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I'm familiar with that usage. We can can find very many such examples out there, indeed we can say that the writings of Ayn Rand are implicit in the grammar of English, and the writings of Immanuel Kant are implicit in the grammar of English. “…all arithmetic and all geometry are in us virtually, so that we can find them there if we consider attentively and set in order what we already have in the mind,” “Thus it is that ideas and truths are for us innate, as inclinations, dispositions, habits, or natural potentialities, and not as actions; although these potentialities are always accompanied by some actions, often insensible, which correspond to them” (Leibniz New Essays). The problem is that I find this to be an abuse of the meaning of "implicit", one that we find very common in social contract style ethical discussions which invoke the notion of "implied consent". Rather than say that all knowledge is implicit in the faculty of reason, we should say that all knowledge is created by using the faculty of reason. We can likewise arrive at valid concepts by contemplating the import of walking into walls for the concept of “solidity”. It is not valid to say that the concept of existence exclusively derives from sense perception: obviously, there is more to conceptualization that simple sense perception. Invoking the implicit obscures an important question: how exactly does one create or validate a concept? Stating the logical hierarchy is not the same as explaining the epistemological process of invention / discovery.

I fail to see why "implications" are not recognized around here. The slogan ~implies~ murderous intent. A free Palestine implies an UN-free Israel.

Not often I quote Hillary... but, yeah, she's right, Palestine could have maybe turned out well if Arafat implemented that 96% sovereignty deal in the West Bank which Israel offered. 96% was an excellent offer. Israel always looked for peace. The PA/PLO, as "rejectionist" as ever. Apparently they wanted all of Israel then, and they want it all now. Free Palestine!! Right. They wish for the entire territory for "Free". Hillary Clinton slams anti-Israel protests on college campuses, says students have been fed propaganda By Jacob Magid Former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton tears into the pro-Palestinian protest movement that has swept across American colleges, calling them ignorant and lamenting that they’re being misinformed by propaganda on social media and in the classroom. “I have had many conversations with a lot of young people over the last many months. They don’t know very much at all about the history of the Middle East or frankly about history in many areas of the world, including in our own country,” Clinton tells MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “With respect to the Middle East, they don’t know that under the bringing together of the Israelis and the Palestinians by my husband — then-Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, the then-head of the Palestinian Liberation Organization Yasser Arafat — an offer was made to the Palestinians for a state on 96% of the existing territory occupied by the Palestinians with 4% of Israel to be given to reach 100% of the amount of territory that was hoped for.” “This offer was made and if Yasser Arafat had accepted it there would have been a Palestinian state now for about 24 years. It’s one of the great tragedies of history that he was unable to say, ‘yes,'” Clinton laments.

Taking positions about a war always amounts to supporting the killing of someone. "Free Palestine!" is not taking positions about a war, because: "Free Palestine!" means suppressing an occupation, The current war is the one between Gaza government and Israel. During this war no occupation took place. Therefore "Free Palestine!" does not mean taking positions about a war. Your comment tries to whitewash SpookyKitty's "Free Palestine!" call, which is a call for murder, a call for genocide, more precisely. There exist, however, also a legitimate call "Free Palestine!".

I tend to side with the Israelis because they at least have a secular, pro-laissez-faire element, whereas the Palestinians have no such thing and want to establish an Islamic dictatorship. The political Left commonly thinks that crime is "justice" and actual justice is a crime; they treat business owners in the cities the same way they treat Israel. The Left also favors policies that encourage the use of human shields.

I've noticed your soft opinions on the PA, whose Palestinians I'd inform you have been polled recently to be heavily in favor of Hamas' actions in October. Have you not heard of Abbas' "pay for slay" program? It is not new. Murder civilian Jews or soldiers/policemen and go to prison - or best, be killed while being arrested, and your family receives cash benefits on a sliding scale. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://emetonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Pay4Slay_Fact-Sheet-FINAL.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjCouzm3oGGAxUvRvEDHfo9CYMQFnoECBIQAQ&usg=AOvVaw24sCFxIU0yLh396ZYsTgz7

Taking positions about a war always amounts to supporting the killing of someone. The entire thread is practically a demonstration in discourse that is not rational in any sense. I don't participate in this thread precisely because no one seems actually interested in figuring anything out. But there is at least a semblance of discourse, even if it goes nowhere.

Of course it is, don't allow them to be in any doubt. "Free Palestine" = "kill Israelis" (Or "Zionists" as such people try to hide behind.) They are either: a. useful idiots or b. complicit in an intended mass murder. And no other option. I am pleased to see you get to the core, however.

From a post I wrote at OL. "Hamas' political arm knows its audience. Capture hostages, commit murderous attacks. The threefold plan: 1. they know the Israelis are guaranteed to come in hard to rescue hostages. Good. The trap is set. 2. the hostages serve as protective shields 3. hostages can be negotiated as leverage for a ceasefire. Objective achieved: Plenty of their own Gazan civilians die and the world turns on Israel and pulls support, and they buy time to reorganize, re-equip and to do it again. I've seen it all before. I could not read much of Mr Unz's sophistry and inversions. Don't misunderstand these folk, they delight in seeing Israelis killed, the country brought low, and even eradicated as Hamas promises".

So, you are incapable of justifying any of your claims; in other words, you know nothing about the subject. Furthermore, you deny that it is your duty to justify your claims. I will report you—again!—to the moderators for not abiding by the rules of rational debate. Additionally, I will ask them to take a stance towards your "Free Palestine!" statement, which I consider a call for murder. @Pokyt @Eiuol @William O

So stop trying to simplify it. Post something and expand on it, get into the complexities.

Did you actually watch the video because that is not the argument at all, it is both much more complex and much simpler in other ways.

indeed, we definitely should completely ignore that Hamas and Palestine are different things, any support of Palestine is inherently support of Hamas. Palestine is obviously the same as Hamas. After all, it's easier to be a tribalist. If you don't support Israel, then you are part of the evil tribe. Very simple, reason not required.

David, in some usages of "implicit knowledge", there is nothing mystical or magical. There is a sense of implicit useful in cognitive-development research literature (viz., Gelman and Meck 1983, 344). The child is said to have implicit knowledge of the counting principles if she engages in behavior that is systematically governed by those principles, even though she cannot state them. The child has gone far beyond learning first words (roughly months 12 to 18) by the time she is learning to count. By 30 months, the basic linguistic system has become established and is fairly stable (Nelson 1996, 106). Not until around 36 months or beyond does the child have an implicit grasp of the elementary principles of counting: assign one-label-for-one-item, keep stable the order of number labels recited, assign final recited number as the number of items in the counted collection, realize that any sort of items can be counted, and realize that the order in which the items are counted is irrelevant (Gelman and Meck 1983; Butterworth 1999, 109–16). Gelman and Meck liken this implicitness of the counting principles at this stage of cognitive development to the way in which we are able to conform to certain rules of syntax when speaking correctly without being able to state those rules. That much seems right, but there is a further distinction I should make. The child’s implicit counting principles are being learned (and taught) as an integral part of learning to properly count aggregations explicitly, expressly. In contrast, we can (or anyway, my preliterate Choctaw ancestors centuries past could) live out our lives, speaking fine in our mother tongue, following right rules of syntax, yet without being able to state those rules; indeed, without even knowing any of the terminology of syntax. Our learning of tacit rules of syntax is not for the sake of becoming able to follow them explicitly, only tacitly. Another sense of implicit is in more common use. That is the logicomathematical sense. It is in that sense that we say a certain theorem is implicit in a set of axioms; Hertz’ wave equation for propagation of electromagnetic radiation is implicit in Maxwell’s field equations; an inverse-cube central force law is implicit in a spiral orbit; dimension reductions are implicit in Kolmogorov superposition-based neural networks; certain measure relations are implicit in any similarity discerned in perception; or certain measure relations are implicit in a concept class. Cf. Rand (1969, 159–62); Campbell (2002, 294–96, 300–10); Boydstun (1996, 201–2). In addition to using "implicit" in her theory of the genesis of measurements-omitted concepts (which I suppose for the concept existence requires suspension of particular measure-values along all the measure-dimensions possessed by all the kinds of existents there are), Rand used "implicit" in describing a cognitive growth in our infant comprehension from existence to identity to unit.* References Boydstun, Stephen. 1996. Volitional synapses (Part 3). Objectivity 2(4):183–204. Butterworth, Brian. 1999. What Counts: How Every Brain is Hardwired for Math. New York: Free Press. Campbell, Robert L. 2002. Goals, values, and the implicit: Explorations in psychological ontology. Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. 3(2):289–327. Gelman, Rochel, and Elizabeth Meck. 1983. Preschoolers’ counting: Principles before skill. Cognition 13:343–59. Nelson, Katherine. 1996. Language in Cognitive Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rand, Ayn. [1969] 1990. Transcripts from Ayn Rand’s epistemology seminar. Edited by L. Peikoff and H. Binswanger. Appendix to Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Expanded 2nd edition. New York: Meridian.

My point is that what you are talking about isn’t knowledge, it is potential knowledge. You might say that some people have that knowledge and others should get their act together to actually have it, and pursuing philosophical discussions here is one way to gain such knowledge. The central question in this thread is about knowledge (not metaphysics), and specifically about validating knowledge. I’m not objecting to your mode of expression, I’m objecting to what seems to be your idea, that people have “implicit knowledge”, knowledge that is not chosen. As I noted, knowledge of personal experience via senses is automatic (indeed, axiomatic), but conceptual knowledge is not automatic. Applied to abstract concept like “entity” or “existence”, you cannot automatically know these concepts. But you can discover them by applying reason to the axiomatic, such as the sensation of bumping into a door jam. Can discover, potentially, if you choose to. Until you do, you do not have a concept “existence”, you just have sensory knowledge that you heard a word “existence”. Before getting to the proper concept of “existence”, you might mistakenly think that delusions, contradictions and God do not exist. They do, as mental states, not a real things. Mental things exist, a fact that eludes many people. Which is why discussion of bare existence without including discussion of identity is a shortcut to intellectual hell.

So I should have said passive acceptance or recognition? ( I didn't use the word knowledge, so a little confused as to your point)

This answers all of the nonsense stated here accurately. And no, I won't be responding to those who promote it and evil. https://newideal.aynrand.org/hamas-and-the-tyranny-of-need/

“Implicit knowledge” is a form of mysticism, based on a premise of a magical automatic reason machine in the human mind. Only a very small amount of one’s knowledge is automatic, namely if you sense something, you have that concrete perceptual knowledge of an event for instance that you cut yourself or that the phone rang. You do not automatically gain high level conceptual knowledge explaining the causal relationship between the sharp object slicing your skin and the sensation that follows, even though that knowledge is “implicit” in cutting yourself. Knowledge must be chosen, it is not handed to you by a brain homunculus. One of the small set of things that are legitimate automatic knowledge – things that you sense and that you register the fact of sensing – is basic words in your language. All people who speak English know that there is a word pronounced “person” because they have experienced it. Most people do not know that there is a word pronounced “zymurgy” because they have never experienced it. Most people probably know that there exists a word pronounced “existence”, and most people likely have an arbitrary incorrect definition of the word. Having a concept means having the unification of units subsumed under the label “person” or “existence”. One has the potential to explicitly validate the concept of existence through experience, but the potential and the actual are not the same. If you haven’t validated the concept, the concept isn’t validated. There may be some confusion over the proper limits on "implicit" knowledge, which relates to a person supplying actual knowledge that is not explicitly stated. If I tell you that you can use my hammer, I probably don't explicitly say that you have to return it in a short time, than you cannot destroy it, that you cannot hit me with it – these are implicit facts about what I say or would have said. This is what "context" is about. You don't have to explicitly state everything when you are communicating with someone, you don't have to announce your definition of "hammer", and so on. You may assume that your interlocutor shares with you a concept of "existence", or "rights", but as we know, the number of people who correctly grasp the concepts of "rights" is way smaller than the set of people who wield the word.

Over at Astral Codex Ten, whose author is a mental health professional, is a very interesting description of the unintended consequences of a seemingly benign government regulation. Let's first consider the intent:Image by joandcindy, via Wikimedia Commons, license.Sometimes places ban or restrict animals. For example, an apartment building might not allow dogs. Or an airline might charge you money to transport your cat. But the law requires them to allow service animals, for example guide dogs for the blind. A newer law also requires some of these places to allow emotional support animals, ie animals that help people with mental health problems like depression or anxiety. So for example, if you're depressed, but having your dog nearby makes you feel better, then a landlord has to let you keep your dog in the apartment. Or if you're anxious, but petting your cat calms you down, then an airline has to take your cat free of charge. Clinically and scientifically, this is great. Many studies show that pets help people with mental health problems. Depressed people really do benefit from a dog who loves them. Anxious people really do feel calmer when they hold a cute kitten. So far, so good. Who would want to deprive an anxious or depressed person of such an unintrusive and simple aid as having a pet around while they navigate their lives en route to recovery? I will not beat up the author for failing to ask the following question: What is the best way to help people who actually need emotional support animals? He simply goes with the flow on this one: Like practically everyone else these days, he assumes that the government should decide who gets an emotional support animal. Period. In every single circumstance it might come up. The American regulatory state has been omnipresent for so long that very few people can even imagine any other way to tackle a problem like this. For most people, the only tool to solve a problem where the needs and desires of different people conflict is to enact a new government regulation. When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. The hammer here looks reasonable enough: To get your pet into places that might no want it there, all you need is a letter to the effect that you need an emotional support animal from a mental health professional. But who wields the hammer? Or: What sort of unintended consequences follow?But the process runs into the same failure mode as Adderall prescriptions: it combines an insistence on gatekeepers with a total lack of interest over whether they actually gatekeep. The end result is a gatekeeping cargo cult, where you have to go through the (expensive, exhausting) motions of asking someone's permission, without the process really filtering out good from bad applicants. And the end result of that is a disguised class system, where anyone rich and savvy enough to engage with the gatekeeping process gets extra rights, but anyone too poor or naive to access it has to play by the normal, punishingly-restrictive rules. I have no solution to this, I just feel like I incur a little spiritual damage every time I approve somebody's ADHD snake or autism iguana or anorexia pangolin or whatever. [bold added, link omitted]The problem is named in plain sight within a sample letter from a mill that people who want to carry pets around everywhere can use to get a letter:[NAME OF TENANT] is my patient, and has been under my care since [DATE]. I am intimately familiar with his/her history and with the functional limitations imposed by his/her disability. He/She meets the definition of disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Fair Housing Act, and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.The three laws named at the end violate the property rights and right to contract of landlords, employers, and businessmen who may not wish to deal with pets brought onto their property by random members of the general public. That is their first sin, and why they shouldn't be on the books in the first place. A side effect of these laws is that they greatly increase the number of "service animals" people might wish to bring with them to the point that there is a cottage industry of people willing to help people get away with whatever they want -- people with legitimate needs for service animals and people with good reasons not to have pets on their property alike be damned. Now, we are far from a time when such laws can get repealed, but let's indulge the fantasy and consider how we might solve the problem of, say, a business that wants to accommodate customers who really do need a service animal. Make them, if the owner produces a magical scrap of paper isn't the answer. Businesses would be free to employ any of the following means from the below non-exhaustive list:Personal judgement by a proprietor on a case-by-case basis;Consulting a mental health professional of its own choosing whenever the matter comes up;Accepting a certificate from an authority of its own choosing as to the safety and suitability of the animal.Just as there are non-governmental standards bodies for engineers, or for dog breeders, there can be for service animal certification. These private-enterprise solutions work because they protect the ability of the people who use them to make a living in a free market. That is, they align self-interest with quality through the metric of honest profit -- which is surely how, over thousands of years, people have worked out which breeds of dog are best suited to help the blind, and how to train them. In other words, rather than a cottage industry of con men, we'd have a legitimate industry of people helping make (actual) service animals work well for as many people as possible. A private certification system would work, because businesses would be free to work with those who don't, say, foist snakes on their customers (as happens now) -- or even simply refuse to do business with people who bring animals to their place of business. The kind of charlatans who operate now would go out of business, and there would be a proper incentive for psychologists whose patients want a letter to give an honest appraisal or a real referral. As it is now, on top of the widespread violations of rights we have now, observe that some of the people who need these animals can't have them, and some who just want to bring an animal with them everywhere they go get to do this. -- CAVLink to Original

Is that quote not saying that life is the standard? Or are you underscoring the "man" part? I've always taken that emphasis to be qualifying the means to life rather than life as an end. So, survival as the end, with reason as the uniquely human means. Honestly, I can't keep all the terms straight -- life, survival, life qua man, happiness, standard, end, purpose.

I guess I'd agree with everything you said. And that's a good point. Like Boydstun said:

@8g9 – That name is not a mystery, what with google and all. Do you have use for saying that a batch of brownies you just took out of the oven exist? Don't they have to exist for you and your guests to eat them? Isn't it plain to you that both the oven and the pan of brownies exist. The bare conjunction between existents, oven and pan, is not originated by us. Our acknowledgement of the conjunction that is there in the kitchen is from us. Likewise for the bare conjunction of the existents kitchen and sun. Is the idea that this exists and that exists and so forth meaningful to you? Then the existence of any and all existents is meaningful to you. What is the stretch of Hume you have in mind in saying he says we do not perceive existence. Are you getting crossed his (and Nicholas of Autrecourt's) ideas about perception of substance, or perhaps perception of necessary connections between distinct events, rather than existence? He was arguing against concepts in scholasticism in his predecessors and contemporaries. Moderns such as Rand have simply the substances such as oatmeal or entities as disclosed by chemistry, physics, geology, and so forth. And here "existents" does't refer to anything but those things, their interactions, and traits. And as opposed to the old Schoolmen, the basic necessary connection between distinct events we think today worth having is physical connection. And that necessary connection between distinct events sometimes can be manifest in direct sensory perception. (If you are trying to pull out a certain kind of vine growing among a mesh of vines that you want to keep, you can take off your gloves, pull taut the bad vine on its free end, see where the mesh is moving, with your other hand find the taut vine among the mesh (not mainly by vision, but by its tautness), getting hold of it between thumb and a finger in the mesh, hold it taut on into the mesh, and so forth hand over hand, until you arrive at the root of the bad vine and pull it out. All along the way one was feeling the physically necessary connection of vine tautness between distinct grasps of it with one's fingers. Perhaps Hume's concerns simply are not applicable to how we tackle the world today in realist philosophy. Physical, physical, physical, . . . .) In sensory perception of my fingers on the keyboard, I am perceiving those objects and motions as existing. The same can happen in hallucinations. Existence is part of the content of and character of one's sensory perception. That is the primary form of consciousness: an act of perceiving existing things as existing. Other sorts of consciousness, such as hallucinations or dreams, are derivative of that primary sort of consciousness, according to Rand. I agree. Existence is not inherently tied to perception. There is much existence in the history of the universe before the appearance of any life, let alone any sensory perception.

The implicit acceptance or the recognition of the external world or reality comes from the mere physicality. The feeling of tactile response to solidity, bump into the door jam on the way out of the room, oh yeah solid stuff. Knock your coffee over on the counter, oh yeah that gravity so useful when causing my car to work on roads , but maybe a little too much and too always right here on the counter, lol. Even more implicit is your awareness of ‘it’. Even more implicit is that awareness is the most finite thing , the locus from which all of ‘it’ impinges toward or radiates from. Formulating an explicit statement that articulates the distinction and relationship between the most finite self and ‘everything’ that awareness is shown can be discombobulating.

I am trying to figure out how to restate what you don’t know (and therefore are asking about) in terms that I can understand. I presume that you are stuck on validating a claim, and the fact that all knowledge derives from application of reason to perception. I also presume that you understand and accept the hierarchical nature of knowledge, for example you cannot grasp “existence” if you do not grasp “exist”. Even “exist” is far from a first-level concept. It is more productive to focus on lower-level concepts like “perceive”. For example, how do you validate the concept “dog”, and how do you validate the concept “cat”, likewise “table”, “chair”, “animal” and “furniture”? On the assumption that you can do this, then you can set to validating some much more abstract concepts like “entity”, “attribute”, “action”. My initial six examples are all examples of “entity” and not “action” or “attribute”. Eventually, we will get to the point of conceptualizing other intangible abstractions like “delusion”, “deception”, “truth”. How do you validate these concepts? The final product of this process is that you can validate the concept “universe”, which is another name for “existence”. I strongly disagree with the claim that every sane adult has an explicit concept of existence – this is kind of a “true Scotsman” fallacy. You are not insane if you don’t have an actual concept “existence”, you’re just (___ fill in the blank: lazy? lax in your thinking? focused on things other than philosophy?). Most people do not have an explicit concept of existence, they simply know the word (if they are fluent English speakers), but there are thousands of words that people commonly know without knowing the true meaning of the word. If instead you focus on “exist”, most English speakers have some defined concept “exist”, but their definition is usually wrong (typically, only real entities are thought to “exist”). I also reject the notion of “implicit acceptance” as a contradiction in terms – it’s like Peikoff’s parrot squawking sounds that resemble an English sentence, but which is not an instance of “truth”.

This quoted sentence confuses, is incomplete and strays into the Objectivist ethics, of objective good and evil: "Life" is the metaphysical given, not a standard. ["Obectivist ethics holds man's life as the standard of value..."] Just having a pulse is no "standard" for man. How would one objectively gauge one's own, and others', moral performance -- or, e.g. - what form of governance/society is to man's good, (or, topically, who holds the moral high ground in Israel's conflicts) - but for that standard to judge by, (proper) man's life?