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  1. The important questions are, where do you get your abstractions from, and how do you know they are correct? The Christian answer is that you get them from God (sometimes indirectly) and that you know they are correct by means of faith. The Objectivist answer is that you get them by reasoning from reality, and that you have to check them against reality. These are very different. It is one thing to reach, for example, egoism, from facts and reasoning, and it's another to reach it from God and faith. If a Christian's faith causes him to happen to wander into an Objectivist idea, what could make it "stick?" Bible verses? He could wander out of those ideas again just as easily. It's just a question of what seems to be coming from God at any given time. So it becomes completely ungrounded (or grounded, ultimately, only in their faith, only in their feelings). Some Christians can smuggle in bits of reason and reality (they have to, to survive), but enough of that causes God to wither away. The Objectivist perspective would seem to say, "rightfully so!" but that scares many Christians. -- There is also a skeptical pair of answers, that you make up abstractions arbitrarily, and there's no way of ever knowing if they're correct. Christians and skeptics are usually good at finding the holes in each other's theories, but Christians usually evade the holes in their own theories. Skeptics will claim that all theories have holes, including their own, so they claim the holes as proof that their theory is correct. Objectivism is the first philosophy that reality can't poke any holes in, although Aristotle's main ideas came close to that and helped make Objectivism possible. Skeptics say such a philosophy is impossible; Christians may say it's a sin, because it leaves out God, but then they want God to be necessary, so then they say Objectivism is impossible, too. Instead of asking "what could make an Objectivist idea stick in a Christian's mind," you could ask the flip-side, "what could make a Christian drop an Objectivist idea?" Reality can't poke holes in Objectivist ideas even if you hold the Objectivist ideas for the wrong reasons. But if you don't know why an idea is correct, there are still consequences, such as when the idea ends up contradicting another idea. How do you resolve the conflict if you rely on faith instead of facts? Facts may show that one idea is true and the other false, but if you hold ideas based on faith, ideas that might be clearly different in light of the facts end up being on an "equal footing" with each other. With no reference to reality, you could pick either. Usually people decide based on still other ideas, which themselves may not be correct. For example, some theologians say that, if there's a conflict between reality and God, side with God. What would a Christian do with his Objectivist ideas, then?
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  2. 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.
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  3. Correct, Monart. This got to be a longer road than I had in mind at the beginning, but that is giving it full due weight. And I'm going to get to each promised component.
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  4. Brian Greene explicitly aligns with determinism. Kaku is indeed a defender of free will; I mistook him for someone else. Solvreven, I think the easiest way to get an opinion might be to provide your own short summary of Sapolski's view. I'm not familiar with his claims, so I searched on Reddit for a brief overview of his argument. I found one with lots of votes, so I'll extract the essential premise from it: "[O]ur bodies are subconsciously (unintentionally without our own input) acting on a series of electric waves in the brain and chemicals and hormones." (Source) I take the above to mean the following (which I'll write as if it were an argument): a) Everything that happens in my first-person perspective has a "twin" in the real world. Love and affection? Dopamine secretions. Anxiety? Cortisol. And so on. b) Dopamine and cortisol are physical things. c) Physical things act lawfully. If you drop a ball, it falls. If you touch an electric fence, you get electrocuted. d) Therefore, dopamine and cortisol act lawfully. e) Corollary: the mental "twins" of dopamine and cortisol (love and stress) also act lawfully. I will now give you my opinion on this. Physical things act lawfully. If a recording device observes reality for a quintillion years, it will only ever record physical things acting in a perfectly lawful manner. Now, let's put physical things aside for a moment. We still have one more thing to investigate: subjective first-person experience. For clarity, examples of first-person experience include: controlling how fast I'm walking on the street; deciding whether to get McDonald's tomorrow; and so on. Since our recording device can only observe one thing, namely physical objects, it is incapable (by design) to observe first-person subjective experience. It is cut off from some information, it works with incomplete data. However, human beings are privileged. They are not limited to observing their limbs, skin, toenails, organs. They have access to what is hidden from the recording device: subjective first-person experience. In addition to seeing everything that the device sees, they also know what it feels like to love, to jump, to look at a Raphael painting. We can now add the finishing touch: what you see introspectively is perfectly real. You really are controlling how fast you're walking, you really are deciding whether to get McDonald's. But science will deny this, and indeed, must deny this. Why so? Science, as it is today, does not consider introspection to be a form of faithfully perceiving something that exists. On the contrary: according to science, only the so-called outer senses (seeing, smelling, hearing, touching, tasting) record that which exists, while introspection is something that must be stripped away from science, to prevent poisoning the data with subjective elements. So for now, we must take refuge in philosophy. From a philosophical perspective, one possible solution to our problem can be simply stated as follows: the will is something eminently real. Of course, the will's existence cannot be inferred from physical objects. From the recorder's point of view, plants and animals just move in a determinate way, according to electrical and hormonal causes. However, from an animal's point of view, it acts exactly as it wants to act. With these results in hand, we can now look at what Objectivism claims, or rather, what Objectivists claim (since Rand wrote very little on free will). Some Objectivists think that "free will" is a pleonasm: where there's will, there's agency; conversely, where there's agency, there's will. This must be put to the test. Quoting my own example: Immediately, a new possibility shows itself to us, and it can be stated as follows: choice does not entail freedom. It just entails choice, period. Choice is choice, and nothing else. Human beings choose to focus, to live, to eat. This really does happen, it is no illusion. However, all choices can be traced to a sufficient explanation. It's up to philosophy to explain this harmony. I have already suggested compatibilism as a framework worth looking into.
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  5. I was fascinated by those sophomoronic experiments which were prevalent on Youtube about 10 years ago, supposedly discounting the freedom of will. Something involving the wired-up test subject reacting to lights on a screen and pressing a button, thus 'showing' that the relevant part of his brain responded a split second before he made his physical selection--i.e. his brain 'informed' him which button to press. i.e. no free will: His act was "determined". What? As if the brain will not in every instance show activity prior to and during activities. As if the brain is pre-programmed deterministically to "cause" one's actions in any and all encounters outside the lab environment. I recall the young host of the show was thrilled by these superficial findings. He concluded (consistently) that no free will means nothing you do can be held against you legally or morally by others, equally that you do not need to take yourself to task for some failing. A great relief for the amoral. More, the personal choices of undertaking effortful thinking and character building can be dispensed with. Then the individual mind will be under attack. The result, individualism will succumb to collectivism-tribalism-racism (major determining antecedent - "ancestral" - factors used often to claim power through past 'victimhood') and self-esteem and pride must suffer since one also cannot be responsible for one's accomplishments. If no-free-will has arrived in the broader mainstream the world is heading for trouble, I thought. Sure enough - what we are seeing today. One can count on human nature to take the easy options. Free will demands far too much awareness and thinking work. While valuable in their own area, the neuroscientists (I refer to the popular Sam Harris, notably, who also, I gather, consistently eliminated "the mind" together with free will) have something to be responsible for bringing about this age of pronounced determinism/skepticism. (But who would expect proponents of determinism to take "responsibility" for anything they do? They had no other choice. Or was it due to your free will, Sam?).
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  6. And to be more specific I have spent a lifetime becoming the ideal man, I'm not going to hide from lunatics and criminals but have them all brought to justice and insure that this can never happen to another individual in at least the United States again at first and then the entire world. Evil only has power via the sanction one gives it, and I will offer it no sanction and will defeat it and those involved in this mass Evil, not hide from lunatic criminals.
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  7. I think the essential in most religions could be characterized as a faith in a transcendental aspect of reality. A faith in the possibility of overcoming the seeming paradoxes in the gross physical environment of life on earth. The life and death of Christ, the perceptual aspects of a human being and the strive to offer an explanation or meaning for how non material aspects , ie 'love' or 'will' , can or do affect one's 'lived experience'. Why be 'good', what are the results of 'being good' , whence the good ?
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  8. Without reifying the abstracted "self", and acknowledging the current unknowns about the evolutionary or neurological emergence of self-consciousness, one can observe extrospectively the emergence of the self in a child's growth from infancy to adolescence and beyond. And, one can also observe introspectively, the "emergence" or growth of one's own, continually maturing, increasingly distinctive self, as one engages productively with the world in a noble, purposeful way.
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  9. I find reading compositions more exact and facilitating of serious thought than videos. I've not got Robert Sapolsky's Determined: A Life of Science without Free Will (2023). I may get it to add to the following of mine: Free Will – Philosophers and Neuroscientists in Conversation, Maoz and Sinnott-Armstrong, editors (2022) Naturally Free Action by Oisín Deery (2021) Free Agents – How Evolution Gave Us Free Will by Kevin Mitchell (2023) A Metaphysics for Freedom(* & on to next page) by Helen Steward (2012) Laws, Mind, and Free Will by Steven Horst (2011) Deep Control by John Fischer (2013) Causes, Laws, and Free Will – Why Determinism Doesn't Matter by Kadri Vihvelin (2013) Why Free Will Is Real by Christian List (2019) ~Also, to the free will side~ "Volitional Synapses" –Part 1 –Part 2 –Part 3 "Ascent to Volitional Consciousness" –Abstract –Article
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  10. I used "emergent" because I was reponding to Monart who had used "emergent." It seems sensible enough to sometimes use that rather than "caused," as when saying that the fluid state of matter emerged from a collection of certain molecules in a certain situation of temperature and pressure. Saying that "air is caused by the molecules composing it" is weird. And "air and its lack of resistance to shearing stress is caused by the molecules composing air and their collisions with each other" is also a weird way of talking. Shearing stresses are not something applicable to a molecule so far as I know. It is something that emerges at a macro level such as in our bones (hopefully with good resistance to shearing stresses) or in a breath of air. Additionally, causal relations in the story of how I came about are immediate and dynamical in my individual ontogeny in which evolution has provided the engineering-type structures in which such organized developmental processes can proceed. (Not only the background evolutionarily yielded structure is required, of course, but also a continuing sameness [within tolerances] of the environment in which the type of organism can survive.) So for thinking about causation and emergences of processes in the individual organism, it seems most important to be focused on individual development, not preceding evolution, while keeping evolution as important background of the present dynamics arena in which this is causing that and/or this is emerging from that. For the determinism worth having in a debate over free will vs. determinism, the determinism has to be a pre-determinism. To which the question "how far back is such and such in the present predetermined?" is sensible, and answers get more ridiculous the farther back the predeterminism is asserted, due to the circumstance that in the real physical, natural world there are a myriad of independent causal streams intersecting each other, continually resetting "initial" conditions and boundary conditions. All of that applies as well to emergences as it does to causation so far as I can see. Also, in stating Rand's mildly circular definition of the Law of Causality (that is, What is the Law of Causality, in applying identity to action?) using the phrase "caused and determined" in her definition (in "The Metaphysical versus the Man-Made"), one should, I suggest, not take the "determined" to mean necessarily determinism, but a broader concept determinate. More like: "caused and delivered as determinate." That way both the results of the mind-independent course of nature and the results of free will engineering things can be brought under a Law of Causality.
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  11. You will likely continue seeing even more, since this is the default, or "mainstream" position among popular scientists like Michio Kaku, Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Sabine Hossenfelder. Names like these will quickly pop up when you search for "free will" on YouTube. The meaning that Objectivism attaches to free will is quite fine and useful, namely: that you will not perform at your best in any endeavor unless you monitor yourself: "Will this sentence I'm writing get the meaning across without ambiguity?"; "Did I pick an over-complicated solution to a simple problem?" and so on. This type of self-monitoring is what Rand calls "focus," and it's not automatic. Doing it is up to you. Now, here's the thing. The ability to make choices, even the choice to focus or not, is not what most (philosopher) determinists typically deny. They make a much more reasonable claim: that all choices have a sufficient explanation. I will illustrate what I mean with a very general example. Let's say that you make a mistake. Did you do it on purpose? Of course not. Had you known in advance that you were about to make a mistake, you would have acted fast enough to avert the mistake. Now, onto the next question: what caused that mistake to happen? A sufficient reason will quickly come up: "I didn't know something like that could happen!". And what was the reason for that? "I had never encountered such a situation before, either in real life or in my education. But now I have, and will probably make use of the lesson in the future". And what is the reason for that? "Because I don't like problems." This can continue indefinitely. If one's definition of determinism aligns with this example, then it becomes clear that arguments like "I can make choices," or "I can focus" mean absolutely nothing. They do, however, point to the possibility of a compatibilist view (the belief that free will and determinism are mutually compatible). If you haven't done so already, check up Schopenhauer's prize essay, On the Freedom of the Will. It will put any modern arguments for determinism into perspective.
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  12. A comparison of Reality as "Existence Exists" and God as "Being qua Being" may help in understanding how some Christians (and theists in general) would become Objectivsts and how they could recover from their previous Christianity. I estimate that many if not most Objectivists are recovering Christians/theists. Tara Smith and Ben Bayer, of the Ayn Rand Institute, have stated that they, too, are/were recovering Catholics. (I, myself, haven't been a Christian or theist, but was born in a Daoist-Buddhist culture.) Another helpful examination is the esthetic comparison between John Galt and Jesus Christ. (I've read your excerpts of "Existence, We" and am curious but will have to wait until I have access to it. Thanks.)
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  13. If Venezuela's Chavista regime held actual elections, they would probably lose the next one, according to a recent Wall Street Journal profile of Corina Yoris, the 80-year old grandmother whose 10-party coalition carefully vetted her and applied for her to run as their standard-bearer against Nicolás Maduro, the leftist dictator of Venezuela. This they did after their previous candidate, Maria Corina Machado, was blocked from running:Though respondents to a poll by the American company ClearPath Strategies haven't heard of Yoris, the results clearly showed that Venezuelans want change -- reflecting previous polls by other companies. In the past decade, the economy contracted 80% as oil output fell precipitously, and inflation at one point hit 2 million percent. The poll showed that an opposition candidate backed by Machado would win 49% to 27% for Maduro. Even a candidate who doesn't have her support would squeak out victory over Maduro, 35% to 27%, the poll shows. And though Maduro's regime has jailed political activists -- including seven of Machado's campaign workers -- the poll shows that 76% of opposition and undecided voters want a chance to cast a ballot. [bold added]The candidate, unlike the two incoherent old men running for President in the United States, is someone I might support. For one thing, she advocates free markets:Yoris is opposed to socialism and communism; she says that the free market regulates prices, that communism was responsible for the death of millions and that the ideology resulted with Venezuela becoming divided.For another, she is in full possession of her mental faculties, unlike her American counterparts, and uses them more effectively than most people do at half her age:Image by Voice of America, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.Asked what she, as president, would do for Venezuela she recalled the democratic years when the country, though flawed in many ways, appealed to immigrants escaping Latin American dictatorships and hardship in southern Europe. "I want to give Venezuela what Venezuela has given me," she said. "I could study in this country. I could educate my children in this country. I could do all manner of things in this country." While not a politician, Yoris said she has taught classes on logic and such esoteric disciplines as the philosophy of argumentation, where she has delved into the concepts of Chaïm Perelman, a Belgian who was one of the 20th Century's most renowned argumentation theorists, and British philosopher Stephen Toulmin. Two years ago, she was named by civil-society groups to serve on an opposition-led commission, which was responsible for organizing the primary elections last year that Machado won by a wide margin. ... "I'm totally for Madrid, and people laugh a lot about this," said Yoris, who during a recent match tweeted out: "This is a scandal! The referee ends the game and takes a goal away from Real Madrid." And though she fires off messages about blackouts and the work of Albert Camus, she also takes photos of the fog-covered hills, flowers and fruit stands overflowing with Venezuela's bounty. She explained that her desire is to show beauty. "It's a message of joy because we've been submitted to a very ugly dark cloud," she said. "So I try to send out a message of optimism, and I take photographs of my surroundings." [bold added]Oh, and she is also much more benevolent than the two bitter old men we have here. Sadly for Venezuela, the Maduro regime, scared of this kind, elderly lady and the optimistic, sunny view of the world she represents, has, predictably, blocked her election bid, like the cowards that they are. -- CAVLink to Original
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  14. I’m perplexed with the notion that self describes subjective experience a part from any description of mental products or operations of cognition, ie the ontological basis of the ‘first person’ perspective of experience. As per Rand , and Stephen , consciousness is the act of perceiving that which exists. Would an irreducible subjectiveness be non perceivable and render it without identity and therefore non existent?
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  15. tadmjones

    How To Be Happy

    This article offers a different frame of interpretation of what was ‘captured’. It seems a better view of the image is to see at as capturing the interactions between light’s ’energy’ and target particles , the light isn’t ‘seen’ or imaged as exhibiting dual aspects as much as what is depicted in the image is the history of the reactions between particles and light as akin to an interference pattern. https://www.insidescience.org/blog/2015/03/13/no-you-cannot-catch-individual-photon-acting-simultaneously-pure-particle-and-wave
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  16. Thanks. I'll accept your recommendations.
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  17. 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.
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  18. I suppose Hindus are better salesmen then , lol.
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  19. Boydstun

    How To Be Happy

    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
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  20. 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.
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  21. Augustine had it that to embrace God is to turn away from oneself. Rand had it that to suspend one’s critical rationality in any question, including the existence of God, is a sacrifice of one’s mind, which is one’s self, and I agree. I think the standpoint of the author Mr. Brunton is like one of those exercise platforms with a hemisphere as its underside. His standpoint is unstable and a frame of cognitive dissonance. At least he is an independent thinker. Thanks for the notice. That egoism of God on display in the Isaiah passage seems overly concerned with social image. More importantly: Is the kind of love traditionally attributed to God, traditionally called agape, is it, when shorn of a Christian sacrificial cast, is such purely outgoing love egoistic? As a matter of fact, it is (though not in the sense of being for benefit firstly to oneself). It was stolen from man and placed in God, just as in truth the making and control of fire was stolen from man and credited to the gods in the setup for the myth of Prometheus. Nonsacrificial agape is our fundamental love, the human-level experience and instantiation of outward striving, the joy in agency and dance, an essential of life itself in the human. Such agape in oneself is because one is a living self. I'm speaking of mortal life, which is to say, real life.
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  22. (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.
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  23. 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.)
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  24. I am indeed, but linguists aren't word-mavens. Nevertheless since these are not expressions used by My People, I don’t really understand how Other People use them. Which is why it is useful to ask a person who uses one of these expressions what they intended, especially the details. The issue that I was addressing is not just about blogs, which I don’t like in the first place. It is more generally about the withdrawal of Objectivism from public fora, and the shuttering of Objectivist fora. Maybe fear and the increase of viewpoint-intolerance in society does explain it. Perhaps I should be more fearful, but at least so far, I find OO to be a useful venue for reasoned discussion.
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  25. Part 3 – Quine, Objectivism, Resonant Existence – Α’ How did Newton (1687) show that the force that causes unsupported objects to fall here on the surface of the earth is the same force that causes earth to orbit the sun? Not as the schoolman Theodoric of Freiberg (d. c.1310), nor as Descartes (1637), scientifically comprehended the formation of rainbows in the sky. Theirs was physical science contributing to understanding in their problem area. But no, Newton’s effective method for showing expanse of gravitation beyond the earth, his most important problem area, was by bringing geometry and limit-process thought into the service of quantitative representation of force exerted by the sun on its orbiting planets and exact forms of orbits that would result from the various strengths of various candidate central forces specified by their various mathematical forms (Brackenridge 1995 and Harper 2011). Newton’s method on this problem laid the foundation for all subsequent methods of theoretical physics. Newton’s achievement will be the kickoff caught by Kant which, together with Kant’s reception of the old gold of Euclidean geometry, will set in motion a locomotive of thought on to the analytic-synthetic sharp distinction I shall trace and dismantle in §B. Rand refused the conceptions of science and its relation to philosophy put forth by the early moderns, the rationalists and the empiricists. She maintained that science under the rationalists’ picture of reason and its relation of mind to the world had “indiscriminate contents of one’s consciousness as the irreducible primary and absolute, to which reality has to conform” (1961, 28). She understood rationalists as maintaining that “man obtains his knowledge of the world by deducing it exclusively from concepts, which come from inside his head and are not derived from the perception of physical facts” (1961, 30; see Descartes’s fourth Meditation). That is not how Descartes discovered how the rainbow comes about nor how he thought reason should proceed in such an inquiry (Garber 2001, 94–110; Dika 2023). We should notice that Rand did not recommend as remedy for rationalism and its alleged purport for physical science a reintroduction of such things as Aristotle-inspired substantial forms in natural philosophy down from Aquinas and Suarez, against which Descartes had rebelled and had replaced with mechanism (Garber 1992; Garber 2001; Garber and Roux 2013). From the time of Plato and Aristotle through Descartes and Leibniz, philosophy of nature and physical science were not sharply distinguished as we think of them today. Edward Grant concludes that without the high development of natural philosophy attained between 1200 and 1600, the scientific revolution would not have come about (2007, 329). William A. Wallace (1923–2015) argued that Thomist Aristotelianism in logic and natural philosophy was the best frame fitting the natural world and the advance of modern science. He embedded the scientific advance of Theodoric on theory of the rainbow into Aristotle’s four causes, stressing the continuity between Aristotelian science by qualitative natures and Theodoric’s quantitative methods and conferring absolute certainty of the scientific results by their rendition into Aristotelian demonstrative form of science. From Rand’s outlook on the relationship of philosophy and physical science, such would be a smothering and hand-maid casting of science by overblown (and faulty) metaphysics (ITOE 273). On the side of consonance with Wallace, however, Rand’s view, in which the import of metaphysics to physics is modest, would not entail a whole dismissiveness up front of Wallace’s 1992 (Chps. 4–6) intellectual archeology of Galileo’s methodological connections, logical and historical, with the Aristotelian epistemological template for science. Rand’s epistemology and metaphysics, to be sure, are in considerable opposition to that template, by her departures from Aristotle on essence, form, causation, universals, and definition. Galileo’s philosophical framework was not Rand’s more modern one, but he famously freed himself of much encumbrance from Aristotelian natural philosophy and got some new and true science crucial for Newton. I have noted the radical opposition between, on the one hand, conception of science under Rand’s general metaphysics and epistemology and, on the other hand, what she thought to be the rationalist method for science (see also Rand 1970). One difference between Descartes’ actual method from standard scientific method today, with which latter, Rand’s theoretical philosophy is aligned: for Descartes, observations and experiments serve only to illustrate and reinforce implications of scientific theory bound up with natural philosophy, and first-philosophy, which has already settled that the scientific theory is true. An observation at odds with the rationalist scientific theory would be suspected of error by the rationalist inquirer of those days. Results from the laboratory were not tests against which the theory stands or falls. Rand saw the classical modern empiricists as “those who claimed that man obtains his knowledge from experience, which was held to mean: by direct perception of immediate facts, with no recourse to concepts” (1961, 30). She saw them as clinging to reality by abandoning their mind. She thought her own theory of concepts filled the large gaps in the rationalist and empiricist theories of knowledge (1970, 89–90), by her tie of concepts (and reason, I might add) to concrete particulars. I hope some day to uncover whether what is distinctive to her theory of concepts—its cast in terms of magnitude structure among particulars subsumed under a concept—solidifies the tie Rand thought she had attained and its rescue of knowledge, ordinary and scientific, from rationalism and empiricism, classical and modern (Logical Empiricism). Rand maintained that failures of modern philosophy to mount an adequate defense of rational knowledge, including science, against Cartesian and Humean skepticism needed (i) a correct theory of universals and concepts, (ii) a defense of the validity of the deliverances of the senses, and (iii) a validation of inductive inference.[1] The first as provided by Rand can correct rationalist and empiricist failures in adequately accounting for modern scientific knowledge provided someone yet-to-come can develop further the measurement structure in empirical concepts and show how Rand’s theory of concepts in its true distinctiveness can be extended to mathematical knowledge. Knapp 2014 advertised the latter, but failed to deliver. The second was accomplished in Kelley 1986. The third was attempted within Harriman 2010, which advertised, but failed delivery in the same way as Knapp 2014. Both the Harriman book and the Knapp one did not make central, deep connection between the nature of modern science and what is Rand’s truly distinctive aspect of concepts in general: its structuring of concepts by measurement ommisions along concepts’ dimensions capturing concretes and their world-given relations. Still, these books are profitable reads as among contemporary realist casts of modern science and mathematics. These two informative Objectivist books, of course, are written in an era in which science and mathematics have become sharply distinct from philosophy and in which much more science and mathematics has been established than at the time of Theodoric, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton. To those Objectivist works should be joined the Objectivist-neighbor realism of Franklin 2014 and Dougherty 2013 from the Aquinas-Aristotelian framework.[2] In the next installment (§B), we’ll travel the road: Kant, Neo-Kantianism, and Logical Empiricism to Carnap v. Quine on the analytic-synthetic distinction to Peikoff’s tackle of ASD and to my own. (To be continued.) Notes [1] To succeed in accounting for mathematical knowledge, Rand’s theoretical philosophy actually needs a renovation in her general ontology, specifically, a renovation (not possible since Rand is deceased and her philosophy is handily taken as in stasis—identifiably what philosophy she made, just that, as-is) that lands as my own layout of the divisions of Existence (2021). Within my layout, pure mathematics is study of the formalities of situation, some such forms belong to concretes given in perception, and the fundamental contrast of the concrete is not the abstract, but the forms belonging to concretes. [2] Some additional contemporary work on the relations of metaphysics to science and on realism in science: Maudlin 2007; Chakravarttty 2007; Mumford and Tugby 2013; Morganti 2013; Ross, Ladyman, and Kincaid 2013. References Boydstun, S. 2021. Existence, We. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. 21(1):65–104. Brackenridge, J.B. 1995. The Key to Newton’s Dynamics – The Kepler Problem and the Principia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chakravartty, A. 2007. A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism. New York: Cambridge University Press. Descartes, R. 1637. The World and Other Writings, Appendix 2. S. Gaukroger, translator. 1998. New York: Cambridge University Press. Dougherty, J.P. The Nature of Scientific Explanation. Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press. Franklin, J. 2014. An Aristotelian Realist Philosophy of Mathematics – Mathematics as the Science of Quantity and Structure. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Garber, D. 1992. Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——. 2001. Descartes Embodied. New York: Cambridge University Press. Garber, D. and S. Roux, editors, 2013. The Mechanization of Natural Philosophy. Dordrecht: Springer. Grant, E. 2007. A History of Natural Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Harper, W.L. 2011. Isaac Newton’s Scientific Method. New York: Oxford University Press. Harriman, D. 2010. The Logical Leap – Induction in Physics. New York: New American Library. Knapp, R.E. 2014. Mathematics Is about the World. Lexington, KY. Kelley, D. 1986. The Evidence of the Senses. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Maudlin, T. 2007. The Metaphysics within Physics. New York: Oxford University Press. Morganti, M. 2013. Combining Science and Metaphysics – Contemporary Physics, Conceptual Revision and Common Sense. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mumford, S. and M. Tugby, editors, 2013. Metaphysics and Science. New York: Oxford University Press. Newton, I. 1687 (1713, 1725). Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and System of the World. 3rd edition. A. Motte (1729) and F. Cajori (1934), translators. Berkeley: University of California Press. Peikoff, L. 1967. The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy. In Rand 1990. Rand, A. 1961. For the New Intellectual. Title essay. New York: Signet. ——. 1970. Kand versus Sullivan. In Rand 1982. ——. 1982. Philosophy: Who Neds It. New York: Signet. ——. 1990 [1966–67]. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (ITOE). Expanded 2nd edition. New York: Meridian. Ross, D.J., J. Ladyman, and H. Kincaid, editors, 2013. Scientific Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wallace, W.A. 1959. The Scientific Methodology of Theodoric of Freiberg. Fribourg: Fribourg University Press. ——. 1992. Galileo’s Logic of Discovery and Proof. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
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  26. #3, The gentle push, is a technique Peter Keating used in order to get rid of a rival. He even lined up a client for his rival.
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