Vik
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Posts posted by Vik
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Mindy,
I mean that the concept of knowledge didn't spring out of perceptual experience. We can't point at knowledge like we point at computer screens.
In order to form the concept of knowledge, it is necessary to have already formed a set of concepts about things we can perceive.
Also, it took a long chain of reasoning to get to the concept of knowledge. We first had to know a chain of facts terminating in the evidence of the senses.
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What must we know before we can have a concept of knowledge? (The Objectivist definition of "knowledge" can be found below)
We can have mental contents. Perception can provide some of that content. Content can be derived from other content. Beliefs don't always match reality, marking the boundary between a mental grasp of reality and the production of fantasy, wish, arbitrary speculation, etc.
What else?
the concept "knowledge" is formed by retaining its distinguishing characteristics (a mental grasp of fact(s) of reality, reached by perceptual observation or by a process of reason based on perceptual observation) and omitting the particular fact(s) involved.
Ayn Rand, ITOE, pg. 35
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I will show my method of reducing concepts and my method of reducing principles. The processes are related, so I've included both. Since concepts are easier to reduce than principles, I'll show the one for concepts first.
Concept: fragility.
Chain leading to perceptual level:
- Fragility refers to a potential of materials. That can serve as the genus.
- Objects fracture when sufficient force separates constituents.
- This object fractured when it fell off the shelf.
Examples of fragility:
- fragility of a ceramic mug,
- fragility of glass,
- fragility of concrete,
- etc.
Non-examples:
- ceramic mug survives hammer,
- glass survives fall to carpet,
- normal stability of concrete,
- etc.
This gives us the differentia, so now we have:
potential of constituents to separate from each other along a course subjected to sufficient stress
Principle: Styrofoam is brittle.
Chain leading to the perceptual level:
- lower-level principle: Subjecting a sample of styrofoam to bending or compressive forces causes it to break.
- test results: When styrofoam is subjected to forces of certain quantities, the results are so and so.
- tentative principle: Pushing something through styrofoam causes cracks. etc.
- observation: When I pulled out a new gadget hastily from a box, part of the styrofoam caught on the edge, bent, and broke off.
Although this chain helps us get to the perceptual level, they don't firmly connect the PROPERTY of brittleness to the perceptual level. That is accomplished by by means of causal reasoning.
Brittleness can be measured by fracture toughness. Fracture toughness of materials varies according to composition, mixture of multiple substances under certain conditions, pre-existing cracks, porosity, etc. Material potentials are a consequence of constitutive properties, i.e. of bonding, intermolecular forces, etc.
Any principle we name is made possible by concepts. In this example, we needed such concepts as fragility, composition, etc. A complete reduction will include reducing every key concept we uncover, as outlined at the beginning of this post.
I've mentioned lower-level principles vs higher-level principles. I see four levels before I reach the level of ordinary observations:
4. The level of generalization about property, aka the level of inductive inference.
3. The level of particular causations, where you perform causal reasoning.
2. The level of rigorous testing, where you have a clear idea of the relationship involved.
1. The level of play, where you come up with tentative principles.
0. Observation of a chance event.
As I go through these levels, I write down notes. This makes three things explicit:
- the hierarchy of principles,
- the hierarchy of concepts, including explicit mention of genus and differentia
- a map of causality.
The hierarchy of concepts includes genus and differentia.
The map of causality isn't necessary for reducing the principle itself, but it is necessary for reducing the explanation associated with the principle. After all, intermolecular forces are NOT on the every-day perceptual level. And energy is so abstract that we can't talk about it without invoking mathematics.
By forcing myself to study existents and re-engineer every concept I come across between the principle and the perceptual level, I guarantee valid definition for every concept identified.
This makes my method superior to simply defining a chain of terms without thinking clearly about the existents involved.
- Fragility refers to a potential of materials. That can serve as the genus.
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I wouldn't call it a "tendency". I'd call it a "potential".
"Tendency" implies that statistical dominance is beyond volition. And that's as deterministic as "hard-wired".
As a human being, you have the potential for doing X, Y, and Z.
You then make choices in regard to that potential.
Religious people can become atheists.
Communists can become capitalists.
It only takes logic applied to the facts gained through experience--an act that every human being with a functioning brain can do.
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Why "hard-wired" is hand-waving:
It's saying that people do something just because.
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An explanation shows how an action, process or state of affairs could logically follow from causes. But actions, processes, and states do not exist apart from entities. A complete explanation of an entity's action will include the *properties* of the entity that are responsible for the action.
"Hard-wired" isn't a proper explanation. It's hand-waving and it flies in the face of the fact that we are capable of correcting our assumptions.
The fact that our brains are *capable* of misinterpreting events as "signs from god" and emotions as "religious experience" does not mean that we are incapable of becoming atheists.
Likewise, the fact that we can interact with people does not mean that we will be altruists. We can grasp the dangers of self-sacrifice and make an effort to change our habits.
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Perhaps. There is a thread here where the relation between a whole and its parts is discussed. There is a philosophical term for that special study, but I forget what it is now and that happens to be the thread title.
There is a branch of ontology called mereology.
I found this thread on Physics Forums "property" vs "characteristic". Translating the conclusion of that thread into Objectivism, Ayn Rand may have had the distinction between similarities and differences in mind. Properties would be attributes similar to attributes of other entities, characteristics would be attributes (even the same attributes) regarded as different enough to be distinctive for identifying particular entities. This perspective would be the epistemological product of mental comparisons, rather than the more metaphysical twist I was giving it. This lines up neatly though, as properties are based on similar intrinsic attributes that lead easily to an integration omitting particulars while the characteristics refer specifically to differences which are irreducibly relational and to be retained rather than omitted. For example, shape for man in the sense of an animal or species can be regarded as a common property or as a characteristic distinguishing man relative to other kinds of animals or as individuals from each other when comparing faces or fingerprints.Existents can have the same characteristics in different measure or degree. This is key to understanding her theory of similarity. Ref page 13.
Also, abstraction from abstractions depends on omitting distinguishing characteristics from the constituent units, i.e. from the lower-level concepts. Ref page 23.
I agree that the mental isolation of shape can be either a characteristic or a property depending on what you're doing with it.
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"Explanation" can be an ambiguous word, it either means "cause of" or "knowledge of" depending on its use. The importance of making the distinction is that we do not always know the ultimate causes.
Given a concept defined in terms of a fundamental characteristic, if we then learn that the fundamental characteristic is completely explained by an internal property then we have a basis to shift the definition to the more fundamental property. A concrete example of this would be in biology when all of the concepts of the various species were based on similarities of the bodily form until genetics, evolution, and the discovery of DNA resulted in a new understanding of what is truly fundamental in biology, resulting in new classifications of some species. The causal relation between genetics and body form has always been true, but what was considered fundamental changed when the context of scientific knowledge expanded. The scientific revolution in biology is both an example of concepts being open-ended in that new attributes were discovered for the same concepts, and an example of definitions being contextual when the new attribute was found to be fundamental. The conclusion is that a fundamental characteristic can indeed have an unknown cause ("explanation") in terms of more fundamental properties.
Whether something is "fundamental" is a contextual issue, yes.
Sometimes even a known causal explanation can fail to justify changing the fundamental characteristic. Anything that happens in every living organism has a chemical explanation, but that level of analysis is not appropriate for understanding discrete living entities as whole organisms interacting with each other.The distinction you attempt here is not meaningful. A "configuration of constituents" can only exist in the form of quantitative relationships. To be is to be something particular. Existence is identity.
I think we're talking passed each other. There is a difference between the entity itself, its components, etc., and the relationships among the attributes of those components.
>>That's arrested knowledge. What if someone discovered that mass changed depending on certain conditions?>> We used to think mass was independent of velocity. Now we have invariant mass vs relativistic mass.
This is no exception. We only know about relativistic mass because of the exact same kinds of effects on trajectories, forces, extended half-lives of decaying particles, etc. A variable mass is not an intrinsic quality of a particle but a relationship between two frames of reference.
Wikipedia quotes a physics textbook on relativistic mass:
I agree that when I wrote about relational and intrinsic attributes that was inaccurate and misleading because those are not two kinds of attributes. The relation between an entity and its actions is not the same as that of an entity to its attributes. I made the mistake that Ayn Rand avoided by using the expression "properties and characteristics". Nevertheless, there are such things as attributes and actions and that is the distinction being made.
For Ayn Rand, shape is a characteristic (pg 12). I'm thinking that characteristics represent measurement-omissions and constitute our mental grasp of properties.
"Dispositional" relates to the Doctrine of internal relations (also see http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logical-atomism/#2.1 and www.britannica.com The doctrine of internal relations and the coherence theory of truth. This is the theory that relations are attributes and it is rightly rejected.There is evidence for one half of my interpretation in that same section:
Constitutive and intrinsic both describe the same relation between entity and attribute. The actions of an entity are not constitutive, what something does is not the same as what it is. Although the two must be causally related, actions are almost always interactions between two entities and so are jointly determined by (at least) two entities that act.
Would you say that causation is an interaction among entities according to their constitutive properties?
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Could you clairify this? Im still not getting it. Saying that some attributes arent included in the concept, if Im understanding, is like splitting the characteristics of a unit into groups, necessary, and contingent perhaps. Or if the fundemental characteristics are a result of the properties of an entity, entities subsumed under a single concept cant have different properties???
Recap:
There is a claim that properties are "intrinsic attributes" while characteristics are "dynamic and relational attributes"
I'm claiming that "intrinsic attribute" vs "dynamical/relational attribute" is an arbitrary distinction that leads to conclusions that are incompatible with Objectivism.
I wasn't thinking that Grames believed in the "necessary vs contingent" dichotomy.
But I do feel that "intrinsic vs dynamical/relational" sounds a lot like the distinction of "intrinsic vs dispositional". I think it's worth mentioning that the latter was exploded on pg. 282-287 of ITOE
A concept refers to all the characteristics of its referents, known and unknown. The fact that some entities dont possess all the characteristics of other entities subsumed under a particular concept does not mean that the attributes/characteristics are not a part of the concept, the entities lacking these qualities would be broken units, borderline cases, or perhaps even qualified instances, depending on what you mean by "constituting the identity of a thing".j..
Agreed, but I don't see how it's relevant to the claim I'm objecting to or my objection to it.
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Do you or do you not hold that characteristics refer to the dynamic and relational attributes of things? If you do, then, logically, fundamental characteristics must be the result of properties. Which means that some attributes constituting the identity of a thing aren't included in the concept about that thing.
Yes.
Okay.
Huh? Why? Is there something special about the fundamental characteristic that means it cannot also be the result of some other attribute?
Fundamental characteristics are supposed to explain the most others. If they are themselves explained by properties, then they explain less than the properties. Do you really think Ayn Rand meant THAT?
Measuring bond angles is measuring molecular structure, that is how you get it done. You measure the structure of a building by taking a series of single linear measurements of the exterior and interior walls, floors, ceilings windows and doors.A structure is a configuration of constituents, not the quantitative relationships among those constituents.
Mass (rest mass) is an intrinsic property that can never be known directly but only inferred from its effects on trajectories or other signs of the force resulting from gravity. Weight and inertia are characteristics.That's arrested knowledge. What if someone discovered that mass changed depending on certain conditions?
We used to think mass was independent of velocity. Now we have invariant mass vs relativistic mass.
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Properties can be measured quantitatively. Characterstics are evaluated qualitatively or descriptively.
Wavelength is a property of light; blue is a characteristic of light. Weight or mass is a property of solid entities; whether the entity is a horse or a turtle is a characteristic of the entity.
Also, I don't see how the classification of an entity constitutes a characteristic of that entity.
What characterizes turtles as reptiles is the fact that they're scaled tetrapods that lay tough-shelled amniotic eggs.
But THAT they are reptiles is simply a way of saying they have the same properties as certain other organisms. I don't see how that qualifies as a separate characteristic on top of those properties.
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Properties can be measured quantitatively. Characteristics are evaluated qualitatively or descriptively.
Wavelength is a property of light; blue is a characteristic of light. Weight or mass is a property of solid entities; whether the entity is a horse or a turtle is a characteristic of the entity.
Molecular structure is a property (pg. 284) but it can't be measured. Consider BH3. It has a trigonal planar structure. You can measure the bond angle. But you can't measure structure as such.
The unit of the conceptual common denominator of color is wavelength. "Blue" designates a measurement-range. All attributes are grasped through measurement-omission. OTOH, "color" refers to all wavelengths visible to human beings and therefore it's a measurement range too--a quantitative subcategory of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Weight is a gravitational force exerted by the earth on an object possessing mass. Electrons have a specific mass which distinguishes them from other leptons. That mass quantity serves as a distinguishing characteristic. But mass could still be a property as well.
Hm...
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I dont follow your reasoning here. Some attributes are certainly not included in the definition, but they are most definitely a part of the concept, whether those attributes are known to us or not.
Quite right. Definitions name the essential, distinguishing characteristics.
At the risk of confusing the issue, on p. 16 she states "Adverbs are concepts of the characteristics of motion (or action); they are formed by specifying a characteristic and omitting the mesurement of the motion and of the entities involved.."Actually, that was another problem I had with Grames' concept of characteristics. It doesn't seem to fit any of the places where the term "characteristic" appears in chapter 1.
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Non sequitor. A concept can have any number of contextually correct definitions and the yet the same set of referents are picked out by the concept. A concept is about its referents, not the definition used.
Do you or do you not hold that characteristics refer to the dynamic and relational attributes of things? If you do, then, logically, fundamental characteristics must be the result of properties. Which means that some attributes constituting the identity of a thing aren't included in the concept about that thing.
I do not believe that the concept of characteristics you have elucidated is compatible with Rand's writings.
I will be moving on.
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They are the results of living and growing up human, and also a snapshot of the continuing process of living.
Also:
Fundamental characteristics are supposed to explain the most others.
If characteristics are defined as being the result of properties, then fundamental characteristics must be the result of properties. Which means that some attributes constituting the identity of a thing aren't included in the concept about that thing.
The view of characteristics given to me must be incorrect.
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They are the results of living and growing up human, and also a snapshot of the continuing process of living.
So if an attribute is the result of another attribute, it's a characteristic?
Then what's left to classify as "properties"?
This is starting to sound like the "dispositional properties" discussion on pg. 282-288 all over again...
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Characteristics refer to the dynamic and relational attributes of things. See characteristic curve for several usage examples. That leaves properties for the static nonrelational intrinsic attributes.
Properties cause characteristics, but don't subsume them. The distinction is between what something is and what something does.
I am having difficulty reconciling this definition of characteristics with AR's writings.
Again, I am trying to figure out why Rand mentioned both properties and characteristics.
Consider this:
"As living beings of a certain kind, they possess innumerable characteristics in common: the same shape, the same range of size..." ~ITOE pg.17
How do these characteristics reflect what human beings DO?
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Which is the wider concept here? Can it be said that a things characteristics follow from its properties? "Property" seems to be a metaphysical attribute, what a thing is made of, its structure, its intrinsic attributes. "Characteristic" seems to denote a things qualities that we use to differentiate it from other things, an epistemic tool. (not to say that characteristics arent metaphysical, they certainly are)
j..
I wouldn't call them "intrinsic". "Intrinsic" suggests a distinction between "dispositional properties" and "intrinsic properties". Such a distinction puts a wedge between constituent properties and potentialities for action. That denies the nature of causality.
I think what you're trying to say is that properties such as structure MAKE a thing what it is and ENABLE it to interact with other things, while characteristics IDENTIFY what a thing is and GUIDES conceptual processes.
But do properties subsume characteristics?
Or are characteristics and properties simply attributes viewed or used in different ways?
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Since I only looked up the definition, the initial thought is that the 'characteristic' falls more in line with the Common Conceptual Denominator while the 'property' appears to align more readily with the Law of Causality.
Distinguishing characteristics represent a specified category of measurements within the CCD involved, but I am not sure what to make of characteristics in general.
The Law of Causality means that:
1) action must be attributed to constitutive properties and
2) what something with certain properties will do are potentials for action, not properties in their own right
But I am still fuzzy on what constitutive properties ARE.
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Knowledge includes both relational and intrinsic aspects of identity.
What is the basis for your distinction?
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"Vik, since it pertains to this discussion about whether or not trans-sexualism is a disorder, what do you mean by a brain with very masculine traits?"
Statistically speaking, there are physical differences between male brains and female brains. For example, men have more gray matter and less white matter than women.
"Masculinized" brains and "feminized" brains are statistical outliers. Could neurological differences make it difficult for them to understand and relate to other members of their biological gender? That's a question best left for science.
Does that necessarily mean the condition is a disorder? Only if it inhibits proper function of the organism, which is the essential characteristic of disorders.
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Yes, and that would still be a disorder.
Ok, now we're starting to define the concept.
What if a person had a similar condition without the resulting dissonance?
Would it still be a disorder?
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There are cases where biologically female individuals develop brains with very masculine traits while still in the womb. This correlates with certain medications taken by the mother during pregnancy.
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'The characteristics of a person or thing are the qualities or features that belong to them and make them recognizable.The properties of a substance or object are the ways in which it behaves in particular conditions.
Sometimes, the behavior of something is sufficient for you to recognize what kind of thing it is.
For example, the trajectory of a particle in an electric field of known value is sufficient to determine the particle's charge and mass. If those match certain numbers associated with electrons, they are classified as electrons.
Would you say that "characteristics" refers to attributes insofar as they are used to classify existents, while "properties" refers to attributes in the context of identity and causality?
Prerequisites for the Concept of Knowledge
in Metaphysics and Epistemology
Posted
"Many other things we'd know by implication to grasp the concept. We'd have to know
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1 depends on a concept of error. The concept of error depends on the recognition of accidental wrong action or false statement. That in turn depends on distinguishing actions of consciousness and comparing mental content against perceptual evidence.
2 depends on a concept of mental processes, which can be formed by isolating the fact that consciousness can act while omitting the particular contents involved.
3 is a heuristic and depends on a lot of advanced knowledge.