frank harley

Referring to he work of Kahneman and Tversky, emotional responses can easily be understood as heuristics, or a way of avoiding intellectual involvement. It's a short-cut, in other words,. And yes, thought does spend lots of brain-oxygen.

The sentence A=A is either a statement of formal logic devoid of any content OR an assertion that things are just what they seem. My point is that whale-ness is not. Rather, it depends upon a background in biology. In passing, A=A is also used as a rhetorical comment that says, "I see reality as it is, whereas you do not".

Fine-- chickens are genetically pre-rigged, wolves are not. OTH, crows and bees learn, too. The issue is imposing a genetic order on behavior that closely resembles human pecking orders, which aren't natural.

Yes, the linguistic turn says that all knnowledge is essentially a narative told by a language. This does, indeed, contradict Aristotle, who believed thast we have direct access to what is (essen). Russell called this the 'bundle'--definitions simply collect all that can be said of what's being defined. The real turnaround came with Kripke na d his 'causal reference'. More than one Objectivist commentator has noted a similarity with Rand....

Yes, i agree that a good application of godel to deduction would be that every triangle of knowledge hangs by its own fulcrum. No one ever said that induction wasn't 'necessary'. Rather, form Hume onwards, that induction itself cannot explain how science works. To this end, perhaps Quine's ontology is a better description: accepting simple fact can alter an 'ontology'. or offer a different world view.

Yes, axioms would require either completeness (True in all cases) or boundary conditions. Other wise thety're jusyt convenient starting points vulnerable to attack. The intent of R/W's project was to establish a system of math that was axiomatically complete, as did Bourbaki in France, btw. That none was found is, IMHO, no big deal, as I'm a second-principle naturalist anyway, mathematically speaking. But back then the insistence was: complete math = complete formal logic= linguistic completeness= complete philosophical system. Obviously, the break vcame withthe study of the ambiguity itself; said A really doean't mean 'A'. W disagreeed with the applicability of Godel because his Investigations revealed that math was useless as a model for thought (other than that off math!).

Well, yes, Godel wrote that all mathematical axioms need to be supported outside of its own context. In other words, contrary to Russell and Whitehead (Principia), math isn't a 'complete' system. The conceptual link here is the hope that all knowledge in general might be axiomitized like math is; moreover, non-axiomed knowledge is nonsense. Godel simply cut the tree down by destroying the roots. No knowledge is sufficintly complete. No knowledge is sufficiently complete to be an axiom. language, form Wittgenstein onwards, reinforces this issue, ostensibly up to Derrida...

Yes, an elephant! Thanks, Skylab! Google up 'Rand lexicon, and guess what you'll find? Specification of words in any genre of knowledge means that only these meanings are true. This seems to be acceptable in science, somewhat less in the soft sciences of the humanities. In philosophy, however, most of your problems and issues involve meanings themselves. In this sense, Rand's answers are literally encoded within the text of the lexicon itself.

Yes, indeed. For example, if Donna Harraway observes that theories of animal behavior ie alpha wolves) follow designs set by human social organization, you're indeed 'de-stabilizing' the notion of a 'natural' pecking order. Likewise, if she writes that theories of immunology follow the same ontic misstep of anthromorphism, chaos results in the minds of those not-immunized against such radical post modernism...

Well, of course a whale is absolutely a whale! but our knowledhe of whale-ness depends upon a vast storeroom of knowledge as to what might distinguish mammals with fins from fish. To this extent, whale-ness as A+A sounds somewhat like 'An idiot is someone who doesn't know what I learned yeasterday".

I'm defining 'rigidity' by the use of a lexicon. In this sense, Rand's lexicon of objectivism is available online.

I believe that it's safe to say that Carnap took the standard logical-positivist party line regarding metaphysics: it's all nonsense. This more or less corresponds to an orthodox understanding of Wittgenstein's Tractatus--"Those things of which one cannot speak must pass into silence". facts that aren't within a frame of reference (Bild) have no case (Fall) to be made for or against... Wittgenstein's later work, 'Logical Investigations' more or less broke with this. metaphysics become viably and important because the frames of reference depend upon precisely those notions and assumptions which are groundless, epistemologically speaking Godel's incomplerteness seems to justify the project of 'Investigation' in so far as he demonstrated that even simple arithmetic cannot be fully axiomitized. To this end, ZF-C is wrong. there is always an out-of -bounds set wich will de-axiomitize any math. Then again, Rand's whole approach seems to run to the contrary.....

Many of the terms that Stanford describes are creations of those who reject 'postmodernism' as such: For example, 'difference and repetition' are from Deleuze, 'trace' and 'simulacra' from both Derrida and Lacan. Ontic univocity is from the scholastic period, again used by Deleuze... Only Derrida claimed to be post modern. More to the point: obviously, asserting A=A and questioning the epistemic certainty of whay we claim to know are distinct endeavors. In a broader sense, Post-modernism is a basic term which describes the historical re-vitalization of questioning what's what. In other words, asserting that a whale is large fish is no less false by asserting A=A.

Social constructs such as 'tables' cannot possibly be 'absolutes' in so far as their definition depends on use. Gravity is not an 'absoliute' because its value depends both upon mass/energy (rt side of equation of GR) and Ricci curvature x metric tensor (on left side of GR). Plus, they're 16 possible (m,n) 4-d coordinates that are possible, thereby giving ten solutions. Post modernism, for its part, questions the perspectives from which different people see different A's = various 'A's, and why.

The Lorentz coefficient, or 'gamma', when added to the classical Newtonian makes time shrink as acceleration approaches 'C', the speed of light. mass likewise becomes infinite. This is the basic formulation fpr special relativity as cited by Einstein himself. in this sense, yes, time is a reality, or a 'thing'. General relativity puts this equation on a spacetime manifold (with Ricci curvature) and assesses the results with respect to a Riemian 4-tensor: gravity causes light to bend, therefore distorting time. Because our working knowledge of gravity comes from the effect that it has on mass, spacecraft are basically trying to find gravatational waves in places where there is no mass to verify that said waves really do exist. The wave behavior would correspond, btw, to 'Weyl geodesics.

If reality were absolute, then we'd have 'absolute' agreement between rational people. But clearly, this is not the case. The alternative, so to speak, is to label those with whom one disagrees as 'irrational'. This, of course is nothing but name-calling....

Dream Weaver, I was intentionally a bit oblique in my last post. 'Baseball bat' refers to a socuial construct that relies on the knowledge of a game' trees and wood are not--rather, material realities. A complete epistemology in any real sense would afford us the opportunity to distinguish social constructs from material reality, in so far as the former are said to be 'mind dependent, Calling both mind dependencies and independents 'concepts' fogs the issue. I cited lock e because the problem is not particular to rand. I cited Searle's solution of a 'sliding scale' as as solution that admits that no clear distinction exists between material and thought-created onjects.

What's confusing everything is the lexicon issue which somewhat prohibits borrowing. Randin concepts must first be translated into the common philosophical vernacular. A good example of how this is attempted is by Machan and several others at ARI. Machan is content to notice similarities with, say, Kripke's causal theory of language and Quine's rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction, etc....while others try to present Rand as a new Aristotelian--things are pretty much as they appear.to be. But agaijn, words and meanings, particularly what is designated by 'epistemology'.

'Self-interest' easily replaces 'selfish' without the negative edge that, perhaps, Rand intended. More to the point: Spinoza spoke of 'conatus', saying that all people want to have their own way. Democratic govenments, therefore. are agreed-upon collectives in which the individuals decide that more can be done better together (in certain endeavors!) than apart. Nietzsche also spoke of 'Will- to- power', as Deleuze spoke of humans as 'desiring machines'. In this regard, Nietzsche can be looked upon as a precursor to Rand, squeezing people into a belief-system of natural charity just causes more serious problems. For his part, deleuze spoke of individuals constructing their own subjectivity by breaking out of society's mold, in a discernable 'line of flight'. ...

Two points, please: 1) Hume was the one who first derived a strongly-stated 'is / ought' distinction. Hence the famous fork of his name. Volition and imagination belong on one prong, sensory data on the other. 2) Yes, if everything in Randi's epistemology is a 'concept', then there is no way of distinguishing the material reality of a baseball bat from the tree from which it was cut. Searle, for one, discusses social realities on a sliding scale as to what's mind-dependent, and what's not. In passing, Locke clearly had the same problem as Rand. If everything (as he admitted to Berkeley) was ultimately drived from thought, you need a way of distinguishing thugh of material from thought of ideas. As he failed in this respect, Berkeley got the better of him; thought qua thought is obviously the default position.

Personal freedom seems to be an absolute for her; collective interests are not weighed into the balance.

Co-optaation is another word for 'borrowing', or 'synthesizing'. Randism protects itself from these by firewalling itself inside of a lexicon, in which the meaning of words are set, and therefore not open to discussion. Within the firewall, so to speak, truth claims are set as 'axioms', or self-evidents. Indeed, this isn't complicated.

Kant wasn't trying to show how to do metaphysics as much as showing a means by which metaphysics might be done that isn't otherwise utter nonsense. That's why he created 'analytics' as heuristic as to what metaphysics isn't. Likewise, his concern wasn't as much for 'synthetic statements, as these are what's made by inductiong empirical data. Rather, is rthere anything beyond the sensible-- or meta-physics? What really exists isn't necessarily what we percieve. This is the basis for Humean skepticism that Kant adopted in great measure. A=A if asnd only if you more or less accept that sensory data is more or less always reliably correct.

The manifold distinction between Kant and Rand is that Kant, as a (rather famous!) scientist, came to the sad conclusion that Hume's critique of Bacon was more or less correct; "LI have been shaken out of my dogmatic slumber!" What we sense as 'A' is not necessarily 'A',--to make a long story short. Rand hates Kant to the extent that she issists.otherwise. The analytic/synthetic distinction, or lack thereof was, btw, somewhat of a canard. Kant used analytics as a heuristic only to show that statements such as 'god is omnipotent' are not fit for metaphysics. Rather, his quest was to find the possibility of metaphysics in the 'synthetic a priori'. What can be said of human knowledge beyond the sensible... or is it even possible? The neumenal/phenominal distinction religates the former to 'thought without an object,' such as, perhaps, math. All else is 'phenomenal'. To this extent, rand's over-reaction might have been of linguistic origin: English contains no concise word for 'object of thought', such as the Greek 'noite', French 'savoir' vs connaisance', etc. In the third critique, Kant loops back to Hume to place freedom, god, free will, the sublime, and parts of judgment judgmentinto the faculty of the immagination. This being said, i find the notion of hating Kant to be rather silly.

Objectivism is closed to the extent that any system that contains a rigid lexicon is said to be 'closed'. In other words, the basic definitions that Rand gave (as well as many of her explanations) are not open to general questioning.and discussion. Suffice to say that most of what she has lexicon-ized is precisely what 'academic' philosophy questions as a matter of practice. ThisI find somewaht dissapointing in so far as one of my intellectual projects is to reconcile the two.