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Thanks. I'll accept your recommendations.

The local university library has a copy of the Norton 2021 book, so I'll do a reading of it. I'll also read your "Induction on Identity" paper. Thanks.

I suppose Hindus are better salesmen then , lol.

The mind-independent universe is mass-energy, not philosopher-armchair substance. Knowledge of mass-energy and evidence for its amount in the whole universe being conserved back to and including the Initial Singularity is a glorious fruitful quest of science alone. Whether there are extensionless points in spacetime is, in the armchairs of philosophers, as stuck in the mud as all the centuries they wasted over the question of whether matter was atomic or continuous. Science got the answers and subtleties of that and delivered a solid stage for bringing the world into our service. Elementary particle physics has it that leptons, in their particle mode, are extensionless particles, perfect points of mass. The old sayings of philosophers that extension is more fundamental than weight is sensibly (on account of modern science) left back in those moldy old armchairs. Additional Note

Is that to mean Rand and Augustine agree that embracing God is a negation of the self or the mind? both? or are they one and the same? I've long thought that mind and self were the same, but lately I'm perplexed with the notion that self contains the mind as an aspect. That the more fundamental self is consciousness as such. The underlying awareness of the functioning of the mind and its contents are objects to the self.

Do Christians really think that self-interest is immoral? That literally makes no sense whatsoever. They couldn't even live beyond a week thinking something so blatantly irrational/immoral. If they actually "believed" such a irrational thing they would all hold their breath, not eat, not drink water, do absolutely not and just die.

(OK. A sour-cream coffee cake, very fine.) A child can discern the rotary motion of a top. Later she gets conceptual grasp of angular velocity, torque and so forth. An account of this advance in knowledge is tackled in David Harriman's The Logical Leap – Induction in Physics. Does that account solve The Problem of Induction ? How far was it a well-defined problem? Was solution of that problem what Rand had in mind in calling for a validation of induction in FNI? I imagine it was, as she would know of Hume’s making shallow of induction and causation and the hero worship Hume received by Philosophy of Science instructors (approximately Logical Empiricists) in the 1960’s (such as my instructor). Does Harriman’s book contain a solution to that problem? I rather imagine it does; I’d have to look at it freshly and closely as well as at the problem. But with the link to SEP on that problem, you might do yourself well in a close look at Harriman with that problem in view. I rather imagine Harriman had a good hold on that because of his portrayal of our modern sure inference to the existence and character of atoms. I told that story also in my “Induction on Identity.” We ended up in somewhat different years on when that thesis could no longer be at all doubted, rationally speaking. Harriman was a bit more liberal on that than I. Can’t recall just now if Harriman gave William Whewell credit for the process of the “concilliance of inductions” that played out in that case after Whewell’s time. Kant had an answer to Hume’s critique of causality. It would be good to know with exactly whose picture of causality Hume had been arguing against and was that prior picture also wrong from the vista of an Objectivist non-Humean system. Kant pulled the premise-rug out from under Hume by exposing that Hume et al. were empty-handed on what was human experience for which Hume could find no necessary connection from episode to episode. Kant’s own hand on what was human experience such that there were necessary connections between its episodes was fantastical. Classic modern philosophers Locke to Kant on this are getting a good replacement today with all the philosophers of perception, direct realist and representational realist who master and incorporate the pertinent science, neurological and psychological. I’ll be taking care of Kant in the sequel of this paper, with a modern realist replacement, my own, which was aided by Rand’s system. You asked about yet-to-come extension of Rand’s measurement structure for concepts. I did take a first step on that 20 years ago in my paper Universals and Measurement. I don’t know how far I might get back to developing that further in connection with science within my projects in view for however farther I live. (I have no indications on specific future failures of health, but I’m 75, so reasonably, the final grade I give myself in advance is “incomplete.”) Within chapter 7 of Harriman’s book, he discusses “Physics as Inherently Mathematical”. He has nothing original to say; and no mention of the many contemporaries of ours imminently qualified who have contributed to further understanding on that circumstance first really solidly seen in Newton (gravity, not optics), and rocketed by Maxwell; and he seemed to not actually know what it was from Galileo that was actually crucial for Newton’s advance; and he seemed ignorant of the middle man Descartes between Galileo and Newton concerning the law of inertia and, additionally, how it was that rotational motion came to be seen as a form of acceleration in the first place*; and he did nothing by way of showing a way (if there is one) that Rand’s measurement-omission analysis of concepts is usefully related to uses of mathematics in modern physics. There are other aspects in Rand’s epistemological ideas that are shown to be at work in the practice of physics, but these aspects are not unique to Rand. If one is a beginner, this book can introduce some history and techniques of physics. Additional literature on those is vast, and some leads to it are in the endnotes of The Logical Leap. I don’t recall if Harriman discussed abduction teamed with induction in science methods, but that is part of the full picture.

The books by John D. Norton on induction look excellent: The Material Theory of Induction (2021) and The Large-Scale Structure of Inductive Inference* (forthcoming, 2024) look to be illuminating. They would not be expressly hooked to Rand's metaphysics or theory of concepts. Upon studying these Norton books, concord and discord with Rand's theoretical philosophy is something most any participant here could do for themselves. A case for basing induction on Rand's Law of Identity is made in my Induction on Identity in the early 1990's (one way to access the text of the paper is to click on bolded text in the Abstract linked here). (I received a complimentary personal note on that paper from Jude Dougherty who was at that time head of the phi department at the Catholic University of America and was editor of the professional journal The Review of Metaphysics.) For deductive logic, the principle of noncontradiction looms large. It is a powerful tool. (Hilbert used only PNC in making the mathematical proof that was his Ph.D. thesis, for example.) Leibniz, Kant, and others of their eras recognized, as did Rand 1957, that PNC is a normative principle of cognition based on the Law of Identity. In some deductive inferences, we rely directly on identity: "All animals are mortal, you and I are animals, therefore we are mortal." One sense in which one might try to validate induction would be to try to prove that if PNC is securely based on Identity, then so is induction based on identity. I think that the history of trying to link induction very closely to deduction has been widely deemed unsuccessful, and perhaps that route suggested in the previous sentence would fall prey to those criticisms. Another sense in which one might try to "validate" induction would be to try to elicit it's correctness for cognition as a corollary from Rand's general metaphysics (taken for true), in the way that OPAR elicits "corollaries" (not deductive theorems) from the most elementary theses and concepts of Rand's general metaphysics. I approve, notwithstanding the usual charge of circularity one receives for any attempts to discursively defend inference principles, deductive or inductive. Another way to validate induction might be to point to vegetative "induction" in the activities of organic neural networks in bringing about sensory perception. Having validated the deliverances of the senses, one then might argue for goodness of consciously engaging in induction for tracking reality (but, again a circularity (benign?) because the first validation had to enlist some induction). Rand suggested in ITOE that induction was intimate with abstraction in her (or other, really) account of concepts. This would be abstractive induction, which I mentioned even in the Abstract of my "Induction on Identity" linked above. That genre of induction was the topic of Peikoff's paper "Aristotle's 'Intuitive Induction'" (1985 The New Scholasticism 59(2):185–99), which was a bit taken from his Ph.D. dissertation. ‘Intuitive Induction’ and ‘Abstractive Induction’ are two traditional names for the same genre of induction. Harriman’s book is nice in his illustrations from the history of physics on the methods we often call induction. That is the standard and very helpful way in contemporary philosophy of science. Scroll down in the pdf link for Norton to his Table of Contents, Part II. I was thrilled in Harriman’s book when I came to text I recognized as taken from old Harvard case studies by Duane Roller, the volume on electric charge, which I had read in my History of Science course in undergraduate around 1970. Roller had joined our faculty at University of Oklahoma. (I’m sorry, but I need to break off just now. I’ll try later tonight to come back and finish what else I wanted to reply for you, Monart. For the present, my husband is calling me away, hoping that I’ll get our dessert made for this evening’s meal.)