." one needs the concept of "the only real solution to that equation". You can reason about things even if you don't know exactly what they are. And reasoning about them may help you eventually figure out what they are.

You know what I meant and you have not addressed the question.  The "requirement" for concepts being ours for the purpose  of reasoning is clearly implied. 

If you prefer to leave it unanswered rather than deal with it, that is your choice.

[SpookyKitty]

2 hours ago, StrictlyLogical said:

You know what I meant and you have not addressed the question.  The "requirement" for concepts being ours for the purpose  of reasoning is clearly implied. 

If you prefer to leave it unanswered rather than deal with it, that is your choice.

 

No no no, I don't want to leave anything unanswered. But if you agree with the three claims above, then I do not see how the example I already provided is inadequate.

[StrictlyLogical]

18 minutes ago, SpookyKitty said:

 

No no no, I don't want to leave anything unanswered. But if you agree with the three claims above, then I do not see how the example I already provided is inadequate.

Hmm.  Let me summarize and then reformulate to distill the issue I see.

One of your claims, essentially, is that one needs a concept (for reasoning), not only in cases where there are two or more units (what I have been loosely referring to as referents) but also in cases of a single unit (or referent).

I have suggested that a proper noun will suffice, while you have (presumably) taken the position that a proper noun will not suffice.

To understand the why behind the disagreement I have asked for examples.

Generally your examples display an element of "unknown" or "yet to be discovered".

My take on this is the particular kind of attribute of the unit or units, namely "unknown" or not, does not provide a reason for why proper nouns are not sufficient for referring to single units.  i.e. that no reason has been supplied for why abstraction away from the single particular unit is necessary.

 

It comes down to this: What would be missing from the ability to reason if one abstained from abstraction/conceptualization for the single unit cases and simply referred to unit/referent with a proper noun?  If nothing is missing then conceptualization is not required for human reasoning, whereas if something IS missing, presumably single unique particulars DO require a concept for human reasoning.

 

Afterthought: a slightly related issue is that if conceptualization is not actually needed for single particular units one could conclude that the act of conceptualization is not actually even occurring for a single particular unit X... unless and until a person thinks up the concept "other things like X", etc.

Edited January 6, 2017 by StrictlyLogical

[Eiuol]

22 hours ago, SpookyKitty said:

In order to reason abstractly about the solutions of the given equation, i.e., make use of statements like "Consider the only real solution of the equation..." one needs the concept of "the only real solution to that equation".

First: I don't see how that is a concept, to the extent that it isn't a set of all the predicates for the concept. If you mean it is the only predicate for the concept, then see the discussion on proper nouns. I'm leaving aside for now the bit on if predicates are sufficient for a total representation.

If you are only using that as shorthand, then it is really just a group of ideas. If you really want it to stand for a concept, well, give it a single word. Moving on though, let me alter your example to get at my idea.

Suppose we gave it a word, "cogisolution" (I just like how it sounds!). Suppose also that a cogisolution refers to all the solutions of a really strange and hard to grasp equation. As it turns out, there is only one solution, despite it being totally reasonable before to expect many solutions. There's exactly and only one answer. So then on out, people talk about the answer as -the- Cogisolution. It does not require any number of units or referents, except one, nor any extra baggage of what a concept denotes. You could call it a "concept" as in "stuff needed for cognition that stand for subjects", except that's not what Rand was getting at: solving the problem of univerals was the point. We get a theory of particulars, or a theory of relating ideas to reality, but we don't talk about universals. Could a Cogisolution be a universal when it is only one particular?

Let's make it less fictional. Suppose that we use Pi instead of a Cogisolution. It is exactly one number, and it is treated as a proper noun. It's constant, there is no variety. Pi is universal in the sense it applies to ALL circles, and it certainly is important for reasoning ABOUT circles. Yet it doesn't work in a way that there's a unity of Pis, or the nature of Pis. Circles can be universal, as one would wonder how THIS circle and THAT circle are both circles. You'd need some universal about THOSE things which you label as circles, so then "circle" would be that universal - and Rand calls that a concept. Again, Pi isn't like a universal at all, as useful to reasoning as it is.

I had more riffing to do on -total- representations of concepts, but it may be better in a separate thread.

20 hours ago, SpookyKitty said:

The best justification I can give is that it makes sense to me and that the opposite doesn't.

Couldn't the conclusions you reached be a reason to say it -might- not be so sensible after all? Sure, going into an argument it might make sense, but clearly we need to amend one of your axioms or reject something. Or maybe you only need to add more. Point is, justification is necessary to continue. At the very least, you'd want to explore what it'd mean to accept as an axiom that a set of predicates is only one portion of a total representation of a concept.

I don't like the term axiom here a lot, but you're using it more like a common sense premise or like an axiom in math where you make an assumption then see what the end result is. So, it's not so bad, and I don't mind using it here, but it's probably not the greatest term considering your audience.

20 hours ago, SpookyKitty said:

Wasn't it you who convinced me that proper nouns and concepts with just one referent aren't the same thing in the first place?

I don't know, I probably was saying that proper nouns are not concepts, so they're certainly not going to be the same as even a concept with just one referent. It's still closer to my viewpoint than them being the same. What do you say is the difference then between a concept with one referent, and a proper noun?

Edited January 7, 2017 by Eiuol

[MisterSwig]

I'm not sure if this has already been established in this thread, but proper names are not concepts with a single unit. They name, and thus mentally differentiate, a particular unit within a particular class of units. There's no abstracting going on. Just isolating.

Mars is a proper name for a planet. It is a unit of the concept planet. By giving it a unique name we can more easily isolate it from every other planet in the known universe and remember its measurable attributes like redness. However, Mars isn't the only red planet in the universe, so we also need to remember that it's the red planet fourth closest to our Sun, which, by the way, is another proper name--for a unit subsumed under the concept star.

[softwareNerd]

On 1/1/2017 at 10:39 PM, SpookyKitty said:

What part of this is rationalism?

Assuming that a concept must have multiple actual concrete entities comes from reading the text and forgetting the "why". This is similar to taking a definition and reasoning from a definition. (A famous example that probably has a 100-post thread on the forum goes something like this: Humans are rational animals; therefore lunatics and not human!)

[Eiuol]

7 hours ago, softwareNerd said:

Assuming that a concept must have multiple actual concrete entities comes from reading the text and forgetting the "why". This is similar to taking a definition and reasoning from a definition. (A famous example that probably has a 100-post thread on the forum goes something like this: Humans are rational animals; therefore lunatics and not human!)

Except, SK's paper doesn't assume that. She just reasons out that a requirement for concept formation according to Rand is not necessary at all. If an idea is false as far as its logical structure, it does not matter why the idea is there, except to find a new solution. I don't see how the argument is rationalism either, even if wrong about its conclusion.

[dlb585]

I've seen this time and time again (as an objectivist). It physically hurts to watch. 5 pages! This is to be ignored.

Edited January 7, 2017 by dlb585

[SpookyKitty]

22 hours ago, StrictlyLogical said:

It comes down to this: What would be missing from the ability to reason if one abstained from abstraction/conceptualization for the single unit cases and simply referred to unit/referent with a proper noun?  If nothing is missing then conceptualization is not required for human reasoning, whereas if something IS missing, presumably single unique particulars DO require a concept for human reasoning.

 

I agree that that's what it comes down to. And as I've said before, what we would lose is all abstract reasoning that concerns single things.

Suppose I tell you, "I just discovered that at least one 'cogisolution' exists!" (to borrow Eiuols terminology).

You then ask, "Ok, what is a 'cogisolution'"? Now, unless I have an example of a 'cogisolution' there is no way for me to answer the question, but it is possible for me to know that at least one 'cogisolution' exists, nonetheless.

How you ask?

Well I know that every odd-degree equation has at least one real solution. Therefore, the fifth degree equation above also has at least one real solution. I am therefore justified in saying that "At least one cogisolution exists." even though I can't give an example of such.

The reason that I can do this is because I have a concept that corresponds to 'cogisolution' even though I don't have any concrete examples of such.

Now, the question is, how can I possibly assign a proper noun to something I can't even give a single example of? What sense does that even make? It's clear that the referents of the concept "a thing which is a solution to equation 1" are precisely those things which satisfy the predicate, even if it turns out that there is one or none at all. But how, then, could the proper noun 'cogisolution' possibly acquire its meaning independently of the concept?

And what's worse is that there is and can only ever be one 'cogisolution', so how was that ever a concept in the first place if there are no concepts corresponding to single things?

 

Edited January 8, 2017 by SpookyKitty