William O

If it has, then it would probably be part of the "Howard Roark" phase some Objectivist teenagers go through where they're not sure which parts of The Fountainhead are intended to apply to real life and which are just artistic.

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The lines are given to Ellsworth Toohey, speaking to Kiki Holcomb at a party (in Part II, §VI – pages are from first edition):
“Toohey moved through the crowd, and smiled at his friends. But between smiles and sentences, his eyes went back to the man with the orange hair. He looked at the man as he looked occasionally at the pavement from a window on the thirtieth floor, wondering about his own body were it to be hurled down and what would happen when it struck against that pavement. He did not know the man’s name, his profession or his past; he had no need to know; it was not a man to him, but only a force; Toohey never saw men. Perhaps it was the fascination of seeing that force so explicitly personified in a human body.” (279)
“Kiki turned to him when Dominique had gone. 
“‘What’s the matter with both of you, Ellsworth? Why such talk—over nothing at all? People’s faces at first impressions don’t mean a thing.’
“‘That, my dear Kiki’, he answered, his voice soft and distant, as if he were giving an answer, not to her, but to a thought of his own, ‘is one of our greatest common fallacies. There’s nothing as significant as a human face. Nor as eloquent. We can never really know another person, except by our first glance at him. Because, in that glance, we know everything. Even though we’re not always wise enough to unravel the knowledge. Have you ever thought of the style of a soul Kiki?’” (281)
I imagine this last paragraph gets its “first glance” as a takeoff from the Hugo quote I gave in a post above. The “style of a soul” is likely lifted from Nietzsche, though put to a new service in which individual character is more fixed than in Nietzsche. It serves well the continual analogy in Fountainhead between fundamental themes in the architecture of a building and in the individual soul. That parallel is itself a parallel (acknowledged by Rand later in a letter) with Plato’s parallel in Republic between constitution of various sorts of souls and constitutions of various sorts of city-state government.* Indeed, Rand continues on 281–82 to have Toohey muse further about styles of civilization and their having underlying supreme determining conceptions.
Rand gave lines to Toohey, Dominique, and Wynand (and to Dr. Stadler in Atlas) that she agreed with or thought a delicious possible truth and anyway a good timber for her fiction and the philosophical views raised therein. I don’t know if this “first glance” picture of people has been taken to heart by readers and brought into their real-life interactions with people. As William has remarked, that would be a disaster. We do, of course, for safety and for other ends, try to read people in some elementary ways, even though the initial data is sparse.
At least after Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, she spoke often of individuals and of societies as being of “mixed premises” in real life.

Replaced it with a quote from Howard Roark, rather than Ellsworth Toohey:
I've always demanded a certain quality in the people I liked. I've always recognized it at once --- and it's the only quality I respect in men. I chose my friends by that. Now I know what it is. A self-sufficient ego. Nothing else matters.

Here's a quote I came across in the sidebar, attributed to Ayn Rand:
Google indicates that this quote comes from The Fountainhead.
I don't think this should be in the sidebar, because it is patently false - your first glance doesn't tell you everything about a person. Rand probably intended for this fictional ability to play some role in the world of The Fountainhead, but the quote doesn't say that it's from a work of fiction, and it isn't particularly insightful out of context.

Here's a quote I came across in the sidebar, attributed to Ayn Rand:
Google indicates that this quote comes from The Fountainhead.
I don't think this should be in the sidebar, because it is patently false - your first glance doesn't tell you everything about a person. Rand probably intended for this fictional ability to play some role in the world of The Fountainhead, but the quote doesn't say that it's from a work of fiction, and it isn't particularly insightful out of context.

I didn't see a forum where I thought this post fits well. If the moderators want to move it to another forum , that's okay. Anyway, I've been posting to this blog for a while, and believe some would find an interest in a couple recent ones.
LeBron, Trump, Altruism

Marconi #6   This is one of a series of 11 that I wrote while reading a biography of Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of wireless technology and often credited with inventing the radio. The post refers to John Galt.
 
 

One of the greatest regrets of my early life is cutting off ties with a girl I loved, and several of our common friends, because I couldn't have her.
Yes, staying friends would've been painful...and, back then, I thought pain was a hindrance to any kind of accomplishment or success, and therefor to be avoided at all cost...but, as I found out later: pain is a part of life. A necessary, and therefor GOOD part of life. It would've TAUGHT me a lot, about both myself and the nature of the human experience in general.
So just take the pain. Don't betray your values, by removing a good person from your life, because you're scared of a little pain. If you take the pain of a short term, probably illusory heartbreak, you will be rewarded for it with a learning experience you can't access in any other way... and possibly a lifetime of friendship as well.
P.S. You DO want to stay away from any kind of an exploitative relationship. My post assumes that your relationship with her is a straight forward friendship (like mine was), and she is not taking advantage of your feelings in any way.

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I’ve had Scott Ryan’s 2003 book critiquing Rand’s epistemology about four years, though I’ve not gotten to work through it fully. His book displays considerable knowledge of Objectivism and some other philosophy as well. I have the impression that his is one of the two most substantive book-length critiques so far of the Objectivist philosophy itself (the other being Kathleen Touchstone's Then Athena Said). The material quality of his book, paperback, is excellent. The quotation from Intrinsicist is from page 41 of Ryan’s book.
Mr. Ryan died in Feb. 2016 at age 52. He had a degree in mathematics, and late in life, he earned a JD. He was an esteemed participant in a blog of Edward Feser, who is author of a very helpful book Scholastic Metaphysics – A Contemporary Introduction (2014).
Greg Salmieri observes in his 2008 Ph.D. dissertation Aristotle and the Problem of Concepts: "It may be that the dominant non-realist theories of concepts in the history of philosophy all render concepts subjective, but it does not follow from this that all non-realist theories must. There is room for theories that hold that concepts have an objective basis, without having univesals as their proper objects." 
The qualification “proper” in Greg's phrase “proper object” is meant as in Aristotle's speaking of a given sensory modality's proper object. So as an Aristotelian conceives of sound as the proper object (dedicated object, we would say in engineering) of hearing, the Platonist conceives of universals as if they were proper objects of concepts. Greg argues that Aristotle did not think of universals as “proper objects” of concepts. 
In his 1964 Ph.D. dissertation, Leonard Piekoff has a footnote on page 107 in which he cites an old jewel. That jewel is The Theory of Universals by R. I. Aaron (Oxford 1952). In this work, the author treats the varieties of realism, conceptualism, and nominalism across the history of theory of universals. He argues the sound points and bases of each and what each of them of itself leaves out of account. In the end, like Rand, but earlier, Aaron rejects all realism, conceptualism, and nominalism as inadequate. He then sketches what he takes to be the right theory, so far as it goes. I add that last clause because he had not got onto Rand’s idea of measurement-omission analysis of general concepts (and related analysis of similarity relations). This book, and of course Peikoff’s dissertation, is work to which Peikoff would have exposed Rand in those years leading to her publication in ’66-67 of her own theory of universals and concepts.
Aaron titles his sixth chapter “Is There a Real Problem?” He responds to various reasons for thinking there is no such problem. He proposes that it is not wise, given the history of the problem and reasons against there being any problem, to begin with the questions “Are there universals?” or “Is the universal a word?” He begins, rather, with the question “How do we use general words?” which engenders more narrow questions such as “What past experiences are necessary to successful use of general words?” and “What sort of objects and what sort of arrangement of objects in the experienced world enable us to use general words successfully?”

Respectfully, I think this is the wrong methodology. When two authors disagree, the right reaction isn't to decide ahead of time that one of them is right and the other is wrong just because of who they are. Instead, I think we ought to study each author carefully until we have a solid grasp of what each respectively is saying, then compare the two positions to determine which has better evidence and arguments in its favor.

Patrick, I have a hypothesis about how Dr. Binswanger might answer your question.
In HWK (p. 262), he writes:
He then gives an example of a deductive derivation, a deductive proof, an inductive derivation, and an inductive proof. (This happens on p. 262-264.)
Now, let's try to answer your question:
As the above passage makes clear, reduction can be inductive. Reduction is nothing more than walking backwards through the derivation that originally led to the idea. If the derivation was inductive, the reduction or proof will be inductive as well.
 

Respectfully, I think this is the wrong methodology. When two authors disagree, the right reaction isn't to decide ahead of time that one of them is right and the other is wrong just because of who they are. Instead, I think we ought to study each author carefully until we have a solid grasp of what each respectively is saying, then compare the two positions to determine which has better evidence and arguments in its favor.

It seems like you're pointing to an apparent conflict between the following claims:
Full validation only requires reduction and integration. Full validation requires induction. Induction is distinct from both reduction and integration. The solution will require rejecting or modifying one of these three claims somehow (probably the third).

Grames, I for one, and several others I'm sure would like to read your thinking on dualism - etc. The relationship of dualism to rationalism - and - of reductive materialism to empiricism and skepticism, for that matter. Can I prevail upon you to open a thread?

It seems like you're pointing to an apparent conflict between the following claims:
Full validation only requires reduction and integration. Full validation requires induction. Induction is distinct from both reduction and integration. The solution will require rejecting or modifying one of these three claims somehow (probably the third).

Assuming the "Indians" never saw anything on that part of the ocean before, it would make more sense that the ships would have been very noticeable, like a some new unaccounted for island or some inexplicable giant sea bird or other creature, clearly never previously seen in that spot and clearly out of place.  I'd take whatever you read with a huge grain of salt.  Post modernists like to say ridiculous things about perception.
Something noticeable and very out of place does not become invisible simply because it is new to one's conceptual framework.  It's something new for sure... and perhaps one cannot identify or fully understand what they are seeing... but is it still is a something which is seen. 
Whether or not and why they did or did not notice the ships is independent of the fact that they never had seen one before...
new things are not invisible... if that were so humans would be literally blind as newborns and would permanently remain so throughout their lives.

This is going to be an uphill battle, because the person you're debating with is not being honest. I can tell that just from your description of him above: He claimed that he didn't understand the axioms of existence and identity, but the axioms of existence and identity are self evident, so he is not being honest.
You might try mockery. His claiming not to know anything provides plenty of material for that - he has to assume he has knowledge just to type out his posts on his keyboard. You will also need to point out all of the stolen concepts and fallacies of self exclusion that he is doubtlessly committing with every post.
He has free will, so if he doesn't want to look at reality then he won't.

Unexpected and Gruesome Battle of 1250 BC Involved 4,000 Men from Across Northern Europe
As it is, no one knows who these people were who fought on the banks of the Tollense River in northern Germany near the Baltic Sea because there are no written records from the time. But analysis of the remains of the 130 men, most between ages 20 and 30, found so far shows some may have been from hundreds of kilometers away—Poland, Holland, Scandinavia and Southern Europe.
What is fascinating to me, is an amateur archeologist stumbles across a find. As he, soon joined by others, continues to examine the surrounding area, it turns out to be an historic unrecorded battle. Add to that input from various fields of specialization, and we are able to determine the approximate era, ages, geographic locations . . . all of this well after the fact.

If you love a person, doing something that benefits that person also benefits you, and the action is moral as long as the benefits are not outweighed by some harmful side effect.  This is true even if the benefit to the one you love is greater than the benefit to you.
If you are running a business, it can be good business to go an extra mile to help customers.  If you are trying to succeed and advance in a job, it can be good strategy to go an extra mile in doing the job.  Both are true regardless of how much or how little benefit accrues directly to you from a particular instance of extra-miling.

Dr. Salmieri's CV, which is available online, has links to PDFs of a lot of papers he's written, including his dissertation.
http://www.salmieri.org/cv
I didn't know this until just now, so I'm posting it in case anyone else finds it helpful. I haven't read most of the papers linked here.

I suppose the whole entire point of me investigating Objectivism was to find a guide to living. I didn't start looking into it because it was a defense of capitalism or atheism or any such thing, but because at first it seemed like the only group of ideas actually meant for practical use in the real world. Even though I have been aware of it for about three years, I have only begun to understand it recently. In the last three years I have made many mistakes intellectually. For the most part, I never really bothered to deal with Objectivism by means of integrating it with the rest of my knowledge.

My general approach was for the most part 1) Find a conclusion 2) Argue for it until I find a conclusion with better arguments. This has caused a great amount of chaos mentally. At this moment I think that this is because I never understood Objectivism, and therefor was never able to argue for it. I have seen so many people make this mistake and it is very troubling. In the context of the internet, I have seen many people who start out as "Objectivists" who then turn into people who say things like "anything goes as long its is within the non-aggression principle", and then they turn into people who say "ethics is magic just like the state and god".

Fundamentally, the source of this is a particular kind of rationalism, which puts importance on argumentation, not knowledge. That knowledge only exists if it can be expressed well. Now while someone who claims to know something should be held to that standard, it is a reversal of cause and effect to say "I think Objectivism is true, I need to start looking for arguments for it". This can't be done, one needs to first spend the time to actually learn an idea and convince one self of it before they can start worrying about how they should be expressing themselves. They want to express themselves first, and be validated by the fact that no one has any retort, then be comforted by the fact that they have knowledge.

This leads to intellectual decay, as one stops thinking about the world, and keeps himself busy with the nuances of debate. An approach to learning based on argument leads exclusively to the upholding of deductive logic over inductive logic. This is extremely problematic because deductive logic isn't sufficient for all cognitive tasks (neither is inductive logic).

An argument based on induction requires a massive dedication of time and energy. This is illustrated by the fact that a good rationalist argument is about a thousand pages of covering one's ass. No one even bothers to prove an idea in fullness with inductive logic. Ayn Rand didn't, and even Peikoff, who organized and elaborated on her views didn't attempt to organize all the information required to validate her views. This isn't a bad thing either, people can only think for themselves, and do not need to be provided with ever aspect of an argument in order to see if it is true or not.

Rand's epistemology is based primarily on induction based on perception, with deduction playing important roles in certain contexts. What follows from this is a view of consciousness that has all aspects of it explained by how someone chooses to think. Do they context drop? Do they reverse hierarchy? Are they emotionalist? These sorts of questions can explain ultimately every aspect of someone's consciousness, including what they value.

Ayn Rand looks at the function of value in nature (what value does for people). The discover that not only do values exist because people are alive, that people are alive because they have values. This allows her to identify values as something cognitive. They are not primarily emotional (subjective, preferences). This allows us to trace all values back to methods of thinking. Values follow the same rules as concepts, because they are concepts, implicit or explicit, conscious or not. They aren't "preferences" that magically appear from no where, or that are left to be explained by Freud or Skinner. They are concepts that are developed by how one thinks. This means they can be analyzed logically.

This conclusion is only possible based on inductive logic. Nihilists are stuck with a given "preferences" with they are completely unable to explain, and have to say "they are just there, maybe it has something to do with how you were raised".

To sum up my points:

1) Many people believe in knowledge through argument.

2) These people in the end rely to heavily on deductive logic, floating abstractions, and arbitrary "givens".

3) This leads them to become incapable of understanding Objectivists ideas unless they put a huge amount of effort into them (like I have).

4) Many people who start with Objectivism, but do not integrate it, treat it as a floating abstraction, usually end up becoming anarchists, and then nihilists (As I have in the past).

As a side note: The idea that one needs to be able to completely prove (I might mean explain here) an idea to hold it as knowledge is bullshit anyways. For instance, there are many concepts and rule in mathematics that I know, use, and manipulate, that I could not prove. The same is with Objectivism. I don't know everything about it, and if put to the task, I could not prove every point of it, but when I apply its ideas, it works. Maybe I am wrong on this, but if you can apply the idea consistently, over time, and get results, it is knowledge.

Question: Thoughts?

NOW, obviously. Lifespans are the longest ever, people are more civilized, every single life is a zillion times wealthier, leisure time abounds, knowledge only goes up because all past knowledge is instant and free, ice cream only gets more popular so we have like 500 more choices than ever before, and humanity still has its built-in bullshit meter intact.
Now, a lot of people just need to realize it's this good not because it always was.

The author is apparently unaware of Rand, but much of what she has to say is of Randian interest.
https://aeon.co/essays/what-can-aristotle-teach-us-about-the-routes-to-happiness?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=feedburner&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AeonMagazineEssays+(Aeon+Magazine+Essays)
 

STEPHEN - Yes, the Berkeley idea seems the same, but in other terms. And a lot of Objectivist types when thinking about the nature of mathematics come down rather like Berkeley. I disagree with them both on the mathematical situation. We do have physical applications of complex numbers. But we did not have any such applications (i.e., physical structures known to coincide with the structure of complex numbers) at the time complex numbers were first thought up. They were never ungrounded in rationally grasped realities, even before physical application was found for them. And there are other things mathematically sensible that to this day we’ve found no physical instantiation of, and perhaps there is no such instantiation.
Rand wrote against the idea of a system of free-market private protective agencies replacing government in the primary functions of the latter: “Nor can one call it a floating abstraction, since it is devoid of any contact with or reference to reality and cannot be concretized at all, not even roughly or approximately.” Here she seemed to think of floating abstractions as having some weak connection to reality. Although, presumably, that could still leave them of limited use and even detrimental for knowledge.
On the NOT side, it occurs to me that I’ve NOT noticed any Objectivist writings taking Platonic Ideas as floating abstractions. The fact that such Ideas have regular relations to concretes may perhaps be enough to save them from being the sleaze of floating abstractions, even though we do not obtain them by abstraction from concretes perceived by the senses.
In the 1960’s while articulating Objectivism, together with Rand and others, Barbara Branden gave a lecture series called “Principles of Efficient Thinking.” Therein she spoke in a kind of psychological-type way of persons who characteristically think in terms of floating abstractions. She said they don’t see the trees for the forest. There’s “nothing in his head but floating abstractions—that is, abstractions which he’s unable to concretize, which he believes, without any idea of what they would actually mean in reality. / An example of this kind of thinking is a meeting at which a political candidate declares that he stands for a balanced budget, decreased taxes, and increased government spending; and his audience bursts into applause. No one who understood concretely what these abstractions meant could possibly applaud. / A man who holds floating abstractions understands words not in terms of what they denote, but in terms of what they connote. Words connote things to him. They call up pleasant or unpleasant emotions, associations, memories. They suggest; they do not denote. His abstractions float in space, untied to meanings, to facts, to reality.” (Transcribed on p. 178 of the book THE VISION OF AYN RAND.)
In the 1980’s Leonard Peikoff gave a lecture series called “Understanding Objectivism.” I notice there that he thought of Leibniz, and presumably Rationalists more generally as dealing in floating abstractions (which is rather the idea you get of Rand’s view of Rationalism in her “For the New Intellectual” even though she doesn’t use the name ‘floating abstraction’ there so far as I’ve found). Peikoff mentions a type of psychosis “which has some elements of being concrete-bound, and has some elements of floating abstractions (certain schizophrenics will build castles in the air), but still they are crazy, and Leibniz wasn’t.” (Transcribed on p. 265 of the book UNDERSTANDING OBJECTIVISM.)
The quotation on floating abstractions you found in Peikoff’s OPAR is helpful. Thanks. There he seems to be back to thinking about persons not very philosophical in their thinking. (Cf. Rand’s ITOE 75-76; also p. 214 of Harry Binswanger’s HOW WE KNOW.) Gregory Salmieri maintains that floating abstractions are one possible result of not taking the dependency relations of concepts into one’s thinking. He seemed to have in mind the dependency chain of concepts ultimately to “first-level concepts” (presumably elementary concepts of kinds of concretes ordinary in perception). “A floating abstraction is a concept that has become detached in one’s mind from its basis in perception and has therefore lost its meaning (Peikoff 1991, 96).” (p. 71 in CONCEPTS AND THEIR ROLE IN KNOWLEDGE – REFLECTIONS ON OBJECTIVIST EPISTEMOLOGY.)

I find "A is A" helpful as a way of reminding myself to always accept reality, even if it's unpleasant. It helps me get past the feeling of "I wish things weren't this way" and focus on dealing with whatever problem I'm currently having.
Good thread, it should be interesting to see people's responses.

For example,
Sometimes I repeat the phrase, "To Say I love you one must first know how to say the I" to remind myself to be assertive with other people..
How about you?