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Ayn Rand's Popcorn-tradiction.

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47 minutes ago, MisterSwig said:

Wouldn't a GoatApple be a real contradiction? It would be both animal and not animal, fruit and not fruit, etc.

If he pointed to one it couldn’t be a contradiction...

it would be whatever shape it was, whatever size, color ... whatever properties it had it would have... we might not be very good at naming it ... and we might be using questionable choices to name it due to similarities with other things, but it would be what it is... and there would not be any contradiction.  What you call something can be informative or misleading.

 

Someone once told me that his daughter had asked him if toy elephants and real elephants were just different kinds of elephants.  He told me he was genuinely stumped... he thought to himself well it’s VERY different but after all it is a toy ELEPHANT so it kinda is a just a very different kind of elephant. Talk about form obscuring substance... and letting what you call something blind you what you are really dealing with... here a toy, not an elephant, but a toy having a shape similar to that of an elephant.

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16 minutes ago, StrictlyLogical said:

it would be whatever shape it was, whatever size, color ... whatever properties it had it would have... we might not be very good at naming it ... and we might be using questionable choices to name it due to similarities with other things, but it would be what it is... and there would not be any contradiction.  What you call something can be informative or misleading.

Okay, so you're talking about something like a catfish. A catfish has a noncontradictory characteristic of a cat (whiskers), but it's a fish, not a cat too. I think your goatapple would be like an apple with horny protrusions and maybe some pointy, beard-like fibers.

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3 hours ago, dream_weaver said:

I'm musing that this may have something to do with a tendency to ascribe one's own rationality onto situations that don't quite square with our own conclusions. After many decades of adhering to such practice subconsciously practicing this, altering it at this stage of the game requires keeping abulia at bay until it is more or less automatized..

The relation to your story about gold's new property is critical, because it highlights the importance of the concept of contextual knowledge. If you're unaware of double diamond anvils and megapressures, for example, then you probably would have no context for conceiving of gold subjected to such a thing. Likewise, if you're unaware of someone else's thought process, you probably have no context for conceiving of an idea subjected to such a thing. And so you're stuck subjecting the idea to your own thought process.

The key is exposure to the new context. But, in this case, we must rely on Jose to expose his own thought process, which was a particular problem due to his incoherence and evasiveness. And so we're stuck applying our own context or guessing at his.

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10 minutes ago, MisterSwig said:

And so we're stuck applying our own context or guessing at his.

And in The Letters of Ayn Rand, in particular Letters to a Philosopher (Hospers) is where the foghorn is sounded about applying our own context or "guessing at his", which is, in essence 'applying our own context', and what is also considered as 'ascribing our own rationality to him' per the wording in the referenced document.

Edited by dream_weaver
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7 hours ago, dream_weaver said:

And in The Letters of Ayn Rand, in particular Letters to a Philosopher (Hospers) is where the foghorn is sounded about applying our own context or "guessing at his", which is, in essence 'applying our own context', and what is also considered as 'ascribing our own rationality to him' per the wording in the referenced document.

For those following along, this is the 1/3/61 letter. Starting on page 524 she offers her hypothesis regarding an epistemological error she suspects Hospers of making. Good catch, Dream Weaver!

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