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Posts posted by Boydstun
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Part 1 – Leonard Peikoff*
By truths I mean, as Ayn Rand meant, “recognitions of facts of reality” which is to say “identifications of existents” (ITOE 48). Without living, fallible minds, there are no truths in this sense of the word. The world would have facts, but until some are recognized, no truth would have come into the world.
Truth is sometimes used to mean what here is meant by fact. That is not the way I mean truth here nor the way Rand or Peikoff used it.
Leonard Peikoff’s 1967 essay “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy” (ASD) set out the basics of the contrasting sorts of truths—analytic and synthetic—the way the distinction had been cast up to middle of the 20th century. Analytic truths had been lately taken as true in virtue of their meaning. Rationality and animality would be included in the meaning of the concept man. So the truth “man is a rational animal” would be an analytic truth, a truth made so by definition, which under contemporary nominalism had become a matter of social convention, pretty arbitrary, free of much constraint by facts of the world. Necessity in such a truth would be from the say-so in our definitional prescription.[1]
That choice of convention, I notice, satisfies a necessity of self-consistent, coherent thinking and talking. Such necessity lies among the class of necessities for a purpose, necessities for an end. I call this class necessity-for.
The truth “man has only two eyes” would not be analytic, the story went, because the feature of having only two eyes is not part of the meaning of the concept man. Such a truth is known as synthetic. Unlike analytic truths, which are necessarily true, a synthetic truth is said to be only contingently true.
Peikoff argued this to be a false dichotomy among truths. The historical root of this widespread falsehood in philosophy, Peikoff maintained, is the Platonic theory that only essential characteristics of a thing are part of the form of a thing and its definition. The inessential, which is from the material aspects of a thing, not its formal aspects, are not part of a thing’s definition.
I concur in Peikoff’s discernment that the false dichotomy in truths between those analytic and those synthetic has a distant ancestor in a false dichotomy in Plato. In Cratylus Plato has Socrates uphold the principle that contrary attributes never belong to a fully real thing simultaneously and the principle that “things have some fixed being or essence of their own. They are not in relation to us and are not made to fluctuate by how they appear to us. They are by themselves, in relation to their own being or essence, which is theirs by nature” (386d–e; see also Euthyphro 6d–e; Phaedo 65d, 75c–d, 78d, 100c; Republic 475e–76d, 479–80). Each thing has attributes such as shape, sound, or color; but in addition, each thing has a being or essence. Indeed, “color or sound each have a being or essence, just like every other thing that we say ‘is’” (Cra. 423d–e). Plato maintained moreover that what each thing essentially is, such as Man, Good, Size, or Strength is not discovered by sight or hearing, but by reason when it is most free from bodily, sensory distractions (Phd. 65, 74–75, 78c–79d, 83, 86, 96–105; Theaetetus 184b–87a).
The character of each thing that is always the same is a kind—call it a Form—that is “a being itself by itself” (Parmenides 135a–c). Sensory perceptions are as shadows and reflections of these intelligible forms, these intrinsic natures, these essences and being of things (Rep. 509d–e). Plato had no notion of ideas or concepts encompassing both visible forms (such as shapes, sounds, or colors) and intelligible forms.[2] Modern notions of concepts or ideas are, in Plato’s frame, only our thoughts grasping intelligible forms.[3]
Peikoff acknowledged, correctly, that Aristotle breathed new life into this Platonic error by bringing essences down from some purely intellectual nether-realm to the material world open to regular senses.[4] Aristotle is the heavy-weight instigator of the necessary-contingent divide and the essence-accident divide. These doctrines constrained Scholastic theories of universals, concepts, and predication, and facilitated the modern A-S divide.
Peikoff observed that Rand’s conception of the concept of a thing, and her conception of the essential in the concept, rules out an A-S partition of the kinds of conceptual truth in our possession. A thing is all the things that it is (ASD 98). I might add that Rand took a thing’s external relationships as part of what a thing is, a blunt contrast with Plato (ITOE 39). And in Rand’s epistemology, we can have a conception of all that a thing is, including all its external relationships and all its potentials, even though we know our present concept of the thing contains only a portion of that totality of its identity.
In Rand’s conception of right concepts, they are “classifications of observed existents according to their relationships to other observed existents” (ITOE 47).[5] Furthermore: “Concepts stand for specific kinds of existents, including all the characteristics of these existents, observed and not-yet-observed, known and unknown” (ITOE 65). Objectivist epistemology does not regard the essential and the non-essential characteristics of existents as simply given, as if in an intellectual intuition. Rather, that distinction is based on our context of knowledge of the facts of existents (ITOE 52; ASD 107, 101–103).
“To designate a certain characteristic as ‘essential’ or ‘defining’ is to select, from the total content of the concept, the characteristic that best condenses and differentiates that content in a specific cognitive context. Such a selection [in Objectivist epistemology] presupposes the relationship between the concept and its units [its member elements in reality regarded as substitutable for each other under suspension of their particular measure-values of their shared characteristics]: it presupposes that the concept is an integration of units, and that its content consists of its units, including all their characteristics.” (ASD 103)
Nelson Goodman had written in a 1953 footnote: “Perhaps I should explain for the sake of some unusually sheltered reader that the notion of a necessary connection of ideas, or of an absolutely analytic statement, is no longer sacrosanct. Some, like Quine and White, have forthrightly attacked the notion; others, like myself, have simply discarded it; and still others have begun to feel acutely uncomfortable about it” (60).
I’ll examine the cases mounted against the A-S distinction by White and by Quine, and compare them to the Objectivist case, in the next two installments.[6]
(To be continued.)
Notes
[1] Brand Blanshard’s book Reason and Analysis appeared in 1962. It was reviewed favorably by Nathaniel Branden the following year. Branden understood that Blanshard was some sort of absolute idealist, but the book offered access to contemporary positivist and analytic philosophy (including the A-S distinction), and it offered criticisms of them, which Objectivists might join. Against say-so free of constraints from conditions of the world being the source of necessity in necessary truths, see Rasmussen 1982. On the nature and need of understanding for truth, see Haugeland 1998.
[2] Cf. Metaphysics 987b1–13; Notomi 2005, 193–201.
[3] See further, Kraut 1992, 7–12; White 1992.
[4] ASD 95. See also Peikoff 1972, 191, on Aristotle’s influential division of the necessary and the contingent. On medieval and early modern roots of the false A-S dichotomy, see Peikoff 1964, 15–16, 45–59.
[5] Concept empiricism is defended and a version of it, thickly informed by pertinent modern science, is formulated in Prinz 2002.
[6] White 1952 appeared originally in Hook 1950. Sidney Hook would a few years later become Peikoff’s dissertation advisor. Recent defense of the A-S distinction against the attack by Quine is Russell 2008. Additional contemporary debate on the issue is Juhl and Loomis 2010. I’ll not undertake assimilation of these in the present study.
References
Aristotle B.C.E. 348–322. Metaphysics. C.D.C. Reeve, translator. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Branden, N. 1963. Review of Brand Blanshard’s Reason and Analysis. The Objectivist Newsletter 2(2):7–8.
Goodman, N. 1953. The New Riddle of Induction. In Fact, Fiction, and Forecast. 4th edition. 1983. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Haugeland, J. 1998. Truth and Rule-Following. In Having Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Hook, S., editor, 1950. John Dewey: Philosopher of Science and Freedom. New York: Dial Press.
Juhl, C., and E. Loomis. 2010. Analyticity. New York: Routledge.
Kraut, R. 1992. The Cambridge Companion to Plato. Cambridge.
Linsky, L., editor, 1952. Semantics and the Philosophy of Language. Illinois.
Notomi, N. 2005. Plato’s Metaphysics and Dialectic. In A Companion to Ancient Philosophy. M. L. Gill and P. Pellegrin, editors. Wiley-Blackwell.
Peikoff, L. 1964. The Status of the Law of Contradiction in Classical Logical Ontologism. Ph.D. ProQuest.
——. 1967. The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy. In Rand 1990.
——. 1972. Founders of Western Philosophy: Thales to Hume. Lectures by Leonard Peikoff. M. Berliner, editor. 2023. Santa Ana, CA: Ayn Rand Institute Press.
Plato c. 428–348 B.C. Plato – Complete Works. J. M. Cooper, editor. 1997. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Prinz J., 2002. Furnishing the Mind – Concepts and Their Perceptual Basis. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Rand, A. 1990 [1966–67]. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Expanded 2nd edition. New York: Meridian.
Rasmussen, D. 1982. Necessary Truth, the Game Analogy, and the Meaning-Is-Use Thesis. The Thomist 46(3):423–40.
Russell, G. 2008. Truth in Virtue of Meaning. New York: Oxford University Press.
White, M. G. 1952 [1950]. The Analytic and the Synthetic: An Untenable Dualism. In Linsky 1952. Included also in White 2004. http://www.thatmarcusfamily.org/.../White%20-%20Analytic...
——. 2004. From a Philosophical Point of View. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
White, N. 1992. Plato’s Metaphysical Epistemology. In Kraut 1992.
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In this study, I firstly examine the Objectivist account of how Rand’s theory of concepts dissolves the customary distinction of truths into ones true in virtue of meaning and ones true in virtue of experience. Although that particular character of concepts in Rand’s mold of them does dissolve that wrong divide of truths—the analytic-synthetic divide—I advance an additional character of her theory, one more peculiar to hers, that also dissolves the A-S division, at least when her theory is set in my ontology. In that residence, concretes as in the world, as in fact, possess form in their situation, passage, and character, I show that the two sorts of necessity traditionally attached respectively to analytic truths and synthetic truths are rightly dissolved and replaced by a single necessity attending a single compounded formula of truth familiar from Rand. This necessity is not a compound of the two necessities, logical and physical, characterized by supporters of the A-S division. It is, rather, a compound of necessity-for of life and of living mind in grasping fact, the realm of necessity-that. I exhibit this single necessity attending truths in logic, truths in mathematics, and truths of concretes tooled by logical and mathematical truths.
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"The Church says 'no' to IVF due to the massive destruction of embryonic life, the assault on the meaning of the conjugal act and the treatment of the child as a product not a gift."* Also, the church of Rome has long been opposed to sexual joy for its own sake, to capitalism, and to scientific and technological advances shrinking human helplessness against nature (which undercuts some of the jobs of the witch doctors.)
Alabama Supreme Court puts the secular sword behind the preposterous RC mystical view: frozen embryos are children.
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The Foundations of Quantum Mechanics by Roderich Tumulka
QuoteThis book introduces and critically appraises the main proposals for how to understand quantum mechanics, namely the Copenhagen interpretation, spontaneous collapse, Bohmian mechanics, many-worlds, and others. The author makes clear what are the crucial problems, such as the measurement problem, related to the foundations of quantum mechanics and explains the key arguments like the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen argument and Bell’s proof of nonlocality. He discusses and clarifies numerous topics that have puzzled the founding fathers of quantum mechanics and present-day students alike, such as the possibility of hidden variables, the collapse of the wave function, time-of-arrival measurements, explanations of the symmetrization postulate for identical particles, or the nature of spin. Several chapters are devoted to extending the different approaches to relativistic space-time and quantum field theory. The book is self-contained and is intended for graduate students and researchers who want to step into the fundamental aspects of quantum physics. Given its clarity, it is accessible also to advanced undergraduates and contains many exercises and examples to master the subject.
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22 hours ago, EC said:
Awareness is a process of information processing and perception. . . .
I'd think "perception" contains the idea of awareness, and is not helpful in a statement of what is awareness or how it comes about. But perhaps you just mean by "perception" here inputs from sensors bring information of things to the processing plant. That is OK.
What is the relationship of information processing in neural networks and my information processing in awareness that I am typing a question ending at the question mark? If the information processing of the neural-network activity underlying my information processing in conscious awareness just is that conscious information processing, that identity needs to be established by argument and research results. On the face of it, it appears that when we are consciously taking in information and making it integral to our actions, we are not thinking about those underlying neuronal information processes (firing patterns of neural networks), but of things like what marks we are making on the computer screen and what worthwhile thoughts of worldly entities, characters, passages, and situations in topic (or tangentially) we are striving to attain and share.
Perhaps you could show us where you think is the cutting edge of research on that question is today. (Please don't say "I'm the cutting edge". That is not credible nor informative, what one is aiming for is not what one has in hand, and it bespeaks a failure to look and assess beyond ones own thought in the enterprise of human knowledge.) I'm not aware that any well-founded right answer to my question has been reached, but I'm not really up to date on latest research. I've noticed the following works tackling the question or issues pertinent to it through some years now. Of any you have studied, do you find any to be getting somewhere (or for that matter, of any interest to you)?
Artificial Intelligence – The Very Idea (Haugeland 1985)
The Remembered Present – A Biological Theory of Consciousness (Edelman 1989)
Consciousness Explained (Dennett 1991)
The Race for Consciousness (Taylor 1999)
The Quest for Consciousness – A Neurobiological Approach (Koch 2004)
Consciousness (Hill 2009)
Mind: Your Consciousness is What and Where? (Honderich 2017)
The Feeling of Life Itself – Why Consciousness is Widespread but Cannot Be Computed (Koch 2019)
Conscious Mind / Resonant Brain – How Each Brain Makes a Mind (Grossberg 2021).
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PS – Any choice to live is made from one who is living. Whether it is a square-on choice or an indirect one, it is a choice of one with a living body and the vegetative values within it. Choosing to live in the larger-arch sense doable in conscious human choice is not made from nowhere, and making the choice as drawn by, according with, and overarching the vegetative values of one's body renders farcical all talk of such a choice being arbitrary or any talk of having the value of continued living get its value merely from choice-making.
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Additional Thought on the Choice to Live
The choice to live is at hand not only in moments of contemplating suicide. One is in a continuous ongoing choice to think and to value, and these are choices to live. One’s thinking and valuing in one’s actions of the day are operations peculiar to life form, to those parts of the world that are living things. Nonetheless there is a bit from wider metaphysics than living things for consideration, a bit recurring in the question of any rational bases for choosing to live.
There are things within the universe that do not apply to the universe as a whole. Such would be electric potential differences. The universe as a whole can have no potential difference with something not itself because there is nothing but the universe, or what Rand called existence as a whole (e.g. ITOE App. 273). We say that a thing within the universe has no electric potential difference with itself. Whether we think of the concept of a things’s electric potential difference with itself as absolutely nothing or as the limit of a thing’s potential difference with some other thing as the one and the other become the same thing, it is plain, again, that electric potential difference, an existent within the universe, does not apply to the universe itself, as a whole. The universe has no other with which it might have an electric potential, therefore, electric potential difference is not a trait belonging to the universe as a whole.
There are other things within the universe that apply also to the universe as a whole, at least if the universe is finite. These are things in the universe that can be summed over all the parts of the universe: such as electric charge, mass-energy, or angular momentum.
Our question so perennial in Objectivism is whether value and the value of reason within a human form of life are sensibly ascribed in its moments to a human life as a whole. Is the choice to live, carrying in its wake the choice to value and to live rationally, itself a rational choice, a meritoriously rational one? Is talk of one’s life itself being a good thing actually sensible talk?
The outgoing-beyond-itself of life (emphasized by Guyau 1885), the growth character of anything living (as talked of in N. Branden’s old essay “The Divine Right of Stagnation”), and the fundamental agape character of human love and creativity (as I’ve spoken of in the preceding post) seem characters extendable from within life to the whole of it. Not by summation, but by the characters of life just mentioned. Those characteristics recommend insistently the rationality and goodness of choosing life in the suicide fork and in the actions in each day of waking life down the river.
Some Objectivist writings on the choice to live and criticisms of those writings:
Leonard Peikoff’s OPAR (1991) 211–14, 220–21, 233, 244–48.
Roderick Long’s REASON AND VALUE which is OBJECTIVIST STUDIES V3 (2000).
Douglas Rasmussen’s “Rand on Obligation and Virtue” in THE JOURNAL OF AYN RAND STUDIES (2002, V4N2).
Tibor Machan’s “Rand and Choice” in JARS (2006, V7N2).
Douglas Rasmussen’s “Regarding Choice and the Foundations of Morality” (2006 in JARS V7N2).
Allan Gotthelf’s “The Choice to Value” in METAETHICS, EGOISM, AND VIRTUE (2011).
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Necovore, I don't know if the preponderance-of-the-evidence rule for civil suits is itself from the Common Law Mr. Brooks purports he would like to be maintained, but most tort law is developed by the Common Law. So he might well need to blame the Common Law for that standard of proof in a charge such as that brought by Ms. Carroll; I don't know. What was the evidence for her claims rated by the jury as having more than 50% likelihood of being true? (I'd imagine Mr. Trump's former boast that you can grab 'em by the pussy if you are a star [entered as pertinent evidence in the present case] probably added some weight against his claim of innocence in the present case.)
Mr. Brooks provided no specifics to his claim that "over several generations Marxist intellectuals have been transforming the American justice system" to their political ends. Which intellectuals of any stripe transform the American justice system. Did Posner's economic analysis of law? Did Epstein's writings on the takings clause in the Constitution? (No on Epstein's, though I wish that they do, and I've still hope they will.) Where in Mr. Brooks's article are specified the law review articles by and names of these alleged Marxist intellectuals who have transformed the American justice system? Surely he knows that such Marxist intellectuals would have to be specific individuals, not air through which his hand waves, and surely he knows that if he speaks the truth in naming such individuals, he is defended against libel by the truth of his claim (proven by preponderance of the evidence). So far as I know, we've the same old common law in this sector of it, undermine confidence in the legal system day after day by hollering "Marxist", "prejudiced", or "rigged" for your political ends as a Mr. Brooks might.
Are intellectuals who think there is "social justice" over and above "justice" (which is a myopic view of "justice") people who have influence on the American legal system? Specifics are lacking for the sweeping declarations of Mr. Brooks. Are such intellectuals all Marxist? Can't intellectuals have wrong-headed social ideas without being Marxist or brainlessly led by Marxists? Of course they can and do. It's easier to cry "Marxist"—and catchier to an audience stuck in whatever learning they or their elders got of social thought 50 years ago—than relaying Rawl's A Theory of Justice with its Principles, including the Principle of Liberty, or the writer in jurisprudence A. J. David Richards based on Rawls or relaying Nozick's counters to Rawl's theory. Or rendering the illuminating classics: Hart's The Concept of Law and Fuller's The Morality of Law. Of course Mr. Brooks likely has read much from those works at some point and has a fair guess as to what quarters hear which of them sympathetically or with hostility. His piece is the usual for broad public consumption: name-calling and lies for a political cause.
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AI and supercomputing enlisted to find a new solid-state electrolyte in only days. The battery works, and it reduces the amount of Lithium required by 70 percent. Emily Conover's report.
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6 hours ago, George Adams CPA MBA said:
Stephen,
While I admire Rand's reverence for reason we must be careful. As Kant said, there are limits to reason. These limits have become clearer in the 20th century and here are two key points:
(1) Kurt Godel's Incompleteness Theorem's showed that some propositions in math can neither be proved nor disproved. The piercing eyes of Math have a blind spot.
(2) Quantum Mechanics, especially Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, shows that there are limits to knowledge at the physical level.
Kant was far ahead of his time and operated mostly from insight and intuition in articulating the view that we should not make a God of reason, even though reason is the best tool we have to understand the world.
Thanks for the response, George.
Rand agreed that there are limits to reason, but she meant only that reason is tied to the senses. Reason in her meaning is the power of identifying and integrating what is given in perception (including in our actions). Such powers have definite limited characters. For Kant, reason usually means a narrower faculty which is boss of the faculty of the understanding, and this reason does not deal with what is in experience directly, only through the understanding. His reason and understanding together might approximate what Rand defined as reason (hers is a sort of theoretical and explanatory definition of reason friending the dictionary definition from ordinary usage).
Even with his limitations on reason, Kant did make a top god of reason, both in his usual narrow sense and that reason in its commerce with the understanding. His ethical theory attempts to replace God with Reason. It is reason and its needed autonomy that is the source of true morality in his view. As for his idea that knowledge, which is product of sensory experience, the understanding, and reason, needed to be reined in from the German rationalists (Wolff, Moses Mendelssohn, . . .): that was for the purpose of shielding religious faith from the growing body of scientific knowledge and the philosophers assimilating it and weighing it. The limitations he argued were, accordingly, on letting knowledge intrude on religious turf (and especially while a religious zealot had the ear of the King).
Kant would be in one way sour over what Gödel discovered in his fabled incompleteness theorem, the one showing that some arithmetic truths we know to be true cannot be proven true in a purely deductive system. (The case of the unprovability either way of the Axiom of Choice in set theory is not the famed theorem of Gödel, if I recall correctly; maybe I'll look it up tomorrow.) For it strongly suggests that in arithmetic at least, we have some intellectual intuition after all, which Kant denied we have. On the other hand, he could smile and take this limitative result of Gödel's as showing that arithmetic as a science is synthetic a priori knowledge, Kant's way of characterizing it, not the way the Logicists were trying to characterize it. Kant would not take that Incompleteness theorem as supporting the limitations he was concerned to place on knowledge. I do not myself take it as limiting knowledge, but as adding to our knowledge of deductive systems, specifically some limitations of them. We seem still to have endless rational knowledge of arithmetic; there is no indication that there are any truths in arithmetic we as a species cannot come to know.
Similarly, the Heisenberg Indeterminacy Principle is a discovery of fact about the nature of physical quantities having the physical quantity called 'action' as their product. Those are known as the canonically conjugate pairs in classical Hamiltonian mechanics. Such are the pairs: linear momentum of a body and position of that body; energy of a body and time of that occasion, if my memory is approximately correct. The discovery was that the quantity 'action' comes in a minute minimum value. The discovery and mathematical development and precise experiments in the physics that is quantum mechanics is one of the most extended and magnificent attainments in human knowledge.
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George Adams, like Peter, I was also wondering why you had the painting of Kant on the wall. It is natural to conclude that something in his thought found serious favor with you. Might it be his doctrine that individuals are ends in themselves and should be treated as that? Might it be the deontological character of his ethics? Might it be that he carries along the perfectionist school of thought among German ethicists?*
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The US has said they will not attack targets inside Iran for their use of terrorist organizations to attack Iranian opponents. I hope, however, that the US has not taken destruction, sooner or later, of the entire Iranian navy off the table as among US retaliatory response actions.*
- Jon Letendre and Jim Henderson
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I have not read the more famous biography of Ayn Rand, the one by Barbara Branden, which was made into a movie. I have read the following biography by Nathaniel Branden.
The book MY YEARS WITH AYN RAND is a recounting of all the years the author Nathaniel Branden was connected with Ayn Rand and his years beyond direct connection up to the time of Rand’s death in 1982. The story begins when Nathan was 14 years old (1944) and first read THE FOUNTAINHEAD. The story has a lot more autobiography of the author than I had expected, but as it went along, I could see how that was sensible for the sort of personal-psychology reflectiveness with which the author is saturated and saturates this story.
Near the end of the book, Branden writes:
“Here is what I believe: Ayn was a great thinker and a great woman. She was also a struggling human being, as we all are. If one cannot understand her humanity, shortcomings included, one cannot fully appreciate her greatness; one cannot know Ayn Rand.”
It is those “shortcomings” which the author thinks he has conveyed within his book (and which I do not accede to as being shortcomings) that might bring others not myself to conclude that the book reflects negatively on the person Ayn Rand. The author may have had that as part of his purpose, but it does not succeed with me.
Late in life, I have asked myself the common question: Would you do anything different were you able to live your life again? The first thing that came to my mind was that I wished I were more patient and gentler with some of my immediate family (now deceased), not cutting them (and other people) off and out of my life for long periods so brutally (even if deserved). But then I think on it a little further and realize that that is ridiculous. Supposing I were the same person of the moments in the hypothetical reliving, I would have made the same choices and behaviors. (I say that from knowing that my personality in that respect has not changed.) And a 20-20 hindsight perspective on a whole life is simply garbage anyway. Real life is, at most all times of it, with an unknown and indeed not-yet-set course, among potential distant-future courses growing out of present choices.
I can think of a “shortcoming” in my personality: that I was pretty shy and, in some situations, insecure. But what on earth does such a thought mean? That I would have been better off as a youth had I not been me in those respects? Honestly, fully, the “I” would be an equivocation. Such an exercise is foolishness.
There are some things simple to change and still be oneself. When I was a youth, I hunted. I killed wildlife, which we ate, not that we couldn’t go to the grocery store. When I learned Rand’s theory of ethics, though there seemed no implication about hunting (mainly for sport), hunting seemed to me out of tune in sensibility with that ethical basis I had come to accept. I stopped going hunting, later sold my shotgun, and remained the same essential self.
So, I do not accede to the usual easy talk of “shortcomings” of real persons concerning their personalities. Furthermore, insofar as “shortcomings” is meant to entail a moral failing, there can be no such thing for characteristic behavioral responses over which one has no originative genuine choice.
I gather that, in context, the “shortcomings” in Rand the person, referred to in Branden’s paragraph I quoted above, were mainly responsive behaviors towards persons in her presence and with backdrop for her a love affair with the author, whom Rand had greatly admired. That it had been and had ended, and her attitude towards it all in old age, seemed natural and nothing “shortcoming” to me.
I take issue with an assertion, additionally, in that quoted paragraph. That is the idea that in knowing personal particulars about a person—such as how went the dinner party we made for a couple last night or what physical labor I like most to do or who all turns me on or who was my unrequited would-be lover—are NOT more my humanity or more who I am than my prose writing, most of all, my scholarly papers. Nothing is more me than my mind, and nothing shows that thing so much as my written works. I earnestly suggest the same is so for the person Ayn Rand or any writer.
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Appellate court for D.C. federal court in the case United States of America v. Donald J. Trump has ruled that the former President does not have immunity against criminal prosecutions. I expect the U.S. Supreme Court to let the ruling and its reasoning stand by not accepting an appeal.
QuoteSince then, hundreds of people who breached the Capitol on January 6, 2021, have been prosecuted and imprisoned. And on August 1, 2023, in Washington, D.C., former President Trump was charged in a four-count Indictment as a result of his actions challenging the election results and interfering with the sequence set forth in the Constitution for the transfer of power from one President to the next. Former President Trump moved to dismiss the Indictment and the district court denied his motion. Today, we affirm the denial. For the purpose of this criminal case, former President Trump has become citizen Trump, with all of the defenses of any other criminal defendant. But any executive immunity that may have protected him while he served as President no longer protects him against this prosecution.
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Tad, from whom is this quoted "Privileged and Confidential" opinion? Was it composed after the decision in Moore v. Harper? I gather it was not, since it refers to VP Pence in the present tense. I defer to the Supreme Court on the constitutionality of the quoted scheme. What they imply about such a scheme might be gleaned from full study of the majority opinion in Moore v. Harper, which I'll leave to you, as I'm smelling the blood in a really important article on the Analytic-Synthetic distinction I'm bringing to conclusion at this time. I'll likely post it in Facebook (because they are generous with size of photos there) and link to it from OO.
This is Black History month, and I'd like to contribute a bit of it that is related to what NC was trying to do, which came to be struck down in Moore v. Harper. This did not involve gerrymander by the state legislature, but its restrictions on voter eligibility. The Oklahoma Democrats, a bigoted Party in power there and then, figured Black voters would vote Republican.
QuoteWhen Oklahoma joined the Union in 1907, its constitution allowed all men to vote, regardless of race. In 1910 it introduced a “grandfather clause” through an amendment to the [State] constitution. This clause provided an exemption to literacy requirements for direct lineal descendants of citizens who had been legally able to vote on or before January 1, 1866. In other words, anyone whose father or grandfather was white. The Supreme Court ruled that Oklahoma’s grandfather clause was unconstitutional in ‘Guinn’ v ‘United States’. Oklahoma legislators subsequently passed a law that required everyone except those who had voted in 1914 to register within an 11-day period or be perpetually disenfranchised (deprived of the right to vote). The Supreme Court struck down this law as well, but not until 23 years later. –Records of Rights
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Let's make sure the point in that last quote is not lost:
"The Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank, takes an extreme position on the ISL theory in its brief. The document was written and submitted by John Eastman, Trump’s legal advisor and a central figure in the attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. In fact, Eastman used the most radical version of the ISL theory to advance his argument before Jan. 6, 2021: In a memo, he spelled out a frightening, unconstitutional plan of how then-Vice President Mike Pence could declare Trump the winner of the Electoral College and the presidency.
Unsurprisingly, given its author, Eastman’s amicus brief in support of Moore states that the power conferred to state legislatures by not only the Elections Clause, but also the Presidential Electors Clause is “plenary,” meaning absolute. The ISL theory is inconsistent with cases from the past century, the brief writes, so the suggested solution is to simply overturn three decisions. . . ." –among the amicus briefs
This brief was on the losing side (the Moore side) of the decision (6-3) of the US Supreme Court.
Afoot now is the campaign by a good many Republicans for defying this ruling at the State level (defy any court) and any other rulings on election law by the Court that is unfavorable (in these Republicans' estimate) to their candidates. It's as though many Republicans are assuming great losses ahead for their candidates if elections continue to be decided by eligible voting citizens. So they are putting about ways of circumventing that anticipated result by claiming as legal what is decidedly illegal under US law.
(That portion of Republicans are united in their rationale [a lie, not merely a falsehood, for they are not really that stupid] that any elections not in their favor must have been fraudulent. There is no Confederate Army, and there is not going to be any warring between US military and National Guard or within the latter. Those troops are overwhelmingly genuinely committed to the survival of our constitutional democratic republic, just as the majority of the present US Supreme Court.)
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9 hours ago, chuff said:
At the risk of oversimplifying, it appears this decision acknowledges the legal principle that the States have final authority over their own election laws (as they do over any other state laws that do not conflict with the U.S. Constitution, as well as over the interpretations of their own constitutions).
And that any such law cannot be exempt from the judicial review, state or federal, of state law for federal elections, which was being attempted in NC (so that the state legislature could dictate election law with no constraints from other divisions of government). Moore v. Harper has lain to rest the Independent State Legislature Theory (ISL) in election law.
QuoteThe Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank, takes an extreme position on the ISL theory in its brief. The document was written and submitted by John Eastman, Trump’s legal advisor and a central figure in the attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. In fact, Eastman used the most radical version of the ISL theory to advance his argument before Jan. 6, 2021: In a memo, he spelled out a frightening, unconstitutional plan of how then-Vice President Mike Pence could declare Trump the winner of the Electoral College and the presidency.
Unsurprisingly, given its author, Eastman’s amicus brief in support of Moore states that the power conferred to state legislatures by not only the Elections Clause, but also the Presidential Electors Clause is “plenary,” meaning absolute. The ISL theory is inconsistent with cases from the past century, the brief writes, so the suggested solution is to simply overturn three decisions. . . . –among the amicus briefs
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Economic Freedom – Haley!
Vote for Haley in the Primary in your State! Anti-intellectualism is one reason, which, joined with others, Rand condemned the Presidential candidate of '68 George Wallace and his movement as proto-fascist. Trump should be condemned just as Wallace and for those same reasons and more. Wallace was not the nominee of either Party. Still, he won seven Southern states and a million votes. Had he gotten the Democratic nomination, as earlier in that century he could have, he could have won the presidency. Support for our constitutional democratic form of government is actually pretty weak, I gather, among the anti-intellectual portion of the citizens. Mr. Trump stirs that weak portion for support. Plenty of shallow sloganeering all around, of course, as ever.
I gather Haley will be in this at least through Super Tuesday, with her bloc-dollars from Mr. Koch and pals, with at least that money source. Her turn to raising the issue of economic freedom, I notice, coincides with the unwavering support of that by Koch across the decades.
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Umar, you can search with Google for the answer. Then educate all of us with what you find. It sounds interesting, and particulars of your food chain startup would also be interesting to us, however far you are able to share particulars at this stage.
Necessity and Form in Truths
in Books to Mind – Stephen Boydstun
Posted
Part 2 – Morton White*
Let me abbreviate the title of White’s 1952 paper by UD (for Untenable Dualism).
White saw the myth of a sharp divide between the analytic and the synthetic as affiliate of an older mythically sharp division: the Aristotelian division between essential and accidental predication (1952, 330). He urged rejection of both of these affiliates due to the divisional sharpness falsely maintained for them.
White noted two kinds of statements that had lately been regarded as analytic. The first are purely formal logical truths such as “A is A” and “A or not-A.” The second are cases of “what is traditionally known as essential predication” (UD 318). He ponders especially the example “All men are rational animals.” That statement is logically the same as “Any man is a rational animal” or “A man is a rational animal.” This last expression of the proposition is one of Leonard Peikoff’s examples of a purportedly analytic statement in “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy” (ASD 90).
White did not pursue in this paper whether it is correct to characterize logical truths as analytic (UD 318–19). It will be recalled that Peikoff held forth Rand’s conception of logical truth against that of A. J. Ayer, who had maintained: “The principles of logic and mathematics are true universally simply because we never allow them to be anything else. . . . In other words, the truths of logic and mathematics are analytic propositions or tautologies” (Ayer 1946, 77; ASD 94, 101, 111–18; Branden 1963, 7).
Whether one were to take analytical truths to be identical with or based on logical truths, I say that the Objectivist view of logic (with which I agree) does not allow the inference of Ayer and others that logical truths are not informed by fact. Logic on our view is a tool we use in identifications of existents. Logical truths are in no way prior to other truths, ones having empirical content. We learn the logical principle of Excluded Middle in an elementary logic course, but that learning is really an explicit articulation of a principle we have already found effective and reliable in thinking about the world we are negotiating.
Either there is a bear sleeping beside the mail box OR there is not. Either I will continue to work on this project non-stop for two more hours from now OR not. Either vampires exist OR not. But there is a limited proper vista on the world within which the principle is sensible if our use of it is in pursuit of identifications of existents. It is nonsense to say that either there are some things existing in the world OR not. The effectiveness and range of sensible employment of the logical principle is learned from experience, and the concept of existence and its totality is learned by experience. The fact that the sensible range of the principle is so wide that it is convenient to indicate its general form as “A or Not-A” does not give us license to suppose there are no limits on sensible “applications” of the Principle of Excluded Middle or to suppose we do not learn that principle by experience.
With that Objectivist view of elementary logic, they can say one thing what Morton White did not say: One’s concept of what is an analytic truth by identifying the analytic with the logical or basing the analytical on the logical does nothing to show that any purported analytical truth is entirely independent of experience, that it bears no information about existence at all, or that a purported analytical truth is made true and derives its necessity of being true by social convention untethered from facts of the empirical world.
As with Quine’s “Two Dogmas,” White undermined the distinction between the analytic and the synthetic by finding fault with various explications of what analyticity amounts to. They concluded there is no durable articulate way of classifying propositions and truths as analytic in sharp contrast to synthetic.
One way of conceiving an analytic statement is as expressing a proposition deducible from a logical truth by substitution of a synonym of one of its terms. (i) Every A is A. Therefore, (ii) Every man is a man. With “rational animal” as synonym for “man”, by substitution of identicals, we obtain (iii) Every man is a rational animal (UD 319).
So some might propose that analyticity is explicated in terms of logical truth and synonymy, as in the preceding paragraph. White rejects the view that whether “man” and “rational animal” are synonymous is a matter of arbitrarily selected convention. Similarly, that “man” and “animal who can skip” (my example, demonstrated, along with other distinctly human moves here [Tina]) are not synonymous is not a matter of arbitrarily selected convention. Natural language is not like an artificial logical language in which meanings of terms are set entirely by stipulation (UD 321–24).
Could analytic statements be defined instead as those whose denials are self-contradictory? (UD 325–26). White argues that denials of such propositions as “Not every man is a rational animal” are not contradictions, but his concept of contradiction is, in step with dominate contemporary views of logic, too narrow, as I have elaborated above in connection with Ayer.
White did not relate this criterion for analyticity to Kant, but I should do so. One of Kant’s characterizations of analytic judgments is that in them the predicate is “thought through identity” with thought of the subject. Synthetic judgments connect predicate to subject, but not in the relation of identity (KrV A6–8 B10–12), where simple complete identity is meant, not Rand’s more expansive notion of identity as some or other distinctive traits belonging necessarily to anything that exists.[1] According to Kant, all judgments must conform to the principle of self-consistency, but only judgments certifiable by self-contradiction upon denial alone, apart from their truth in experience, are analytic (A151–53 B190–93; 1783, 4:266–70; 1790, 8:228–30, 244–45; Allison 2004, 89–93; Garrett 2008, 204–6).
I object that contradiction upon denial is no genuine grounding of any truth. If we start with a truth and then show that upon denial of it we arrive at a contradiction, well isn’t that cute? But establishment of its truth is elsewhere.
Morton White found that appealing to synonymies in the language is not illuminating in the absence of objective criteria for synonymy (UD 324). If it is said that one’s sense of wrongness in “Man is not a rational animal” differs from one’s sense of wrongness in “Man is not a skipper,” White responds that that is surely only a matter of degree, not a sharp difference in kind. Between one’s response to contradiction of “Man is a rational animal” and contradiction of “Man is a skipper,” there is not a sharp difference in kind. If self-contradiction upon denial of a proposition is the criterion for analyticity of the proposition, then there is no sharp divide between the analytic and the synthetic (UD 325–26). Objectivism can add that there is no qualitative divide in the purported divide analytic/synthetic because elementary logic is based on the widest-frame, worldly facts that existence exists and existence is identity, in Rand’s expansive sense of identity. White did not surmise that the merely-difference-of-degree in our sense of wrongness in “Man is not a rational animal” and in “Man is not a skipper” might be because a thing is everything that it is, as was later underscored by Peikoff in ASD.
White saw the myth of a sharp divide between the analytic and the synthetic as affiliate of an older mythically sharp division: the Aristotelian division between essential and accidental predication (UD 330). This kinship was also recognized in Peikoff (ASD 95), as I remarked earlier. But Peikoff went further: He observed that essentials of a thing do not exhaust what a thing is. No concepts of a subject are concepts of only what are the essentials in the definition of the subject.
(To be continued.)
Note
[1] Joseph Butler (1692–1752) stated: “Everything is something or other.” Taken as the Principle of Identity, it is expansive. This expansive concept of identity is championed in Oderberg 2007, chap. 5.
References
Allison, H. 2004 [1983]. Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. Revised and enlarged edition. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Allison, H., and P. Heath, editors, 2002. Immanuel Kant: Theoretical Philosophy after 1781. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ayer, A. 1946. Language, Truth, and Logic. New York: Dover.
Branden, N. 1963. Review of Brand Blanshard’s Reason and Analysis. The Objectivist Newsletter 2(2):7–8.
Garrett, D. 2008. Should Hume Have Been a Transcendental Idealist? In Kant and the Early Moderns. D. Garber and B. Longuenesse, editors. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Linsky, L., editor, 1952. Semantics and the Philosophy of Language. Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Kant, I. 1781(A), 1787(B). Critique of Pure Reason. W. Pluhar, translator. 1996. Indianapolis: Hackett.
——. 1783. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science. G. Hatfield, translator. In Allison and Heath 2002.
——. 1790. On a Discovery Whereby Any New Critique of Pure Reason Is to Be Made Superfluous by an Older One. H. Allison, translator. In Allison and Heath 2002.
Oderberg, D. 2007. Real Essentialism. New York: Routledge.
Peikoff, L. 1967. The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy. In Rand 1990.
Quine, W. 1951. Two Dogmas of Empiricism. In From a Logical Point of View. 1953. Cambridge, MA: Harvard.
Rand, A. 1990 [1966–67]. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Expanded 2nd edition. New York: Meridian.
White, M. 1952 [1950]. The Analytic and the Synthetic: An Untenable Dualism. In Linsky 1952. Included also in White 2004.
——. 2004. From a Philosophical Point of View. Princeton.