Rockefeller

I've recently listened to Dr. Peikoff's course, "Objectivism Through Induction," and took some notes with respect to what he said concerning concept formation and induction.


Disc 10, Track 4, 01:00

Question: "I don't understand the difference between concept formation and induction."

Peikoff: "Well now those are radically different. I mean, not opposites, but a concept, think of as a single word, like "table," "chair," "man," "star,"run," "hit," "red," "green," etc. Concept is like a file-folder which you designate a certain category, all the things which have this shape, for instance, table, or this structure, man, and then you put in that file-folder every piece of information you gather by studying a few men, and you say, 'since it belongs to this category, what I have learned about the few men, that they are mortal, for instance, applies to all the rest in this category.' So induction is, let's say, is the cash value of concept formation. Concept formation, you form the single word which is the file-folder. Induction, you formulate a proposition, a sentence, a statement, all so-n-so is so-n-so, which consists of applying to every member in the category the things that you learned by studying some of them."

And: '"Man" is a concept. "All men are mortal" is four concepts united into a proposition which is reached by induction.'

Question: "Is induction used in concept formation?"

Peikoff: "No. That's a great question. Induction is not used in the forming of a concept. The forming of a concept just...for instance, here's one table and another table and another, and I'm going to set these aside as against "chair," and I'm going to use this as a category from now on, and call it "table." There's no generalization in that. There's simply the setting aside of some concretes and opening a file. But now, the first time you start studying tables and you find, for instance, they're made of wood, assuming that was true, and you do that by studying ten of them and then you say, 'okay, that goes into the file now, all tables are wooden.' That is an induction."

Edit: I'm uncertain as to what's proper, with respect to copyrights, when quoting such material. If posting such a quote is inappropriate, please let me know and delete this post. I could simply post a statement, in my own words, of the gist of Dr. Peikoff's response, but I thought the quote, if appropriate, given that it's brief, would be clear and helpful.

Induction in essence "makes new knowledge". Integrating referents into a new concept is in essence induction. Integrating two concepts into a new generalization is induction.

Consider "fire burns paper". An inductive generalization (All S is P) makes a new integration between two existing concepts. Naming the fire and naming the paper are essentially deductive when fire and paper are already known concepts. No actual deduction appears here, only the essence of deduction. The essence of deduction is "making explicit what is already known implicitly." What is new is knowing what fire does to paper, 'burns' is the causal connection newly induced to apply to all paper and all fire.

That's not what I said. Ninth Doctor is upset that Weigel isn't treating Objectivism as a collection of all the voices of everyone who is claiming to be an Objectivist.

I pointed out that that's not what Objectivism is. Whether ARIs position is the right one is debatable, but whether two contradicting positions should both be treated as "the Objectivist position" is not. It has to be one or the other.

If Ninth Doctor had said that ARI is wrong, and the correct Objectivist position is to be opposed to so called
interventionist wars, then at least he'd be trying to assert and defend his position. Instead, he wants it to be mentioned whenever Ayn Rand's philosophy is mentioned, just because he says he's an Objectivist.

Read the article. That's not his reasoning. He presents a substantive argument as to why ARIs position is the correct application of Objectivism. Nowhere does he suggest that whatever ARI says is automatically Objectivism.

I want to add that prisons, along with probably mental hospitals, are the gulags of the West; the concentration camps of the Welfare State.

Probably a good percentage of inmates are not there for violating contract or other's rights; and as some experiments have shown it is simply too early to determine what percentage if any is getting better at psychiatric hospitals. Yet these Welfare State institutions mantain people against their will in a living hell of lack of privacy costing more money that could feed homeless elders, or lower taxes.

In a Capitalist Society, there would be so manyu different governments competing that criminal activity would not be very useful. IF you don't pay at a restaurant or bar and end up in the black list, you'll end up banned from all bars in town except the shadiest one. And as such, there will probably exist one or more shady country offering services to outlaws who'd violate each other's rights and probably learn quick not to mess with the other nations / clubs.

The Solution to Crime is to have enough countries so that criminals can be expelled, not concentrated, and deal among themselves. If Civilization is defined as creating more privacy between individuals, freeing man from men, then the more separated yet controlled the zones are the better. Like a system of dykes, ships (commerce) flow, but the water (masses) are fully controlled.

thread thus far is full of lol and win, let me contribute.

Hipsters might have to actually start reading all the books they've claimed to of read.

"It is a conspiracy without leader or direction, and the random little thugs of the moment who cash in on the agony of one land or another are chance scum riding the torrent from the broken dam of the sewer of centuries [...]

"It is a conspiracy of all those [...] who seek to cut just one small corner of reality and are drawn, by feeling, to all the others who are busy cutting other corners [...]"

(Atlas Shrugged, page 958)

Hmmm. I don't know about the rest of you, but as an individual I am most certainly not an "abstraction."

Not in the Christian/egalitarian sense. A child represents the culmination of a lot of productive effort, can symbolize your value of human nature, etc.. You can also look ahead to all the values of parenthood. Some people think babies are cute, the captured essence of new life or something like that.

Just because a fetus, as a potential person, doesn't have rights, that doesn't mean a fetus or small child cannot be of great value to its parents by virtue of that same potential. It just isn't exactly equivalent to the person it will grow up to be.

A lot of social workers choose their profession out of a desire to be altruistic. That doesn't make the profession immoral (you can indeed be a social worker for selfish reasons), but it does make those who practice it out of altruism immoral (to the extent their motives are indeed altruistic). There's no way around that fact, altruism isn't moral.

You should try to get to the bottom of what her driving motivation is for pursuing this career. Obviously, she does buy into the false notion that so called non-selfish professions are better than the professions which are unmistakably selfish (like being a businessman), but that doesn't mean she is driven by that notion.

Most people who consider professions like social worker and doctor "better" (because they don't have a strong enough philosophical foundation to explicitly reject the Ethics of the altruist driven culture around them) do nonetheless hold on to their individuality, and are in fact quite selfish. That is how professed altruists become rich and successful, even though their choice of career was supposedly made out of a desire to help others: they may profess that, but in reality they are self centered and career oriented.

So you should figure out (if you haven't already), whether your girlfriend values herself, her career, her happiness, etc., from her actions and past decisions rather than her words. If she does, then she most certainly isn't an altruist, she is a good person who is wrong about her theoretical moral beliefs. If she doesn't, if she actually puts others ahead of those things, in practice, then she is on a path to self destruction, and you should remove yourself from her way.

Right now, it does not work for anybody.The previous version allowed rating complete topics 1-5. This new version also allows voting for posts, but some set-up needs to be done first.
I forgot about it... one has to set up quotas that allow users a certain number of votes a day... something along those lines.
Will check what other mods think the configuration should be, and get in in place.
Thanks for the reminder.

The way the system works is that each vote counts toward a member's "reputation". On the side of the voter, each voter has a budget: you can only give out a certain amount of reputation each 24 hours. I'm going to try setting it up where all people in the "Regulars" user group earns the ability to give 2 votes (i.e. dole out 2 reputation points) in every 24 hours. Let's see how that goes.

If anyone has suggestions on how best we can use the system, I'd be happy to hear them. (To understand more about how reputations work on this software, visit IPB's forum and check out this topic.)