frank harley

My point was that your (Rand's) formal description as to how concepts are formed says nothing of content. For example, what determines 'sameness' of charactaristic? What disninguishes a 'distinguishing characteristic'? Lastly, in science, one does describe a thing or a group of things by using a particular word-- without referencing quantities that make that thing what it is. For example, we say, 'boson' and 'fermion' with the understanding that the first has a 1 spin and the second a half. In Chemistry, the elements are called names, as well. But what references these are atomic numbers and valences. The only 'omission' of 'particular measurements' is for reasons facilitating linguistic use---hardly a deep 'epistemological' issue.

In times of war, reciprocity is about the best you can hope for. If Churchill bombs German civilians, they retaliate with V1 and V2. of course, Russian atrocities in Germany were revenge/payback. American incendiary use of low-flying B-29's ovr Japan was simply an effort at genocide, pure and simple. Both Japanese massacres in China and treatment of pow's (Bataan death march) gave a thin veneer of justification that 'Japs' were depraved human beings as a 'race'. Of course, subsequent occupation told an entire different story. Likewise, the fact that from 1900-1935 eleven democratic governments had been overrthrown by the military would indicate that the manifold issue was not the national character. The real tragedy is that anyone . in their own history, could succumb to a putch. Our support and sympathyshould therfore be given to the people; responsibility-mongering is merely an excuse to do evil.

Yes, if you please... From the pov of math.or even, say, a visitor from another dimension, there is no intrinsic means of fitting facts or things together to make a generalization, or 'concept', as it were. Moreover, our experience with other cultures (Anthropology) indicates that things are classified and divided in a number of different ways. That being said, philosophy tries to demonstrate the justification for having organized the world of facts and things in a certain way. Here, three words seem to be operative: metaphysics, epistemology, and ontology. * Metaphysics is the final big picture (Wittgenstein's frame of reference) * Epistemology is the justification for such and such an arrangement (coherent vs foundational) * Ontology is the search and argument (polemic) as to which arrangement is more essential, or primarily more important. Several comments on people, please: Kripke famously wrote that words themselves cause meaning, or actively serve the purpose of aggregating. Deleuze rejected Epistemology, using 'agencement', or agency to describe how people organize the world according to will and utility. Quine said that the study of philosophy is should only be about the generation of facts through science. He also remarked as to how the tweaking of several small facts can radically alter a theory. big pictures are inherantly unstable. Cartwright wrote that general laws lie. Only local systems are causally true.

An excellent point. If consciousness (brain-work?) isn't seen as a a part of objective reality then i'm afraid we have a ghost in the machine upstairs! Well, at least Objectivists do! Perhaps, then, there's a history to Rand's Cartesian dualism...then perhaps not...or perhaps she'd being misrepresented? For my part, I've always had a serious objection tot the use of 'consciousness' because of its bad metaphysical connotations. Far better, then. to simply say 'brain work' or 'awake'....

Yeah, i do know a lot of 'literalists' who can't connetct dots! So Rand does have an important point here, but, oth, there are those who see dots where there are none! I do believe that 'relevancy' and 'pertinenence' are linked to science only through the formation of testable hypotheses. In other words, "What I find meaningful, I test". One good example of this is Planck's testing of the 'ultraviolet catastrophe' and hypothesizing his results as...particles of light. Subsequent experiments by Einstein and Compton proved that light does behave (somewhat) like particles, hence, 'photons'. That they behaved in ways not predicted by Newtonian Mechanics gave rise to its own field mechanics (matrix algebra) by Heisenberg, Jordan,and Born, labeled "Quantum' by the last member. But you must understand that this whole affair stated from less than scratch. 'Just a bunch of arrogant 20-year olds finding meaning in the results from a cheep black box , while their elders were saying. bfd'...

One of the key tests for language is to rig up an experiment to see if, say, a fire ant fron one mound can understand the instructions given in another. This has been done many times; the first assay was with bees, in order to test EO Wilson's 'instinctivity'. If animals are born with a set of instructions, these are good for anywhere within the species. But they aren't. By whatever manner bees, ants, etc communicate, it's learned within the group, Finally, lot's of what assumed was animal silence was communication in a language that's outside our human sensory range. The best two examples of this are whales and elephants.

Actually, Kant made no such assumption that everyone else would follow The categorical. Rather it's out of a sense of duty that frees our mind from both our own selfish emotions and an expectation of reciprocity from others. the best we can hope is to set a good example.

Harrison, Please feel free to use my previous comments as a template. But please be 'warned' that his 1920-ish stuff, that was the basis of my comments, is not all there is to Keynes. Lots of his other ideas I find disagreeable,

if I'm evading reality, then you're in complerte denial.

Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan. The American Revolution against the British. The complete failure of Reconstruction in the south after the Civil War. South/Central American and Mexican resisrance to the Spanish, Spanish resistance to the napoleonic french (guerillas).....etc

You need to rethink the importance of 'values' in terms of their particular seriousnesses. For example, is she an outright racist (unacceptable0, or is it simply a matter of political pov? Frequently, people really do share the same values, but envisige contrasting political solutions.

As you wrote that you knew enough to accept Austrian over Keynes, my last response was to clarify common misunderstandings as to what keynesianism is.....

We form concepts by aggregating individual things and facts together. The scientific motive for aggregation is called 'cause', which gives the sort of meaning that scientists think is important. Concepts, then, are aggregates that we think are important. So, of course, fundamentality is contextual because to say something is meaningful --hence, conceptual--means that we feel that this particular way of aggregating is 'fundamental' relative to other possible ways. Again--to belabor the point a bit-- a tribesman on a pacific island classifies all things that swim in the sea in meaningful, fundamental ways that fit the culture's needs. Concepts, based upon differences deemed contextually imporant are thereby formed. Or fundamentally' important, if you please. same thing. We now know that other animals create concepts because they have language--which was not generally known during Rand's life. IMHO, to edit out her statements that were based on factualities that are now known to be false would be of great service to her memory. During her life, Rand talked and wrote with intelligence, passion, verve, and vigor. She was indeed a master at conceptualizing facts. which is to say endowing them with a remarkable sense of meaning. In the citation that you sent, her position was clearly staked with respect to the old assumption that only humans possessed language. Knowing what we know today, she'd not have written this.

Austrian school theory relied on a 'business cycle' that was posited by a Frenchman named Bachlier in 1906. I say 'posited', btw, because his work was not based upon data. As the name implies, cycle means 'bounce back' when performance, measured in prices,are low. Keynes attacked the cyclic model from two perspectives: empirical and... mathematical/logical. First. many slumps last, empirically speaking, far beyond that which would correspond to the low point(s) of a cyclic curve. Next, the cycle itself is liiogical because if the downward point(s) of the cycle correspond to a level of assets which would not cover liabilities, then the firm is broke--hence, no possibility of an upswing. Keynes' point is that a macro-national economy can either stay 'broke' or prime the pump with more money, to repay when productivity finally rises. But again, staying broke (austerity) does not work. So defending Austrain school would involve explaining how the cycle would upsewing by itself. OTH, a defense of Keynes isn't necessary. as he's simply saying that sdeficit spending is the least-bad of alternatives. In good times, btw, Keynes was for cutting spending & running a surplus, ostensibly to save for the inevitable rainy day.

Beyond her chatty sarcasm, her main point is that the web offers Objectivismm the opportunity to openly debate and expound upon its philosophy. This is critical in so far that it's not generally taught in colleges.

Hume's point was that 'pure' induction cannot give you a true statement. In other words, an accumulation of facts or instances doesn't naturally offer an explanation. We need both background information and imagination in order to build a theory. In passing, lot's of what passes as background is necessity-driven milieu. Kant went on to explain (Crit#3) that because our imagination is a natural faculty, we will never be short of generalized explanations that we hope to universalize, the real isuue, then, is how to find the best imagination-generated hypotheses. Also, since imagination is constant, the real issue is the facts themselves, or 'the understanding' (verstehen), Therefore, dare tio know. Kant's rejection of analytic-anything was expanded upon by Quine: all analytics are nothing but hidden synthetics from which language has created a short-cut statement.

i believe that to speak of fundamental concepts is a bit redundant, and here's why: We form concepts as generalizations from individual entities. For example, we might define a discreet set of 'water-dwelling animals' as 'hsif', those with gills are 'fish' and those withot are 'mammal'. If our intenet were to construct a phylogeny based upon the aquisition of selective-adaptive traits, 'fihs' would be irrelevant, while fish and mammal impostant. Suppose, OTH, we were simply on an island looking for a meal. 'Hsif' would be relevantly subclassified as to possibility of capture, resistance, and aquisition of protein and carbs per energy spent. What, then is conceptually 'fundamental woud depend upon situation. Or rather, simoly say that our minds would conceptualize 'hsif' because it's meaningful, and reject Linneus because his classification was not. Moreover, our island-dwelling children would learn a hsif-system, and not the Linnean. In short, the essentail value to both 'concept' and fundamental dwells in the sense of meaning: what's classified and how depends upon need and utility. The scholastics said as much when they conceptualized supernatural entities as neitherthing nor word. It simply corresponded to their world view, or fram of reference,,as it were. Of course, the huge collection of ethnographic materaial that deals in nomenclature suppots this view.....

Even if i were to agree with 'tranhumanism' (which would require my reading of the material) i stll would say that 'evolution' begs the question of meaning. For example, we already do control natural selection by the social means of racial prejudice and assessment of others by skin color. So are the authors nothing but total airheads to think that this 'phase' is somewhere in the future? Intended change in this respect could either be the willfull rejection of racial discrimination or its willfull augmentation as a hitleresque policy, ostensibly giving opposite outcomes.

If you bother to look back thru the thread, in particular at Illya's last post, you'll see that we're not talking about biological evolution. Hence the scare quotes. He's the one saying that all innovations that hasten automation are 'evolutionary' In so many words, i'm saying that that's nonsense. For the sake of argument, however, I would concede that 'evolutionary' might be applied (as pretentiously awkward as it might be) if and only if the automation was shown to serve the needs of a large majority. It moreover is, indeed, 'collectivist' in that the collective would not willfully endanger the majority of its members for the sake of one individual. Thisis not to infer that automation, by causing jobs to dissappear in the automated field, is necessarily bad. Rather, in times and places of labor shortage, it provides the opportunity for labor to move in to more needy sectors,

This, of couse, is not to say that there are no 'fundamentals' within science....

Yes, really.I can offer examples to support my point: by all evidence, German resistance to the allies increased as a result of the bombinmg campaign. Surely, that was true, too of the vietnamese against the Americans. Al Quiada and Taliban recruit against American terror,as does hamas against the occupation by the zionist entity, Shermans' March through Grorgia is commonly said to have sparked the resistance against reconstruction, and assisted in bringing about Jim Crow.reconstruction. Likewise, british terror tactic iin the southern campaign drew neutrals against the tories and over to the continental side. In Crete, the Eleventh Day lasted for three years, until german surrender in May of 45.

There is no Kantian economics of which I'm aware. That the Austrian School in not empirically testable is not a polemical point that I woud need to argue. Rather, it's an assertion that they voluntarily offer. My only observation is that examples that are not directed by empirical research can never be considered 'concrete'.

Branden is wrong in confusing a desire for a pastoral life with cause and effect analysis. Or rather, he's using a cheep dime-store psychologism to infer that those who do cost-benefit are closet pastoralists after all. As far as conversations on planes go, he's using anecdote to replace thought. So middle brow amerikan at that. For change to be 'evolutionary', it must prove to be beneficial to the majority of it's members. It's therefore incumbent on said members to actively qiestion automation's true benefits. Failure to do so is the real laziness.

My original answer was that real concreteness comes from doing science. because austrian school 'economics' is not written tio conform to hypotheses and empirical testing, it cannot ever offer concrete results.

Yes, the answer is pretty clear. People who don't know any science can pretend that tey do by using pretentious words such as 'fundamental'. Other wise, in terms of sctually doing science, the mosr interesting biological study is to understand how each species behaves within its own niche.