Roderick Fitts

The reduction of Rand’s idea of “objectivity” complete, we can now work through how she induced her redefinition of objectivity as involving both facts about the world and facts about human consciousness. The induction will take two series of steps: The first, basic series: 1. Assuming Aristotle’s knowledge, discover that knowledge has an order. 2. Discover that knowledge involves integration. 3. Find out that measurement is the essential means of moving beyond percepts. 4. Discover that consciousness has identity. The second series: 1. From Aristotle’s discoveries and the above four, reach Ayn Rand’s theory of concept-formation. 2. Integrate her theory of concepts with Aristotle’s view of objectivity, and note the amendments that this involves, which include a reformulation of what it means to “follow logic,” and what it means to “be objective.” Two elements of knowledge that Aristotle only implicitly recognized, that knowledge is formed in a context and it exists in a hierarchy, will be explicitly included in logic, as it was in Rand’s view. This is the way that we’ll know how to adhere to reality by following a certain method, because we’ll be explicating that very method further than it was explained before by Aristotle. Knowledge has a Definite Order The first induction we’d have to reach is that “knowledge has an exact, definite order.” Aristotle knew many facets of this view, and so he’s the precondition of Rand for this. He knew that reasoning starts with observations, and that we then arrange our premises in a successive manner until we ultimately reach the conclusion we want to prove. Further, he knew that we form gradually broader concepts, leading to a hierarchy of concepts with each level supported by the preceding level. Rand had two advantages over Aristotle on this point though. One was that she lived in the 20th century, with all of the discoveries of science, and the clear-cut order of learning in our educational systems. Another advantage was her level and sheer amount of self-awareness and introspection, which she practiced her whole life. Her self-awareness that’s relevant here is that she knew that whenever she learned something, it made new routes available to learn other things, and to learn something from those, etc. She knew the generalization that we construct knowledge on top of earlier knowledge in a definite order, and it wasn’t hard for her to learn this due to the advanced scientific context she grew up in. She didn’t need her “theory of concepts” to reach this point; actually, this principle is a precondition for that theory, just as scientific progress is the precondition for the generalization that knowledge follows a definite order. Knowledge Involves Integration The second induction is that knowledge involves putting things together, integration. At first, we grasp that knowledge can be broken up into a series of independent pieces, which is like “analysis,” but later on, we grasp the importance of putting these pieces together, the synthesis. Long before her theory of concepts, Rand knew that all knowledge is interrelated, and that you have to put all cognitive items into a particular sum. Aristotle knew the importance of integrating propositions, and he knew that he should integrate problems with their philosophical, scientific solutions into a total system (like his answer to “what is soul?” in On the Soul), but he never reached the principle that all knowledge as such should be integrated together. It might have been Georg W. F. Hegel who first expressed this principle: “The truth is the whole.” (Preface to Phenomenology of Mind.) Not that I know a lot about Hegel, but his philosophy is obsessed with integration, that integration is the key to knowledge, to truth (he accepts a form of the coherence theory of truth) and to self-realization. Rand didn’t seem to use Hegel as a start-off point for this idea, though. What she used to understand integration was her own mental exercises. Since she was 12, she would recognize relations that people never even dreamed of looking for. The kinds of relations that we take for granted now: between trade and justice, epistemology and capitalism, logic and morality, etc. She would discover contradictions in people’s thinking, and they wouldn’t have even suspected that the elements of their thinking contradict in any way. (One example is: “[Mill’s principle] ‘The greatest good for the greatest number’ is one of the most vicious slogans ever foisted on humanity.” http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/utilitarianism.html Most people who know Mill wouldn’t agree with this, because they see Mill as a defender of capitalism, individual rights, and liberty, but Rand could trace logical consequences of that principle that they wouldn’t notice, and which she was thoroughly against. Rand noticed that this could justify the most horrendous practices committed by the majority according to what they believe is good, like the German populace in the 1930s and 40s who largely supported the prosecution and extermination of the Jews. It wouldn’t surprise Rand at all that in Mill’s work On Liberty, you can find statements like, “[t]he spirit of improvement is not always a spirit of liberty, for it may aim at forcing improvement on an unwilling people.” She would explain the tension between liberty and “the greatest good for the greatest number” in Mill’s philosophy as caused by the fact that, “’the good’ is not determined by counting numbers and is not achieved by the sacrifice of anyone to anyone.” http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/utilitarianism.html For some more examples of how Mill isn’t the champion of liberty and rights that he’s largely regarded to be, consult Laura Snyder’s Reforming Philosophy: A Victorian Debate on Science and Society, chapters 4-5.) Rand also had contempt for compartmentalizing, that is, refusing to apply the knowledge you have to other areas of knowledge or other subjects beside your specialty, like a biologist refusing to connect his views to its implications in psychology or political science. In addition to that, she hated the “concrete-bound” mentality: the kind of person who deliberately does not relate cognitive items together, but focuses only on specific issues without any connection to abstract principles and context. An example we could see her using is: communism not working in Russia, communism not working in Cuba, and then someone asking, “what would this have to do with communism in Venezuela?” The person will not relate his knowledge and reach the abstract conclusion that communism does not work as a viable political-economic system, no matter in what country it is applied. (Of course, that conclusion rests of some understanding of the system of communism and why it fails, but that's the general pattern of the "concrete bound" mentality.) These examples of non-integration were amazing to her because her normal mental functioning was connecting things, and this may have something to do with her (implicit) allegiance to induction; it’s because of this allegiance that she was constantly looking for the broader principles that could be inferred from concretes, and reaching even broader principles from her earlier ones. The result is that she would constantly surprise people when she presented these connections. (For a good example of Rand’s ability to do this, consult Peikoff’s essay, “My Thirty Years with Ayn Rand,” where she surprises him with several principles he hadn’t even thought of before.) It wasn’t very difficult for her to induce the principle that knowledge involves integration. The principle became so important to her that it was even mentioned in the summary of Objectivism given in Galt’s speech from Atlas Shrugged: in one sentence, Galt speaks of integrating every item, without contradiction, into the sum of one’s knowledge. (Here are the relevant sentences in Galt’s speech: All thinking is a process of identification and integration. […] No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the total sum of his knowledge.) And once she knew that all knowledge is a sum that is arrived at by integration, she could later integrate that with the first principle: that this sum, at each stage, made possible the next stage. Measurement is the Essential Means of Transcending Percepts The third induction revolves around something that Rand had to know about math before she could think to explain integration in concept-formation using mathematical terms. She needed to know basic things about math, such as that measurement requires a unit of measurement (foot, pound, gram, etc.), that the unit varies according to the subject matter (the unit for measuring radiation is different from the unit for measuring distance, etc.), and that what measurement does is relate the entity or attribute to the proper unit. Of course, she didn’t originate any of these points, but whoever discovered it had to use a range of examples, and then reach an inductive generalization: “there must always be a unit; that this unit varies depending on the subject-matter; and what the essence of measurement is.” Rand needed to know the conclusion that measurement expands the range of our consciousness beyond the level of percepts, a conclusion which she didn’t originate, either. Take an example: let’s say that the average car weighs 2 tons. It isn’t possible to grasp how much 2 tons is by the sensations of touch and pressure, and you can’t explain the object’s heaviness to an animal, but it is possible to grasp it by relating the non-perceivable to the perceivable. You can relate it by saying that a car weighs 2 tons; a ton is 2000 pounds; and a pound is this. This principle about mathematics is an easy inductive conclusion, known well before Ayn Rand, and later she would connect this to her knowledge that concepts transcend the perceivable, as well. Consciousness has Identity Rand might have reached the idea that consciousness has identity before reaching her theory of concepts (at least, this is what Peikoff speculates). What the principle means is that you observe the functions of consciousness, noticing that it operates in certain, definite ways and does so in a fixed manner, and you observe that it can’t grasp things or do other cognitive feats without carrying out these processes. The principle isn’t a mere deduction from the law of identity, like “X is X,” because that wouldn’t give consciousness content. Rather, ideas such as the first three principles are cases of this principle: human consciousness gains knowledge in a definite order, its knowledge is gained by a process of integration, and conceptual knowledge is capable of transcending percepts—all of that is part of its identity. When you connect that with the law of identity, you reach something profound and metaphysical, “consciousness has identity,” and this leads to not only further specifying the law of identity axiom, but also you’ve gained more knowledge by identifying the processes of consciousness as something that consciousness has by its nature, that its identity consists (in part) of those processes. So, “consciousness has identity,” isn’t self-evident, but is rather grasped through a study of advanced issues concerning consciousness. There were a few other paths for Rand to reach this conclusion about consciousness: (1) The Sophist’s (and modern philosophers, like David Hume’s) attacks on the senses: a stick appearing bent in water, an object appearing smaller or larger depending on distance, when in fact the size doesn’t change, etc. Rand could see past all these attacks and recognize the common problem: if you perceive in a certain way or through certain means, all the critics seemed to say, then you don’t perceive at all. (2) Her encounter with the ideas of Immanuel Kant. For instance, in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant says this: For we can understand only that which brings with it, in intuition, something corresponding to our words. If by the complaints - that we have no insight whatsoever into the inner (nature) of things – it be meant that we cannot conceive by pure understanding what the things which appear to us may be in themselves, they are entirely illegitimate and unreasonable. For what is demanded is that we should be able to know things, and therefore to intuit them, without senses, and therefore that we should have a faculty of knowledge altogether different from the human and this not only in degree but as regards intuition likewise in kind -- in other words, that we should be not men but beings of whom we are unable to say whether they are even possible, much less how they are constituted. ( Critique of Pure Reason, A277/B333, Chapter III. The Ground of the Distinction of all Objects in general into Phenomena and Noumena, “Note to the Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection.” Emphasis in original. For a list of Kantian terms like “intuition” and “pure understanding,” see this site) Kant’s view is that we have certain subjective means of perceiving and conceiving objects (like the forms of intuition, “space,” and “time,” see those terms in the glossary website above), and that these are our human means of representing reality, that is, they structure or organize reality in relation to consciousness; the result of this thinking is that the noumenal world is composed of things insofar as they are outside of any relation to any consciousness, they are things-in-themselves (instead of things “in relation to consciousness”), and thus are unknowable. What Rand took away from this is that Kant is attacking the fact that consciousness has identity: His [Kant’s] argument, in essence, ran as follows: man is limited to a consciousness of a specific nature, which perceives by specific means and no others, therefore, his consciousness is not valid; man is blind, because he has eyes—deaf, because he has ears—deluded, because he has a mind—and the things he perceives do not exist, because he perceives them. She had to confront these sorts of criticisms before reaching her theory of concepts. And it should be clear how she had a plethora of examples, both positive and negative, from which she could induce the generalization that “consciousness has identity,” and that this was an important principle. What constitutes the identity of consciousness is the kind of information that we’ve gone over in this essay thus far, that the senses function in a certain way, that there’s some intimate connection between measurement and gaining conceptual knowledge, etc. Later on, she would use her theory of concept-formation to describe the essence of human consciousness as a conceptual faculty that functions by omitting measurements, and this supplied her with a ton of knowledge as to the ways that “consciousness has identity.” Concepts are Formed by Measurement-omission …Historically, it happened this way. Somewhere in the 1940s, so it’s over twenty years ago, I was discussing the issue of concepts with a Jesuit, who philosophically was a Thomist. He was holding to the Aristotelian position that concepts refer to an essence in concretes. And he specifically referred to ‘manness’ in man and ‘roseness’ in roses. I was arguing with him that there is no such thing, and that these names refer merely to an organization of concretes, that this is our way of organizing concretes. We never really finished the argument. But after this conversation, I was dissatisfied with my own answer. Because I felt, ‘Yes, I have indicated where concepts come from, but I haven’t indicated what is the process by which we organize concretes into different groups—because I certainly don’t agree with the modern nominalists who claim it’s an arbitrary convention or an arbitrary grouping.’ And then I asked myself, ‘What is it that my mind does when I use concepts? To what do I refer, and how do I learn new concepts?’ And within half an hour, I had the answer. Now it took me longer than that to check it, to apply it to various categories of concepts, and see if there are exceptions. But once I had the answer, by the logic of it, I knew that that’s it. And that’s it. [Ayn Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, 2nd Expanded Edition, p. 307] After reaching Aristotle’s understanding of objectivity, and reaching the four principles we’ve discussed above, she reached her theory of measurement-omission through introspection. By analyzing what her mind does with concepts, she realized that concepts are formed by integrating particulars which share common attributes, and that this process consists in not specifying—omitting—the specific measurements of these shared attributes, thus including all of the relevant measurements and particulars under one conception. Concepts are formed by abstracting and retaining similar characteristics that the particulars share—Rand realized that “similarity” and “abstraction,” when analyzed, both amount to: measurements omitted. And as she said, she may have reached her idea that “measurement-omission” is the process by which concepts are formed, but regarded it as only a hypothesis: in order to make sure that it was valid, she wanted to consider every kind of concept in a methodical manner. And this investigation is another example of induction: in chapter 2 of Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, after presenting her definition of concepts as formed by a process of measurement-omission, she applies it to nouns, materials, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, adjectives, pronouns, and conjunctions; in chapter 3, she applies it to forming higher level concepts, whether wider in scope, like “mammal” in comparison to “man,” or more narrow, ‘like “policeman”; chapter 4, concepts of consciousness, like “introspection,” “extrospection,” “thought,” “emotion,” and “love”; chapter 5, the role of definitions, a reduction of the need for the concept of “justice,” and a discussion of the concept “objective”; chapter 6, the basic axiomatic concepts, “existence,” “identity,” and “consciousness”; chapter 7, the concept of “unit-economy,” “Rand’s Razor (like Occam’s Razor, but for concepts),” and the cognitive function of concepts generally. (Peikoff mentions that he gets the historical credit for Rand applying the theory to concepts of materials, like “water” and “gold.” He asked: “How does it apply to water?” After corresponding back and forth with each other, it ended up being included in chapter 2.) Peikoff summarizes Rand’s massive scale induction in the sentence: “the similar concretes integrated by a concept differ from one another only quantitatively, only in the measurement of their characteristics.” Also, as reported by Peikoff, Rand said that her theory of concept-formation was purely an inductive conclusion, with no attempt to deduce it from the nature of reason or of the mind or of consciousness; she simply observed what her mind did, used mathematics to assist her in identifying what she observed, and then induced based on the observations. Finally, her theory was completed when she integrated her view of concepts with her earlier identifications about consciousness, by spiraling back to those principles and reformulating them. • The principle that knowledge involves a definite order: this was easily incorporated into Rand’s view that concepts are formed in an inherently hierarchical structure, that advanced concepts cannot be formed or understood without forming or understanding the concepts on which they depend. So what started as an observed regularity or generalization, later on becomes a description of the very nature of concepts. In other words, a principle first reached by induction now becomes a corollary of a principle that was also reached by induction—in detailing her theory of concept-formation, Rand not only incorporated the principle that “knowledge involves a definite order,” but explained why this is necessarily the case. (Further, in the taped epistemology discussions transcribed in the second edition of Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, she discusses the hierarchy of knowledge more generally: that perceptual concretes allow us to form concepts, that we can cognitively hold information sophisticated enough to form propositions in a perceptual form, and that we form propositions by first forming their constituent concepts and then uniting them.) • The principle that knowledge involves integration: this is connected with Rand’s discovery that a concept, the basic unit of conceptual knowledge, is itself a form of integration, of relating cognitive items. Since a concept is a means of integrating cognitive data, human consciousness is, by nature, an integrating mechanism. The principle that knowledge is a sum, that it involves integration, is then tied to the points that concepts have a certain nature and are formed in a certain context, that concepts are by nature contextual and hierarchical. So these two epistemological principles that Rand initially used to reach her theory are now seen as aspects or tenets of that very theory. Once she had her theory of concept-formation and integrated it with her earlier ideas about knowledge, she kept expanding the theory with her own growing knowledge about knowledge. In chapter 7, she discusses the “crow epistemology,” the point that the amount of perceptual or conceptual material that a person can hold at any time is limited, and that the power of concepts is to condense a vast amount of information into a few, manageable units. This originally came from a scientist discussing an experiment with crows to Rand, and after hearing how limited crows are in counting objects, someone then exclaimed, “how limited crows are compared to human beings!” But Rand gleamed a much different conclusion: not how different human are from crows or other animals, but how similar we are; Rand readily recognized that our mental capacity to hold information is very limited as well, limited to perhaps 5 or 6 units at most, and that concepts save us by allowing us to integrate cognitive data on an unlimited scale, expanding what we can be conscious of on a scale entirely different from, and unavailable to, other animals. Take her theory’s idea that concepts integrate an unlimited number of perceptual concretes into one unit, and this new knowledge about crows, and it leads to the deductive conclusion that concepts are mental space-savers, constantly expanding the amount of material we can mentally hold at a given time. Objectivity is a method that Adheres to Facts while Recognizing the Context and Hierarchy of Knowledge Once Rand reached her theory of concept-formation, how did it lead to her reformulation of Aristotelian “objectivity”? Though she rejected the realist and nominalist approaches to concept-formation, there were two ideas that she gleamed from her own study: 1. Concepts are based on factual data about the world, and are not arbitrary inventions of the mind. 2. Concepts are human: they are made by a process of measurement-omission, a human process, and this implies that we don’t know how other conceptual beings would form concepts other than humans. She also knew that concepts relate the (humanly) perceivable to the (humanly) non-perceivable, so they are formed in part from the structure of our cognition to that extent. So concepts are human because they satisfy a human need: more cognitive space. We don’t have any knowledge of alien conceptual consciousnesses and how they would deal with a complexity of data and non-perceivables. Concepts are tools of our consciousness to handle the issues we face in reality. They don’t pertain to consciousness alone, contra Nominalism, and they don’t pertain to existence alone, contra Realism. Concepts are a specific kind of relationship between the two, consciousness and existence. Without proper preparation, Rand might have (conceivably) been led to apologize for the fact that concepts have a human dimension or element, or try to minimize this aspect somehow. She would have minimized it, rather than claim that concepts lead to subjectivism, that we don’t conceive of reality in an objective way, which leads to Kant’s critical philosophy. (Kant even went so far as to redefine “objectivity” himself, meaning the forms of consciousness that make experience possible, like the Categories or the schema of imagination. See the glossary again here.) But what happened instead is that she insisted upon the point that concepts have a human element, and remarked that it was only because of this fact that it could give us knowledge about the world. She was counting on the principle that “consciousness has identity,” as this allowed her to move from her theory of concept-formation to affirming the fact about concepts that preserves their ability to confer knowledge and to make knowledge possible. Aristotle held that the mind is like a blank writing tablet, on which anything can be written (and thus that it is potentially everything) as he thinks that this is how he can show that the mind has a common element with everything. (Consult “On the Soul,” book 3.) But if he were right, then how could reality write on the mind? How could it reach us? If the mind had no element of its own, with nothing to add to cognition, then it wouldn’t exist. The same point can be applied to the nominalists and philosophers like Kant, who thought that if the mind contributes anything of its own, then it is a distortion of reality, some form of subjectivism. Rand held that no such distortion exists: whatever the various methods and kinds of consciousness there are, they are all forms and methods of grasping something, reality. There’s nothing else to be conscious of or to grasp. And this is the relevance of “consciousness has identity.” A human consciousness must grasp in some form by some means, according to its nature, and that of the processes that it performs. To object to the fact that there’s a human element in cognition is to really object to: A is A. Having understood the role of consciousness in concept-formation, she integrated that with the principle that consciousness has identity: she distinguished between the form of cognition from the object, and from then on there was no problem. Later, she would claim that conceptualization involves both consciousness and existence, and proclaim in opposition to the philosophers who preceded her: “identity is the means of knowledge, not the obstacle to it.” The point that concepts are based on facts really isn’t enough to fully validate “objectivity.” If objectivity were merely based on a kind of correspondence between facts and a tablet or mind with no nature of its own, then someone could say: “Our consciousness is not a ‘nothing.’ It works by definite means, and we can only perceive and conceive as humans do, so there is no real objectivity.” The standard objection to objectivity is that it’s a method based only on facts, and that logic has no relation to the means and identity of our consciousness. Rand had to reach the right theory of concept-formation and the idea that “consciousness has identity,” in order to use both to reformulate objectivity, that logic is based on facts and the requirements of human cognition. One example is the fact that measurement-omission is a method, even though it doesn’t depend on our knowledge or choice, or even awareness: people have been omitting measurements for as long as we have been forming concepts, just as we knew before Rand that people abstracted to form concepts. (In her book on epistemology, Rand notes: Concepts of method designate systematic courses of action devised by men for the purpose of achieving certain goals. The course of action may be purely psychological (such as a method of using one’s consciousness).[…]Concepts of method are formed by retaining the distinguishing characteristics of the purposive course of action and of its goal, while omitting the particular measurements of both. ( Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, 2nd edition, pp. 35-36, emphasis added by me.) With that in mind, the method of measurement-omission consists in regarding certain measurements as existing but not specifying them, with the goal being the formation of a conceptual product (like a concept). Method is thus a broader term than “logic”: “method” covers more than conscious processes, and it means any process we can engage in that’s divisible into steps that we can pursue, whether consciously or not. It applies to successive steps leading to any goal, not only those of epistemology like knowledge or truth: there’s a method of driving, swimming, of building a house, etc. This is why the final meaning is: “objectivity” is adherence to reality based on certain rules of method, a method based on facts and appropriate to man’s form of cognition. “Method,” in conscious terms, still means “logic,” so Aristotle is completely right, here. But Rand chooses to use “method,” instead of logic, so that she can include the conscious and subconscious methods of the conceptual level of consciousness. The subconscious level includes what we’ve gone over thus far: omit measurements, knowledge having a definite order, integration, context, hierarchy, abstraction, etc. The benefits of Rand’s reformulation of “objectivity” is that she can identify the exact relationship between concepts and reality and thus validate them (which previous theories couldn’t do, or gave up trying), and we can construct the conscious method of logic much more completely than Aristotle could. We know that human consciousness needs logic due to its capability to form concepts within a context and within a hierarchy, such that anything that is “logical” cannot neglect or drop either of these. Aristotle would say, “don’t commit contradictions,” whereas Rand would say, “yes, and to know that you’re avoiding contradictions, you must keep the full context and hierarchy in connection with every attempt to check propositions against the laws of logic.” Rand’s additional point offers a new window into logic that wasn’t attainable before her. “Don’t contradict”—we couldn’t really grasp what a noncontradictory identification is, until we learned that the propositions in an argument must take into account the sum of knowledge and not just a compartment or solitary fragment (the issue of context), and that they have to be not only themselves reduced, but that each constituent concept of each proposition must be reduced to sensory data (the issue of hierarchy). What this means is that to show that a conclusion is “objective,” we would have to (1) validate each concept of the argument by showing that it can be reduced back to sensory data, (2) show that the propositional conclusion is itself reducible back to this evidence, and (3) show that it can be integrated with everything else that we know. This is Rand’s contribution to the science of logic insofar as it’s a corollary of “objectivity,” thanks to her theory of concept-formation as measurement-omission. Conclusion In the induction of Aristotle’s view of “objectivity,” we contrasted objectivity with subjectivity, the latter being the illogical techniques of people ignorant of or spiteful towards logic, the objective approach. In Rand’s case, there are three schools: the intrinsic, subjective, and objective. Using the genus method, we could have said “knowledge involves some kind of relationship between consciousness and existence.” The three positions we could have derived are “only contributor is consciousness (subjectivist),” “the only contributor is existence (intrinsicist),” and “both contribute and it’s the relationship that’s the most significant (objectivist).” She would discuss many issues and aspects in philosophy and in life in terms of the “intrinsic-subjective-objective” trichotomy, including the theories of universals/concept-formation, the selection of essential characteristics/essences for a concept, approaches to knowledge generally, the status of values, of “the good,” and beauty (and more). We should be able to more fully understand how she reached this idea of “objectivity” with which to contrast subjectivity and intrinsicism. Meta-blog, automatic cross-post

Now that we’ve reduced and induced Aristotle’s idea of “objectivity,” we can start the reduction of Rand’s concept of “objectivity,” which is an important advancement over his idea. Let’s start with Ayn Rand’s definition, though presented in Leonard Peikoff’s words: “volitional adherence to reality by following certain rules of method, a method based on facts and appropriate to man’s form of cognition.” The “rules of method” is Aristotelian logic, but there are important epistemological discoveries within Rand’s version of objectivity that we need to focus on. Aristotle wouldn’t have focused on man’s form of cognition as something worth analyzing in order to understand how we reach knowledge. Whereas, for Ayn Rand, it wasn’t enough that our method is based on facts; our consciousness offers something in the acquisition of knowledge, concepts are partly human, and as a consequence, objectivity has to take this element into account. So, to reduce the idea of “a method based on facts and based on human consciousness,” we need to understand Rand’s theory of concept-formation, specifically why it is that concepts require both reality and human consciousness. There’s some kind of element involved in forming concepts, and recognizing this element will allow us to learn something that is inherent in all concepts, to then form Rand’s theory of concept-formation, and after that we can amend Aristotle’s view of objectivity. The next step down is: how did Rand reach her theory of concept-formation? What observations did she need to reach it? There four elements of consciousness that we need to know before reaching her theory of concept-formation: 1. We need to know beforehand that consciousness has a specific identity, the principle that identity is the means to knowing reality, not the impediment. 2. The identity of concepts includes the fact that it does something with measurements, and this is the means by which concepts can surpass and rise above percepts. 3. An understanding of cognitive integration is necessary before we notice that aspect of the identity of concepts; we need some general awareness that integration plays a crucial role in gaining knowledge. 4. Of course, before we can put things into a sum, integrate them, we must be able to take things apart, go through a certain sequence, a series of steps. This leads to our earliest understanding that knowledge inherently has a certain kind of sequence—concept-formation involves a process of forming one concept, and then forming another based on the earlier one, etc. To understand integration, we need to reach the idea that there’s an order to knowledge. And this is where we’ve reached the end of the reduction, since below “an order to knowledge” are specific items of knowledge that we later relate as being in a certain sequence or pattern, and these are available to introspection. Meta-blog, automatic cross-post

This essay will focus on the aspects of John Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy that discuss his ideas on causation and induction. Before presenting his rules of philosophizing, which amounts to his theory of how induction works, John Herschel discusses the characteristics of cause-and-effect. The Five Characteristics of Cause-and-effect In Part 1, I mentioned how we study phenomena in order to discover connections among things which we term cause-and-effect. Herschel believes that enumerating the characteristics of cause-and-effect will be necessary for our presentation of general rules, rules designed to guide us in examining the facts we’ve collected, and deciding upon their common cause. Indeed, the rules of induction that Herschel presents are informed by the attributes he lists. There are five characteristics, and they can be abbreviated as (1) invariable antecedence, (2) invariable negation, (3) increase or diminution, (4) proportionality, and (5) reversal: (1) Invariable antecedence: There’s an unalterable connection between the antecedent, the cause, and the consequent, the effect, unless prevented by some counteracting cause. Herschel cautions that it isn’t always obvious how cause and effect works in a given case. An effect may appear gradually while the cause is still accumulating in intensity (e.g. a slow boil), or the cause and effect happen so instantaneously that the interval cannot be perceived (e.g. the generation of lightning). (2) Invariable Negation: The effect doesn’t exist whenever the cause is absent, unless there is some other cause that is capable producing the same effect. (3) Increase or Diminution: The increase or decrease in the magnitude of the effect, corresponding to the increased or diminished intensity of the cause, in such cases as admits of increase and diminution. (Like the increase or decrease in pressure applied to a table by your hand with the increase or decrease in energy and effort you put into pushing your hand into the table.) (4) Proportionality: The effect is proportional to the cause in cases of direct, unimpeded action. (5) Reversal: Reversal of the effect with that of the cause—when the cause ceases to exist, so does the effect. Herschel’s “Rules of Philosophizing”: the Ten Rules of Inductive Reasoning Following his list of cause-and-effect’s features, he makes ten, “observations, which may be considered as so many propositions readily applicable to particular cases, or rules of philosophizing” (Prelim. Disc., p. 152). He characterizes these methods as an “inductive search for a cause,” and describes them as follows (with titles made up by me): 1. The Method of Exclusion: If in our group of facts there is one in which the sought-after phenomena is wanting or the opposite, then such a peculiarity is not the cause we seek. Herschel postulated that causes precede effects, so if there’s a fact which doesn’t reveal the phenomena, then that fact cannot be the cause we’re looking for. 2. The Method of Agreement: When the facts agree in a certain respect in all cases, then this is the cause in question, if not, it is a collateral effect of the same cause; if there is only one point of agreement, then this becomes a certainty. If there is more than one cause, they may be “concurrent causes.” 3. The Method of Strong Analogy: That we do not deny the existence of a cause when we have many strong analogies to support it, though it may not be apparent how such a cause can produce the effect, or even though it may be difficult to think of its existence under the circumstances—we must appeal to experience rather than decide “a priori” against the cause, and try whether to see if the mystery can be unraveled. (He gives the example of the bright sun which we think to be intensely hot, and the question of how light can produce heat or maintain it, neither of which we knew back in his day. We can’t simply deny either inference just due to our ignorance, however.) 4. The Method of Contrary Facts: Contrary or opposing facts are equally instructive for the discovery of causes as are favorable facts. (He gives the example of an iron vessel, the air of which contains moistened iron filings, and leads to the diminishing of its bulk due to some part of the air being taken out and combining with the iron to produce rust. If you examine the remaining air, you will discover that the air will neither support flames (combustion) nor animal life (respiration). This is a contrary fact (neither an affirmation of combustion nor respiration), but it shows that the cause of the support of flame and animal life is to be seen in the part of the air which iron abstracts, and which rusts it.) 5. The Method of Degrees or Intensity: Causes become more obvious when we arrange the facts in order of intensity in which some peculiar quality subsists, though not necessarily, since counteracting or modifying causes may be acting at the same time. 6. The Method of Counteracting Causes: That it is the counteracting or modifying causes, operating unperceived, that prevent the effect of the cause we seek in the cases where the resulting phenomena would have been favorable if not for the intervening cause. Exceptions to a proposed general law can often be removed by removing or allowing for such counteracting causes. (Like Galileo’s thoughts on free fall, and how the resistance of different medium affect the rate of fall of objects as opposed to a vacuum. My example.) 7. The Method of Difference: If we can find in nature, or produce by experiment, two instances which agree exactly in all but one particular, and differ in that one, the influence of that difference in producing the phenomenon must be made sensible. If the differing particular is present in one instance but doesn’t exist in the other, the production or non-production will determine if it is or is not the only cause. This is even more evident if we can make the reverse happen: it the differing quality is then absent in the first case but present in the latter, and the effect is reversed from the first case. But if the total presence or absence of this differing aspect only produces a change in the degree or intensity of the phenomenon, we can only conclude that it acts as a concurrent cause or condition with some other cause to be sought elsewhere. In nature an occurrence of two phenomena agreeing in everything except for one respect is rare, but experiment makes this much easier to produce. This is the grand application of experiments of inquiry in physical researches. This quality increases the value of experiments, since it makes the inquiry into nature more pointed, and its answer more decisive. 8. The Method of Concomitant Variation: If we’re trying to discover the influence of a circumstance, and cannot completely wipe it out or oppose it, we must find cases where it varies considerably in degree. If that cannot be done, we may be able to alter its influence one way or another through introducing a new different circumstance, which we think will likely produce this effect, and thus obtain an indirect evidence of its influence. (Think of a catalyst, it would be the new circumstance that starts or makes more powerful a chemical reaction, for instance. We would do well to remember that it is indirect evidence, and that the new circumstance may have a direct influence of its own, or become a modifying one on some other circumstance (like the air reducing the bulk of an iron vessel, which certainly influences the composition of the vessel). 9. The Method of Residues or Subduction: Complicated phenomena have a plurality of causes, which concur, oppose or are independent of each other (like horizontal and vertical motion), and operate at once, and thus produce a compound effect. The phenomena can be simplified by subducting the effect of all known causes either by deductive reasoning or by appeal to experience, the result being a residual phenomenon that requires explanation. This is the process by which an advanced science progresses (or an advanced philosophical theory, explaining minor technical issues; my note). Most of the phenomena of nature are very complicated; when the effects of all known causes are estimated with exactness and thus subducted, the residual facts are constantly appearing in the form of new phenomena, leading to the most important conclusions. (The small discrepancies of predicting the motion of orbiting objects with gravity as the sole cause, lead to the supposition of a resisting medium as the cause of the discrepancy.) (Another example: François Jean Dominique Arago discovered that if you suspend a magnet on a silk thread and vibrate it, and the air resistance, along with the inability of the thread to perpetually move, will cause the magnet and thread to eventually rest. Place a copper plate beneath the magnet and its motion is further retarded, which quickly leads to a whole new relation of facts (copper and magnetic motion.)) 10. The Method of Causal Connection: The detection of a possible cause by comparing gathered-up cases must lead to one of two things: (1) the detection of the real cause and its manner of acting, which furnishes the complete explanation of the facts; or (2) the establishment of an abstract law of nature, pointing out two general phenomena as invariably connected—where there is one, the other also appears. The invariable connection is a phenomenon of a higher order than a given particular fact. When many of these are discovered, we can again “classify, combine, and examine them, with a view to the detection of their causes, or the discovery of still more general laws, and so on without end.” (p. 159) For Herschel, these are the methods by which the process of induction reasons from phenomena to causes. It may help to consider five of these methods to be kinds of inferences, and the other five as precautions or tips for the inductive investigator to keep in mind as he searches for a cause. I’ll now restate them as “kinds of inference” and as “causal tips”: On the five kinds of inference: (1) The first method (Exclusion) is a kind of eliminative reasoning, in which you reason that some thing or circumstance isn’t a necessary or sufficient cause of an effect or phenomena being studied, based on either observation or experiment. (2) The second (Agreement) is a more sophisticated form of enumerative induction, in which from the instances it is reasoned that the facts share the same cause in the quality that they have in common, or it’s reasoned that this common quality is a collateral effect of whatever causes the facts being studied; if there is more than one cause, then the induction would conclude that there may be two or more causes which act at the same time to produce the effect (“concurrent causes”). (3) The seventh method (Difference) is a form of causal reasoning, in which we note how the one factor that a group of facts do not share plays into the production or non-production of the phenomena being studied, adding that it may or may not be the cause, or only a concurrent cause. (4) The eighth method (Concomitant Variation) is another kind of casual reasoning in which we infer the influence of a circumstance on a phenomena by finding instances in which the circumstance varies in degree, or failing this, introduce a new circumstance which affects the first, giving us indirect evidence of its influence. (5) The ninth method (Residuals/Subduction) involves either deductive reasoning or inference from an appeal to experience, by which we break down a complex phenomenon of compound effects with multiple causes, correlating known causes with their effects, in order to wind up with a simpler, residual phenomena that requires a new inductive investigation for its cause. (There is one other method that Herschel considers important for induction: analogical reasoning. I will discuss this more in-depth in Part three.) On the causal tips: (1) The third method (Strong Analogy) cautions us to avoid denying that something is the cause of a phenomenon “a priori,” without experience, when that thing has many strong analogies in support of it being the cause. Even if it’s hard to conceive of how the cause could produce the effect, we can’t allow our reason to be sole arbiter over what can be the appropriate cause, or ignore relevant analogical evidence. (2) The fourth method (Contrary Facts) instructs us that contradictory instances, like air not supporting flame or life (as opposed to the positive instances that normally apply in life), is informative in our search for a cause. This is similar to Bacon’s account of induction, which considers positive and negative (or “contradictory”) instances of the phenomena being investigated. (3) The fifth method (Degrees) suggests that we arrange the phenomena being studied according to the range of intensity belonging to some quality of them, which may make the discovery of the cause easier. The arranging of phenomena by their intensity in order to discover the cause was first used in Bacon’s theory of induction, in his Table of Degrees or Comparison. (4) The sixth method (Counteracting Causes) warns us that in cases which don’t convey the effects of the cause we’re investigating, it is due to counteracting or modifying causes, maybe acting in a manner that cannot be directly perceived. (5) The final one (Causal Connections) remarks that the detection of a possible cause must lead to either the detection of a real cause and manner of acting which explains the facts, or the formation of an abstract law of nature, which describes two general phenomena as being invariably connected. It’s important to note that Herschel believes that these inductive rules are more like general guidelines than a strict methodology, which is contrary to Mill’s inductive method. (But Mill’s theory of induction is a topic for another time.) This also means that he doesn’t believe that scientific induction must discover certain causes in some necessary order (like heat, then radiation, then molecules, etc.). In his presentation of how to induce a theory of dew-formation (following the theory of Dr. William Well, Essay on Dew (1818)), prior knowledge that heat radiates from objects was crucial for understanding the cause of dew, but Herschel remarks that, even with no knowledge of heat radiation, our induction of dew would nevertheless had made the fact of radiation known to us. Following this idea, he says: In the study of nature, we must not, therefore, be scrupulous as to how we reach to a knowledge of such general facts: provided only we verify them carefully when once detected, we must be content to seize them wherever they are to be found. (Preliminary Discourse, p. 164, Aphorism 170) Herschel then proceeds to list the ways in which we can verify the inductive conclusions we reach. The Three Methods of Verifying Inductions Examination It is a tendency of the human mind to speculate, to leap forward, on the basis of a sketchy analogy between some phenomena, to a cause or law. Because of this, many of our most important inductions must be considered as conclusions drawn from few cases, and “verified by trial on many.” “Whenever,” Herschel states, therefore, we think we have been led by induction to the knowledge of the proximate cause of a phenomenon or of a law of nature, our next business is to examine deliberately and seriatim [that is, points taken one at a time] all the cases we have collected of its occurrence, in order to satisfy ourselves that they are explicable by our cause, or fairly included in the expression of our law… (ibid., p. 165, Aphorism 172, words in brackets mine) An induction has to be able to account for and explain all the cases and phenomena from which it was generated. Herschel advises the inductive reasoner to examine all the cases he has gathered up to determine if each and every one of them can be explained by the induction, and that they all are properly represented in the inductive law or generalization that has been formulated. What Herschel decides to do with “contradictory instances,” with instances that seem to disconfirm the induction, is well worth noting. He remarks that any exceptions of the induction must be “carefully noted and set aside for re-examination at a more advanced period,” where at this more advanced stage of knowledge, the cause of the exception might become known, and afterwards the exception may turn out to be an affirmation of the induction in a way that was never thought to be so. In verifying our induction, the steps needed for the verification will differ depending on whether the cause or law we’ve reached is already known and generally recognized as a general causal law, of which the phenomenon we were studying is merely one additional effect of this general cause, or if it is less general, less known, or altogether new. If it is less known, less general, or new, then our verification, examining all the known cases and noting that they all agree with the induction, will suffice, because it shows that induction really does fit with the facts that are known. But if it is generally known and recognized as a more general cause, “the process of verification is of a much more severe and definite kind,” Herschel imparts. This more severe kind of verification traces the relevant causal actions with more precision, and this precision is reached by modifying the circumstances of each case gathered in the induction; we test the circumstances and estimate the effects of our tests, in order to show, “that nothing unexplained remains behind.” He modifies this point by stating that we’re only concerned with explaining this known cause or causes, not with unknown modifying causes. If unknown modifying causes occur, we’ll first discover their existence by the presence of residual phenomena that occur in our evidence for our induction. If an induction is really valid and a comprehensive one, then any unexplained phenomena that remain after comparing the inductive conclusion with its cases, in all their circumstances, must be a residual one (instead of a necessary indicator that the induction is false). The residual phenomena then become the subject of another train of inductive reasoning to discover what their cause or law(s) is. This is how inductions become more general and more specific and how new sciences rise up: It is thus that we may be said to witness facts with the eyes of reason; and it is thus that we are continually attaining a knowledge of new phenomena and new laws which lie beneath the surface of things, and give rise to the creation of fresh branches of science more and more remote from common observation. (ibid., p. 166, aphorism 174) An example of an induction leading to residual phenomena that Herschel discusses is the gravitational law--that planets are kept in their solar orbits, and moons in their planetary orbits, by an attractive force which decreases in strength as the squared distance increases—which historically led to discrepancies in explaining the motions of the planets, and larger ones in the cases of the moons. These two became “residual phenomena,” were studied in subsequent inquiries, and determined to be cause by the same gravitational law, but now applied to the mutual attractive force of the planets on each other (answering the issues of measuring solar orbits) and the force by which the sun influences the motions of the moons (answering the issues of planetary orbits). Prediction The second verification of inductions is the induction’s capability to predict new phenomena that are analogous to the ones that were originally considered in the formation of the induction. For an inductive law of nature to be general enough to serve as a foundation upon which greater inductions may be built, the law of nature must be universal in its applications. And we won’t know if it will be general enough to apply to more than what instances were used to form it, unless we’ve already experienced the law’s ability to do that very thing—to allow us, before trial or experiment, to state what will happen in cases similar to the ones already included under the induction. To verify the induction in this way, we must extend its application to cases not originally part of the induction; this means carefully varying the circumstances under which the causes act in our induction, in order to determine if its effects are truly universal. This includes applying the inductive law to extreme cases. Herschel illustrates the importance of the extreme case with Galileo’s inductive conclusion that gravity’s acceleration was the same on all bodies, great and small, remarking that Galileo couldn’t prove this with extremely light objects like feathers or cotton due to the counteracting resistance of the air during their fall. The invention of the air pump, however, allowed this law of acceleration to be tested by an extreme case: Isaac Newton exhausted the air from a glass using the pump, and dropped a guinea (a British coin) and a downy feather at the same time, the result being that they struck the bottom at the same time. Of course, in air the coin would strike first, followed by the feather as it slowly floats to the ground. After giving this example, Herschel announces, “[let] any one make the trial in the air, and he will perceive the force of an extreme case.” (For some cool videos demonstrating the validity of Galileo’s induction that resistance is what prevents objects of different shapes and weights from falling at the same rate of acceleration, see the famous “Apollo 15 Hammer and Feather Experiment” and a new version of the “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXDZWKmRxI0” experiment made by a person using his personally-designed apparatus.) A further requirement is to be applied to inductive laws whose expression is quantitative: its universal validity must be established not only by subjecting it to trial in all manners of varying circumstance, but every trial made must be of precise measurement. The means for subjecting the quantitative law to trial should also be designed such that the trial can be repeated many times in order to make any deviations from the law apparent. Consilience Consilience is the third, and the best, verification criterion for an induction. And it consists of completely unsuspected verifications of the induction arising from areas of study least expected. Herschel focuses on the psychological aspects of consilience, in that an induction is consilient when unsuspected or unknown cases or even groups of facts actually verify the induction’s truth when they weren’t expected to, especially cases that were at first considered hostile to the induction’s validity. “Evidence of this kind,” Herschel remarks, “is irresistible, and compels assent with a weight which scarcely any other possesses” (ibid., p. 170, Aph. 180). He states that this is often the case with “residual phenomena”: Unexpected and peculiarly striking confirmations of inductive laws frequently occur in the form of residual phenomena, in the course of investigations of a widely different nature from those which gave rise to the inductions themselves. (ibid., p. 171, Aph. 181) The term “consilience” was coined by Herschel’s good friend and fellow scientist, William Whewell, who also worked out his own theory of induction. As I’ll discuss in my future essays on Whewell, consilience had this psychological aspect for Whewell too, but also a causal, logical element: a “jumping together of inductions” in the form of causal unification of different event or process kinds into more general kinds (a more general induction), whose members all share a common cause or property. (The last sentence is paraphrased from Dr. Laura Snyder’s “Reforming Philosophy,” p. 182) Science as a Process of Induction and Deduction The lower stage of induction that’s been discussed is how we reach proximate causes, laws of nature which apply to vast amounts of phenomena of certain kinds. Deduction is the method by which we trace out these laws into their farthest reaching consequences and effects. Indeed, “it is very important to observe, that the successful process of scientific enquiry demands continually the alternate use of both the inductive and deductive method.” (Prelim. Disc. p. 175, Aph. 184) Speaking further about the relation between induction and deduction, he states: The path by which we rise to knowledge must be made smooth and beaten in its lower steps, and often ascended and descended, before we can scale our way to any eminence, much less climb to the summit. The achievement is too great for a single effort; stations must be established, and communications kept open with all below. To quit metaphor ; there is nothing so instructive, or so likely to lead to the acquisition of general views, as this pursuit of the consequences of a law once arrived at into every subject where it may seem likely to have an influence. (ibid.) This is also how greater inductions (hypotheses and theories) are verified, by deductions made from the inductive conclusions using specific facts, and testing to see if the theory fits with the results. I’ll cover this relationship more in Part 3. Part 3 will cover Herschel’s views on analogy, the greater inductions called “theories,” the role of hypothesis, and the three ways for discovering the general laws which are the foundation for these theories. Meta-blog, automatic cross-post

Objectivity now being reduced, we can work through the steps Aristotle had to in order to induce his principle of objectivity. It’s essentially five steps: Grasp the distinction of percepts and concepts. Understand that concepts are capable of error, whereas percepts are not. Learn that the functioning of concepts is under our control, whereas percepts are not. Discover that we can somehow use percepts as a means to measure concepts. We’ll then know that a method is necessary, and that it is possible because we know what it would consist of, by reducing the fallible part to the infallible part. Percepts and Concepts The first step is to reach the distinction between percepts and concepts, what the Greeks called “sense” and “idea.” The distinction was originated by Socrates and Plato, depending on how one interprets his dialogues. What Plato had to do, and what Aristotle and all of us had to do, was to mentally observe similar instances of ideas in contrast to sensory experience, to our percepts. With the contrast, Plato was able to draw out a list of attributes that belonged to ideas as opposed to sense experience: Ideas were general or universal (Beauty, Justice, Virtue, etc.); sense experience was particular or concrete (the beauty of a maiden, the piety of a man, etc.). The One and the Many—we’re aware of countless things which nevertheless seem to have the same properties; for instance, John is the same person, no matter what age he is or any differences in his appearances. Plato realized that this physical distinction actually applied to these mental phenomena, ideas. Ideas are abstract, non-material, whereas the senses interact with our bodies and material objects. Ideas are immutable, changeless, whereas sensory objects are always changing, coming into being and going out of existence. And so on. This first step itself consists of a great many inductions Plato had to make before even reaching this distinction. He had to realize that the phenomena of ideas were universal to man, but not to animals, which lead to the induction that animals possess senses, but not ideas. All men possess ideas—another induction. He had induce that all ideas have the same composite attributes—that anything that has universality would be immutable, non-material, etc. These weren’t very difficult for Plato and Aristotle to induce, as these conceptions of ideas and the senses were easily integrated with the long-known view that man was the animal that reasons, argues, judges, etc. The field of epistemology started because Plato’s discovery led to the further discovery that reason, the special faculty of humans, was the faculty of ideas or universals, in contrast to other animals who had only the faculty of sense. Error-free vs. Fallible The next step: before we get to an idea of method, we have to discover something about error. Aristotle himself made the necessary discovery, following Plato’s distinction of ideas and senses: he states explicitly and on numerous occasions that the senses (specifically the “special objects” of senses) can never be in error, but that the intellectual interpretations of sense-data can be mistaken. He says for example that the seeing of the special object of sight, i.e. color, like “white,” can never be in error, while the belief that the white object seen is a “man” may be mistaken (On the Soul, Book 3, Chapter 3). He made this clear-cut induction without a clear knowledge of how the sense-organs operate or even how we form concepts, except that it involves abstraction and induction. But from examples like the white object seen being a man, and many examples of seeing, hearing, etc. being free from error, while the thought associated with the sense experiences being liable to error, it was relatively simple for him to generalize, thus grasping the fallibility of ideas, and the infallibility of the senses. What We Control The third step: We also have to know where we are in control, and where we’re not. The Greeks discovered this, and Plato and Aristotle knew that the senses were automatic, that they are an interaction of some material object and your body’s sense-organs, and no effort is needed on your part. And Aristotle knew implicitly that concepts functioned under our free will, and that we could deliberate, guide our mental and physical actions, make choices based on our circumstances, improve our skills, like in debate, etc. He knew that no act of will could affect our senses once we our organs had interacted with the objects of sense, and that no mental effort was necessary for the interaction, and that the opposite was true for the level of ideas. (For instance, in the Topics, Book 8, Chapter 2, Aristotle advises that during a debate, when you present an inductive argument based on several cases and your opponent won’t admit the argument, you should cover all the cases with an already-known term, or a newly-coined one, which places the burden on the opponent to then disprove your argument.) Clearly, he thought that the use and creation of ideas was under our control, and he must have induced the restriction of free will to the conceptual level from observing numerous cases which discerned the role of choice. So, Aristotle knew that the part that can go wrong is in our control, and the part that was error-free was not in our control. With that knowledge, advances could be made in the science of epistemology, specifically an account of objectivity. The goal is to use our free will to correspond our ideas to the senses. Aristotle will propose to use the safe, error-free part as a standard against which to test the part that’s liable to error. The Connection between Percepts and Concepts This, however, leads to an interesting question: Since ideas and senses are opposites in so many ways, what could be the connection between the two? Plato is well-known for regarding ideas and the senses as so different that they occupy different realms, and thus that there are two worlds. Aristotle had to realize that there’s only one world, and that ideas come from sensory experience. He describes the process of ideas coming from sensory experience in Posterior Analytics, Book 2, Chapter 19 as a progression from perception to memory to experience (memories of the same thing) to a universal. The essence of objectivity is being able to reduce our ideas to the evidence of the senses. So Aristotle’s discovery that all ideas come from sense experience was an important and necessary induction. How did he reach it? He had to directly observe the process he used in forming concepts. And the essential process of concept-formation, the one which he was the first to name, he termed abstraction. By abstraction, he meant a special focus on the similarities among things, while ignoring or not specifying the magnitudes of their differences. Certain things have similarities which we can cognitively focus on and “pull out,” separate in thought what can’t be separated in reality. Once mentally separated, we could discover an implicit universal that applies to all the particulars of a certain kind, and that allows us to form the concept, definition, or proposition. He performed this analysis on many concepts, concepts that he observed introspectively, and concepts he heard from other people. This insight into the nature of abstraction led to Aristotle’s induction that all ideas are formed by a process of abstraction from the data of senses, adding that higher-level abstractions were formed from lower-level abstractions that were initially formed from sense experience (see Posterior Analytics, Book 2, Chapter 19). For Aristotle, this corrected Plato’s original thesis that ideas do not come from the senses but are recollected from our previous existence. This in turn led to the deductive conclusion that there are no ideas apart from sensory evidence, and thus to the view now known as “empiricism,” the idea that all knowledge is based on sensory experience and the denial of innate ideas, a view which originated with Plato. Here we could use the genus principle: knowledge above the level of a jellyfish, the level of discrete sensations, requires some sort of certification by perception, some validation. Higher animals (like tigers) already have perception, so their knowledge is directly validated. The distinctive method of people requires validation by perception because it is conceptual—concepts have to be reduced to percepts. This is what we have to know to form logic, because we now know that conceptual validation isn’t given without effort, but requires some kind of reduction to the level of percepts. The fourth step would be to understand what basic things people did with concepts, so that we begin to search for a method to check our ideas against the senses. The key fact here that was known way before the Greeks is that people would argue, they would have structured discussions involving chains of ideas, which would lead to other ideas or other chains. The Greeks knew that propositions called “premises,” when linked together, would lead to a proposition called a “conclusion” and that this structure was called an “argument.” (Aristotle discusses “premises” and “conclusions” in Prior Analytics, Book 1, chapters 1 and 4, for instance.) The Greeks also knew that these arguments were a kind of reasoning, and that arguments were a crucial way of using ideas to gain knowledge. There were many observations and inductive conclusions required before anyone could reach the ideas of “arguments,” “conclusions,” etc. and we’ll take them for granted here. People also knew in Plato’s time that you could unravel an argument, asking what a given premise depended on, which implies that there can be a chain of arguments. In this way, they learned that knowledge is relational and hierarchical: relational, because a person could gain important knowledge by relating one cognitive item to another (like, “a ‘tree’ falls under the idea of ‘plant’”) as opposed to starting in a void; hierarchical, because these relations among ideas can be organized into complex, protracted structures which go back to some kind of beginning or starting point. It’s this context concerning arguments and their structures, and what Aristotle figured out about concepts that were prerequisites for Aristotle creating the science of logic. A Method that was Both Necessary and Possible Before we induce what Aristotle learned about logic, we should first reduce it, which will give us a clue into what discoveries he had to make. Logic allows you to validate or prove an idea by showing you how to establish valid relations among your knowledge, leading back to axioms, to sense-data. How did he discover that “validation” is something established by leading an idea or chain of ideas back to axioms or sensory data? That presupposes that he discovered the principle of validity, whatever it is that makes an argument valid. Once he knew it, he would know what makes a valid argument, and could realize that a chain of valid arguments is what a proof consists of. We thus need to discover the basic principle of validity. To determine the standard or basic principle of validity, we’ll need to create a list of valid arguments on one side and compare them to a list of invalid arguments on the other side. And from there, we can abstract what the valid ones have in common. But before that separation can happen, we’ll have to discover that we need rules to guide us in relating ideas, since up until now we’ve been focusing on a general guide of validating concepts as such, not specifically their relations to other concepts. Aristotle’s validation of concepts will progress by analyzing concepts as combined into statements, and discovering rules to guide us whenever we combine these statements to draw a conclusion. So, to induce all this: how did Aristotle discover that we need rules to direct us into combining propositions to reach a conclusion? The Greeks before Aristotle knew that some arguments followed from their premises and some did not, and philosophers from the beginning of philosophy would criticize each other for drawing unwarranted conclusions, or denying what they admitted in their premise. The Sophists were well-known for deliberately using invalid arguments and convincing people to accept them. They knew that reasoning was the means by which we learn (or at least one important way), and they knew that a person’s reasoning could get off-track and the reasoning could be criticized as a result. All of this was known before logic, and people could grasp that arguments didn’t follow before studies on arguments like that of Aristotle’s, and Aristotle used this knowledge to devise the method of reasoning. Aristotle knew that a method was necessary because he knew that the mind’s reasoning can go wrong, that this wasn’t direct observation of the self-evident. And he knew that this method was possible because he knew that the area of reasoning was the area under our control, and that we’re not merely reactors. People argued, and they couldn’t figure out how or why arguments would fail, and yet Aristotle devised an ingenious universal method for checking chains of ideas in our consciousness. He set out to formulate a set of principles that an argument could follow and could insure that the argument was valid, and if an argument disobeyed the principles, it was then invalid. Thus, he abstracted a method of thought that pertains to everything and anything: books, teachers, ships, houses, ideas etc. The result would be the largest induction that could ever be made. But even the discovery that we need these rules was itself inductive: how did he know that we need rules in every case of reasoning? He knew that every case of reasoning was volitional and fallible, liable to some kind of fault. He couldn’t examine every case of reasoning; he rather examined exhaustive numbers of arguments (simply read the Prior Analytics for a sample of his study!), and generalized that all reasoning required rules. There’s no other way to reach this generalization except by induction, neither by enumerative induction and inspection of every case, nor by deduction. His goal was to find rules to determine valid and invalid arguments. The results of his efforts can be read in his Prior Analytics, which inductively presents each argument type, even providing examples for the reader to work through his argument structures, which uses variables. I’ll add that the idea that variables could be used to teach argument structures was another innovative induction of Aristotle’s. His amazing discovery was that all the valid argument structures were related by having certain forms, rather than validity depending on the content or material of the argument. Without Aristotle’s discovery of this, logic would have been impossible, as people would think that only certain structures would work for certain content, or that the content determined the validity of the argument. Here is an example of a valid argument (the syllogistic figure that the medievals called Baroco, in which “a” means a universal affirmative proposition, like “all men are mortal,” and “o” means a particular negative proposition, such as “some pigs are messy”): “a”: M belongs to all S “o”: M does not belong to some B “o”: S does not belong to some B To give an example of this argument: All swamps are murky. Some books are not murky. Therefore, some books are not swamps. The major premise (M belongs to all S) states a universal property of a subject, the minor premise (M does not belong to some states that some members of a different subject don’t have this property, and the conclusion (S does not belong to some is a conversion of the two premises: it infers that those members of the second subject do not belong to the class of the first subject. (A conversion occurs when we infer a proposition from different proposition by interchanging the subject and predicate.) Aristotle, by using variables, holds that arguments like this, and the other figures he discusses in his book, are structurally valid no matter what their content. Here’s an example of an invalid argument: C does not belong to B C does belong to some X B belongs to all X Or, to particularize this argument: All bathtubs are not made of cardboard. Some boxes are made of cardboard. Therefore, all boxes are bathtubs. We supposed in the major premise that no bathtubs are made of cardboard (C does not belong to , and this is convertible with the statement that no cardboard things are bathtubs (B does not belong to C). But in the minor premise, we also supposed that some boxes are made of cardboard (C does belong to some X); to make the argument valid, we would have to conclude that some boxes are not bathtubs (B does not belong to some X), but that isn’t the conclusion we reached in the argument. The conclusion that all boxes are bathtubs does not follow from its premises, and it clashes with what the premises present. (What this “clash” is will be discussed a little later.) In fact, the argument structure will always be invalid, no matter what the content is, with the result being that “there will be no syllogism,” as Aristotle often remarks about invalid arguments. Aristotle’s Predisposition towards Forms and Rules How did Aristotle find out that validity in arguments is an issue of form? Here, Dr. Leonard Peikoff has two speculations, as he finds the idea that Aristotle merely observed instances of arguments and induced his discovery to be too simplistic. Two factors may have predisposed Aristotle to see validity as a formal issue rather than a material one, prior to his induction about arguments and validity. One was his knowledge of mathematics; the other was his philosophical distinction between “form” and “matter.” The science of mathematics, especially geometry, was already well-developed as a deductive system, and this was a critical model to work with for someone working on an even more abstract science, which is what logic is. Geometry was a well-suited deductive model, with well-defined rules regarding how you approached a subject matter, the axioms you must start with, and how each theorem and proposition would unfailingly follow from the preceding, and the presentation would end with QED—“what was to be demonstrated.” He understood that broad geometric reasoning was possible because the science dealt with abstractions and not specific concretes. You could reach universal conclusions about equilateral triangles or right angles, but not to a triangle whose sides were 10 feet, 8.4 feet, and 3 feet. This might have led Aristotle to figure out that we make logical connections in accordance with abstract rules, not rules with specific contents contained within them. So in developing logic, he searched for universal rules, even more universal and abstract than geometry, which deals with space, size, shape, and figures. The second factor was that his entire philosophy rested on the distinction between form and matter. Practically on every issue or subject, he states that there is something with matter, its composition, and a form or structure in which the matter exists. He wasn’t always correct in applying the distinction, but it was a brilliant thought, and he used it to analyze God, the soul, perception, elements of the physical world, all kinds of animals, and even cause-and-effect (the well-known "formal" and "material" causes). With that in mind, what would make more sense than to apply the distinction to chains of thought as well, splitting every argument into its form and matter, structure and content, use abstraction to consider the greatest possible range of arguments that could exist, and conclude that in each case, the validity depended on the form and was independent of the matter? This discovery led to Aristotle’s induction that the validity of all arguments is dependent upon their form, which was the discovery of logic. Non-contradiction, the Excluded Middle, and Objectivity We have yet to find the unifying principle, however. What is common to all of the valid forms of arguments, and thus defines validity? He discovered that in every case of invalid reasoning, there was a contradiction, a mistake, a violation of the law of noncontradiction. No matter the form of the argument, an invalid argument always fails due to some sort of contradiction, some attempt to claim “A” and “non-A” at the same time and in the same respect. This led to Aristotle’s application of the principle of noncontradiction to all thought, including arguments: “…the most indisputable of all beliefs is that contradictory statements are not at the same time true” (Metaphysics Book 4, Chapter 6). Aristotle didn’t invent the principle or law of noncontradiction; Plato or Socrates before him might have, because in the Republic Plato writes: "It is obvious that the same thing will never do or suffer opposites in the same respect in relation to the same thing and at the same time" (4:436b). (Or as Aristotle words the principle: “the same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject and in the same respect” (Metaphysics, Book 4, Chapter 3).) But Aristotle discovered the law’s role in thought, that it is the law which governs all thought trains. And he did this by another grand induction; the law’s application to thought is not deducible from the definition of knowledge or from the statement of the law. From the fact that nothing can be a contradiction, it would not follow that the invalidation of all reasoning consists in the attempt to maintain a contradiction. Though he wasn’t the discoverer of the law of noncontradiction, he did discover its corollary, the law of excluded middle, as well as that law’s role in thought. The law of excluded middle states that: “…there cannot be an intermediate between contradictories…” (Metaphysics, Book 4, Chapter 7). Its application to thought states that: “…of one subject we must either affirm or deny any one predicate” (Ibid.). Everything is either A or non-A at a given time and in a given respect; in thought, only the assertion or the negation of something can be true at a given time and in a given respect: there is no third alternative to assertion or negation, or to existence or non-existence, in reasoning. The laws of noncontradiction and excluded middle state the basic rule of reasoning and the principle of logical validity, non-contradiction, and the basic rule applied to all assertions: all reasoning must either affirm or deny something about some subject at a given time and in a given respect. We can now consider the final point: we know what a valid argument is, but what is full validation of a series of arguments—what is proof? Aristotle knew our ideas came ultimately from our sense experiences, and that the purpose of his method of logic was to conform our thinking to reality. His focus on tracking reality can be seen from this instance, while he was discussing the ambiguity of names: “the point in question is not this, whether the same thing can at the same time be and not be a man in name, but whether it can be in fact” (Metaphysics Book 4, Chapter 4; italics mine). Because of what he knew, he reached another induction: that proof is taking arguments step-by-step back to sensory data and axioms. The medium for the progression of a chain of ideas was what Aristotle termed a conversion, such as the one used in my deduction above, that some books are not swamps by relating them to the quality of murkiness. And the validity of a series of arguments was determined by testing the constituent propositions against the law of noncontradiction: “It is for this reason [i.e. the possibility of contradicting oneself] that all who are carrying out a demonstration [i.e. an argument that leads to knowledge] reduce it to this as an ultimate belief; for this is naturally the starting-point even for all the other axioms” (Metaphysics, Book 4, Chapter 3). The conversions allow us to reach the inferences we seek to prove using pre-established knowledge (or presumed knowledge); the syllogistic forms give us the necessary valid structures to present our reasoning; and the axioms of logic; the laws of noncontradiction and excluded middle provide a means for us to check if our reasoning is contradictory at any step. Gaining knowledge by choosing to adhere to reality through this method of proof which goes backward until we reach axioms and sense experience, i.e., by the use of logic, keeping in mind that the overarching principle is: noncontradiction. This is what Aristotle conceived objectivity to be. Conclusion: Objectivity vs. Subjectivism One last issue: to help clarify objectivity as Aristotle understood it, we should contrast it to an opposing idea: subjectivism. What would Aristotle’s definition of subjectivism be? Instead of “choosing to adhere to reality,” he would most likely say, “volitional indifference to or departure from reality.” Instead of “by the use of logic,” he would say, “by the disdain of logic.” And Aristotle knew plenty of examples of these, and could easily use them to fill this understanding of “subjectivism.” He discusses many instances in which people would deliberately use ambiguous words in arguments, or ask many distracting questions, or offer a proof that actually doesn’t follow, and a number of other ways in which arguments were made using some criteria other than or opposed to logic; Aristotle discusses many broad examples of logical fallacies in his Prior Analytics and On Sophistical Refutations, showing that fallacies could pertain to the form of an argument, or to the material or content of an argument. Aristotle then could have contrasted his view of objectivity with case after case of people being non-logical or illogical, and then induced the principle that if you use something other than logic, then you cannot claim to be adhering to reality. Meta-blog, automatic cross-post

The aim of this essay is to reduce the idea of objectivity so that we can inductively reach Aristotle’s understanding of the concept. It’s important because we need his understanding of the concept to really understand Ayn Rand’s discoveries. After inducing this, we can induce the full, Objectivist understanding of objectivity from Aristotle’s development. The definition of objectivity Aristotle would have given: “volitional adherence to reality by the method of logic.” Dictionary definition: “Not affected by personal feelings; based on facts.” Based on facts, and not based on feelings—this is the main thing people understand about objectivity. It isn’t enough to set aside your feelings in a cognitive context without some other means of understanding facts, and “based on facts” can’t simply be about percepts, because all conceptual knowledge would be barred from the approach of objectivity. So the dictionary definition informs us that we need a method or rules of thinking that ties thinking to facts, instead of feelings. The first step down from this idea of objectivity is: “The method of adhering to reality to gain knowledge,” and we learn what the method is later. How would we grasp the idea that we even need a method? It isn’t as simple as: from observation and induction we know that man is capable of error, he’s fallible; from this, we can deduce that you can’t be certain of your conclusions and that therefore, we can deduce that we need a method of gaining knowledge to guide us: this is a rationalistic argument. It is necessary to grasp that we’re capable of error if we hope to even reach the concept of objectivity, but “objectivity” and “error” are vastly far apart from each other, cognitively speaking. The understanding of the fact of error came very easily, going way back into prehistory: people would bring home the wrong animal to eat, bring the wrong things needed to start a fire, etc. The striking fact, which the rationalist would overlook, is the idea that people are fallible didn’t suggest to anyone before the Greeks that we were in need of a method for checking our thinking and conclusions. In effect, the rationalist is taking as common sense what was actually a monumental discovery by the Greeks, by specifically Aristotle. The pre-Greeks had a means to deal with errors, but it wasn’t objectivity, but intrinscicism: authority, their faith in authority. The Pharaoh knows, or God knows, or whatever. It’s an invalid leap to go from “people are capable of error” to “we need a method of checking our thinking.” So, to grasp why we would need a method at all, we need to know something about the mind, specifically what its operations are, what is possible of the mind, where it goes wrong, and how. If we don’t know how it goes wrong, or where, or what it could be doing that is different from what it’s doing, then we have no means to improve the mind. The first thing we need to know is that there are some areas or operations of the mind in which it is safe, or infallible. We have to know that first, before we can start looking for a method, as that knowledge gives us a clue as to what we can do when we’re using a fallible process. Once we know that some part of our mind is error-free, we can figure out later that we can guide our minds reliably by using the safe data to check our fallible data, which is the essential process of objectivity. Later, we determine that the way to check this is to reduce all conceptual products to sensory observation. This idea of infallible data is important, because without it, we could never devise a method of guiding ourselves to the truth, and we could not count on it as underlying our conclusions, including our conclusion as to how we can improve our mental processes. There are then important distinctions which exist within our individual consciousness, which we have to discover before we could construct a method for correcting our errors, or even preventing them. How could someone discover that there’s a process that can go wrong as opposed to a process that is safe? Well, we know that we have free will, that we have control over something in our consciousness, because it would be impossible to wonder about how to guide our thinking, or find ways to improve our conclusions, if the whole operation of the mind is out of our control. The idea we’re getting to is that Aristotle had to make a crucial discovery: there’s a part of the mind that can go wrong, and that’s the part that we’re in control of, where our free will reigns, and that there’s a part of the mind that is safe, where we don’t need control. As a result, we can decide to check the part that can go wrong using the other, error-free part. That’s what we have to know before we can search for a method of guiding our thinking. What obvious major discovery about consciousness had to be made before we can determine that one part is fallible while one isn’t, and that one part is controlled by our mind, while the other is not. What’s the basic distinction of consciousness that had to be discovered before we could discover other distinctions and thus grasp the need of a method? The distinction between percepts and concepts. Not those exact words: for instance, Plato and Aristotle called the distinction “the realm of sense” and “the realm of ideas.” Ideas or Forms or Universals or Essences: how we word it is irrelevant. The point is that without this distinction, we would have no footing in prescribing guidance. So, we couldn’t reach the method of logic until we knew that the method was necessary and possible, and to know these we would need to know three things: 1. We need to know what kinds of error are possible. That means that we would have to discover what kind of mental content is fallible vs. infallible. This is necessary, because it gives us a clue as to what we’re trying to correct (the fallible part), and that we’re trying to accomplish this by somehow measuring the fallible part against the infallible part. 2. We have control over the fallible part—free will reigns over the fallible area. There’s no point in prescribing a method if we have no control over the relevant part of the mind. 3. What is the relationship between these two areas? How could we relate, measure or reduce the fallible to the infallible? Once we know those three, we’ll know that a method is both necessary and possible. The final issue, between percepts and concepts, is directly observable, one by extrospection, the other by introspection. Meta-blog, automatic cross-post

Introduction John Frederick William Herschel (1792-1871) was an important 19th Century scientist, arguably the most important. (I currently put William Whewell and Herschel on nearly the same footing, with Whewell having a slight edge.) He studied and made applications to the fields of astronomy, mathematics, chemistry, botany, and electricity. He was also one of the first modern "philosophers of science," and an advocate of the use of inductive reasoning in scientific investigations, particularly a version of Francis Bacon's method of induction, informed by the discoveries of science since the early 17th Century (Bacon died in 1626). To promote and encourage the activities of the "men of science," Herschel published the work A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1830), a treatise on the scientific method, detailing the elements of science, scientific subjects that had been and were being studied, and the procedures that a good man of science should utilize. (This book would be influential for many later scientists, notably Charles Darwin.) Most importantly, Herschel proposed in this work an enhancement of Francis Bacon's philosophy of induction, discussing both the nature of inductive reasoning and the value that should be placed upon it in science. Indeed, the very progression of science from the state of pre-science speculations and collections of facts is a progression of inductions, Herschel would remind us. This three part essay will detail the elements and rules of Herschel's view of induction, starting with his empiricist view of experience being the source of all knowledge, working our way through his rules for inductive reasoning and ways for verifying inductions made, and the role of analogy, hypothesis, and the complimentary relation of induction and deduction in science. As a result, it isn't a complete discussion of all the important points about science made by Herschel in his Preliminary Discourse, such as the role of precise measurement in describing laws of nature, and I would suggest that the reader takes some time to read the book itself. Experience as the Source of All Knowledge Experience is the source of all human knowledge of nature and its laws. (p. 75) By “experience,” he doesn’t just mean the sensory experience, but the accumulation of all the experience of mankind, including the observations made in books or other works. There are two ways to acquire such experience. The first is “observation”—noting the facts as they happen without human interference, without influencing the frequency of its occurrence, or varying the situations under which the facts occurs. The second is “experiment”—to influence nature to make things happen, by controlling certain factors of an event, and taking note of the results. (p. 76) Observation and experiment, in this light, are the foundations of all natural science. (Something of interest to Objectivists, who understand the theory of “measurement-omission”—Herschel states that observation and experiment are not really different kinds of experience, but simply differ in measurement and degree. Stressing the similarity, he calls the two “passive observation” (observation) and “active observation” (experiment).) The significant difference of the two is due to their results: passive observations led to unfruitful catalogs of phenomena with no means of organizing them, or with no way of determining what causes the phenomena. Active observation can lead to advances in knowledge and applications unheard of by the method of passive observation and these advances become the “natural course.” (p. 77) Classifying Phenomena and the Laws of Nature Phenomena are what we observe and what we experiment on. They are natural events insofar as they account for us perceiving certain objects doing certain things. Phenomena are literally appearances: they are what we sense due to processes that occur amongst external objects, or because of secret processes within the objects. We can make these processes sensible: we can analyze them and show them to consist of motions or changes to the sensible objects, although many cases exist in which we are incapable of such analysis and are left with the sensible impressions we have of objects. (Page 85) Analyzing complex phenomena and resolving them into simpler phenomena—laws—is the proper aim of investigating nature; there is little chance that we’ll discover “ultimate causes,” and so we must content ourselves with determining the laws and causes by which complex phenomena are produced and are made sensible to us. Herschel gives the example of the “phenomenon of sound.” Analyzing sound leads to the inquiry into two causes, those being the excitement and propagation of motion and the production of sensation (in this case, of hearing), which are simpler (also more general or elementary) than the complex phenomenon of sound. A subsequent inquiry into the propagation of motion would in turn lead to simpler phenomena and further inquiries into more laws of motion (or laws of nature more generally). (pp. 90-91) Ideally, we would already possess or could easily ascertain what things are the ultimate phenomena, the basic ones into which all the composite, complex ones can be broken down or resolved into. But there is no way to ascertain these à priori (independently of experience): rather we must explore nature, and “we must account every phenomenon an elementary or simple one till we can analyse it, and show that it is the result of others, which in their turn become elementary.” (p. 92) By this meaning then, “cause” is a relative term, meaning a proximate cause between an elementary/simple/general phenomenon, and its production of a more complex phenomenon. This process of analyzing phenomena leads to the discovery of laws, which allows us to form general axioms (principles/generalizations), or “forms of words” (I take Herschel to mean “conceptions”), either of which will include all of these laws. This scientific process is very important in Herschel’s view: the ability to conceptualize laws of nature into conceptions or axioms allows us to perform the cognitive feat of reasoning about phenomena à priori, without reference to phenomena that exist currently or in the past. By reasoning from generals to particulars, the propositions reached apply to a vast number of cases, which were not originally conceived of during the initial formation of the axioms—when these propositions are made as detailed as possible, they represent individual facts, facts which we wouldn’t have known from ordinary experience. These axioms and conceptions allow us to not only explain all known facts, but lead to the discovery of previously unknown facts—to predict facts before they are discovered by trial. One example Herschel cites is the axiom (or law) of gravitation, which predicted that, “the earth, instead of being an exact sphere, must be compressed or flattened in the direction of its polar diameter, the one diameter being about thirty miles shorter than the other; and this conclusion, deduced at first by mere reasoning, has been since found to be true in fact.” (p. 98) Unlike the analysis of phenomena, we have a guide for the creation of axioms of nature, and they follow the general pattern of abstract or general reasoning. A law of nature states what will happen given certain factors or contingencies, and is no different from announcing a whole group or class of phenomena. This is, therefore, very similar to the natural process of abstraction and proposition formation: [W]e perceive that two or more phenomena agree in so many or so remarkable points, as to lead us to regard them as forming a class or group, if we lay out of consideration, or abstract, all the circumstances in which they disagree, and retain in our minds those only in which they agree, and then, under this kind of mental convention, frame a definition or statement of one of them, in such words that it shall apply equally to them all, such statement will appear in the form of a general proposition, having so far at least the character of a law of nature. (pp. 98-99) There are thus two meanings of a “law of nature”: 1. A general proposition stating abstract facts about the actions of natural things under purported circumstances. 2. A proposition stating that a whole class or group of individuals which agree in one respect/character agree in another respect as well. (p. 100, sec. 91) The first meaning shows a law as little more than an “artificial memory,” and thus has little use, but the second meaning influences our minds profoundly, allowing us to consider a potential proximate cause, if not an ultimate one, Herschel remarks. The second meaning of a law has this impact because, “whenever two phenomena are observed to be invariably connected together, we conclude them to be related to each other, either as cause and effect, or as common effects of a single cause.” (p. 101, sec. 92) In this connection, a third meaning can be given to a law of nature: a proposition asserting the mutual connection, or even identity, of two classes of individuals, whether objects or facts. An example would be the connection Newton drew between falling objects and objects in orbit and their relation to the gravitational force of objects. (My example; Herschel uses the example of double refraction and polarized light exhibiting what we would call the visible light spectrum in streaks and bands. (pp. 101-102, sec. 93)) We can now appreciate the benefit of classifying phenomena: one of the proper goals in science is to accurately classify particular facts or objects under well considered headings or points of agreement (i.e. the simple phenomena which were discovered by investigating the initial facts). The result of such a process is that this simple phenomena or head of classification, becomes not a particular but a general fact; and when we have amassed a great store of such general facts, they become the objects of another and higher species of classification, and are themselves included in laws which, as they dispose of groups, not individuals, have a far superior degree of generality, till at length, by continuing the process, we arrive at axioms of the highest degree of generality of which science is capable. (p. 102, italics in original) This process of methodically reaching higher and higher generalities from a study and comparison of nature is what Herschel means by induction. (p. 102, sec. 95) The Two Types of Induction Before discussing the rules by which we should inductively reason, I’ll note that he discusses two kinds of induction: (1) Juxtaposing and comparing already known classes, and taking note of their similarities and differences/agreements and disagreements (the early comparisons of electricity and magnetism, or the acceleration of horizontal and vertical motion—my examples, or swinging around a sensible material force (a string) and swinging around with no visible force (the force of gravity)). (2) Investigating the individuals of a class, and attempting to discover what particular feature or quality they all share in common, besides whatever led us to group them together under a concept (Herschel’s “principle of classification”) in the first place. (p. 102) The first method is better suited when facts are numerous, well observed, and methodically arranged. The second method is better for the “infancy” of a science, while the first is better for the “maturity” of a science. In (1), facts are already numerous and well-documented and organized, but in (2) the exact opposite is the case. The first method exploits the scientific "division of labor," where individuals benefit immensely from the thinking and observations of past thinkers; (2) mainly occurs in the hands of a single individual on a quest for understanding, requiring a union of many areas of knowledge within that person. (p. 103) (An example of both (1) and (2) is Sir Isaac Newton, particularly his works on optics and gravitation. He once considered how he benefited from the thinking and observations of previous scientists/philosophers, relating himself to a person standing on the shoulders of giants in order to see further regarding nature. And his scientific work united ordinary perception with mechanical philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, and dynamics.) Part 2 will cover Herschel's characteristics of causation, his "rules of philosophizing," and the 3 methods of verifying inductions. Meta-blog, automatic cross-post

The goal is to use the method of reduction to learn what things we need to know in order to induce the idea that “justice is important, it is something that we should have.” We’re not inducing the virtue of justice, as that presupposes that we already know a large amount of proper actions, and that we already have a criterion of “virtue” to compare justice with. Suppose someone said, “the way to validate justice is to look at examples. You go to court, a murderer gets convicted, and an innocent man goes free.” Those are examples of justice, but they’re not perceptual ones. In other words, you see the event, but not the “justice,” because it is abstract. This makes “justice” a lot more abstract than the other principles we’ve already worked through. In the induction that “reason is man’s means of survival,” you could see someone produce food, so you could see production; you could introspect and note the role of abstraction and other mental processes in production. In the egoism induction, you could directly reflect on your own priorities, motivations, and values. In justice, there’s nothing directly to observe. Someone could object and say, “the idea is you punish criminals and reward good people.” But the question we seek to answer is: “where did you get the idea of rewards and punishments from? How did you get it from reality? How do you know what it applies to? What is its scope? Etc.” Since the goal is to show that justice is something that we should have, that it is “good,” we need some collection of values from which we can get an idea of “the good,” like we did in inducing egoism. And we’ll start with the same common-sense values that we started with in egoism: whatever gives pleasure, strength, health, wealth, enjoyment, knowledge, or employment is good; whatever gives pain, weakness, or disease, etc., is bad. Those are the underlying evaluations that allow people to make judgments on whatever views they do have, so we’ll take them for granted here. To begin the reduction, then, let’s start with a dictionary definition of “justice”: “Administering a deserved punishment or reward.” Since the word “deserved” is so important in this definition, then let’s also look up “deserved”: “to merit or become worthy of because of one’s acts.” This is the first part of our reduction: the reduction of the concept “deserved.” Justice is a matter of some response or action being appropriate because it was “deserved.” Well, we can ask ourselves, “is there ever a case in which we reward or punish without someone deserving it?” Yes: the case of animals. We punish and reward animals, but we don’t think that they deserve that, we don’t say that they are worthy or merit our response even though we do in fact respond with some action. Desert is something we add to punishments and rewards, and we couldn’t have the concept of justice without this concept of “deserve.” So, what do we need to know in order to reach the concept of “deserve”? To know that a punishment or reward was “deserved,” we have to know the concepts of “reward” and “punishment.” How do we reach these? Why do they come up? The idea is that we have to act in a certain way, we give rewards and punishments, and when deciding to give rewards and punishments, we’ll say that this is “deserved” in some cases, and in some cases it is based on some other principle (not simply “undeserved”). So, we’ve gone from “justice,” to “deserve,” and now down to “reward” and “punishment.” What do “reward” and “punishment” presuppose? A punishment is a negative conferred because of a bad or undesirable, improper action, whereas a reward is a positive conferred because of a good or desirable, proper action. To reach these two ideas, we would have had to reach the idea that some actions and some people are good, and some are bad; this means that we must reach the idea of evaluating men and their actions. First, we need to reach the idea of evaluating people and their actions, and then a certain kind of action, based on our evaluation, would be a punishment or reward, and then something else, whatever it may be, will tell us the difference between punishment and reward, and between animals and people, such that people can “deserve” things while animals cannot. What could we do to discover the importance of evaluating human beings—that it’s important to judge and evaluate human behavior? You couldn’t start from scratch, and then understand what a person means when he says, “it’s important to judge people.” We must then start with, “why should I judge anything at all, animate or inanimate?” This is where we reach the level of direct perception, and the end of the reduction. Meta-blog, automatic cross-post

Objectivists tend to be very favorable to the views of philosopher Francis Bacon (1561-1626), particularly his often used quotes that "knowledge is power," and "nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed." My purpose here is to give us all yet another reason why we should appreciate and study Bacon: his theory of induction. Bacon's ultimate aim in life was to show us all the relation between knowledge and human power, between reason and human survival, and between scientific thought and the wealth of nations. The most important part of this project was his articulation of a new theory of inductive thinking—of forming generalizations from the particulars of experience—which he propounded in his 1620 work the Novum Organum, or "New Instrument." After we examine the contents of this monumental book, the reader may come to see why he's been widely regarded as a father of modern science. The Preface In the "Plan of the Great Work" of his The Great Instauration, Bacon discusses two fundamental requirements that must be met in order for anyone to understand the immense project he's trying to achieve (which would no less than change the very face of science). Before his "renewal" can take place, people must first purge their intellects of preconceived notions so that they may deal with the truth, and then they must understand the true relation between the nature of the mind and the nature of the universe. Bacon's Novum Organum (Part II of The Great Instauration) is is broken up into three parts: the Preface, Book I ("On the Interpretation of Nature and the Empire of Man"), and Book II ("On the Interpretation of Nature, or the Reign of Man"). Book I comprises Bacon's "expurgation of the intellect," which prepares the reader to consider the merits of his theory, and this book consists of three refutations: of human reason, of the demonstrations (enumerative induction and deduction), and of the philosophies. Book II lays out his theory of induction, of how to truly gain knowledge. To begin, he contrasts his method of gaining knowledge with three other groups: the dogmatists, the skeptics, and the ancient Greeks. The dogmatists presume to have already investigated the laws of nature and thus "know everything"; the skeptics proclaim to "know nothing." In contrast to these, the ancient Greeks possessed a prudent mean between the arrogance of pretending that you know everything, and the hopelessness of knowing nothing: trying to engage with nature to gain knowledge, whatever the difficulty of the inquiry or how obscure things were. Unfortunately, they only used their unaided reason, with no fixed rule or methodology. Bacon's method, in contrast to all three positions, will establish progressive levels of certainty. For this, he'll take the evidence of the senses, provided that they are corrected by instruments, but he refuses to take the kind of thinking which normally follows the senses. Instead, he will explain a new path for the mind, one which will proceed from the direct perception of the senses. While this aim—providing helps to human thinking—likely belonged to logic, it is already too late for such help, in Bacon's view: our minds are already filled with unsound doctrines and vain idols from the daily activities of life. ("Idol" is a fundamental term in Bacon's theory of induction; it's a concept or notion formed by a corrupt method that leads to distortion and confusion, and it will be discussed in detail later.) Rather than helping the situation, logic, as it has been practiced, has led to cementing errors, rather than disclosing truth. "Our only remaining hope and salvation," Bacon advises us, "is to begin the whole labor of the mind again; not leaving it to itself, but directing it perpetually from the very first, and attaining our end as it were by mechanical aid." (Novum Organum, Preface, p. 7) Just as it is impossible to carry out any great task without instruments or machinery, the same is true when one is learning about nature: nothing of great importance can be learned by the mind using its undirected and spontaneous processes—instead, it needs to be run as if it were machine-operated. Unlike other philosophies, Bacon says that his theory is not obvious, it will not be understood with a passing glance, it won't conform to people's preconceived notions, and it won't reach the understanding of people in general except by its usefulness and its effects (practical works). These philosophies (or others that may come to resemble them) encourage discussion, embellish long speeches, and thus are suited to the lectures of a professor, and to the everyday business of life: his philosophy won't be of much use for those areas. In a passage fundamental to Bacon's project, he declares that there should be two divisions of knowledge, two tribes, or two families of students in philosophy—divisions that are not hostile or estranged from each other, but rather work together: one method for the cultivation of knowledge, and another for the invention of knowledge. In regards to these two, Bacon wishes the best for those who choose to cultivate knowledge and thus choose the former method. But for those who are not content to use only the knowledge that has been discovered by others and who want to have true, demonstrable knowledge (in other words, those who choose the method of inventing knowledge), Bacon requests that they join him in his quest to find greater knowledge about nature. Formally, he calls the first method the Anticipation of the Mind, and the second the Interpretation of Nature, corresponding to the methods of cultivating and inventing knowledge, respectively, and he continues to do so throughout his work. Book I The Limits on Knowledge and Power Bacon begins Book 1 by explaining the limits of humans, both physically and mentally—in doing so, he describes the intimate relationship between these physical and mental aspects. Humans can only perform or understand only what we have either observed in fact or thought of regarding the course of nature—outside of that sphere, we know nothing and can do nothing. Without tools, neither our hands nor our faculty of reason can do much: physical tools guide our physical motions, and intellectual tools give us suggestions or cautions concerning the world. Bacon then makes the connection: “Human knowledge and human power meet in one [are synonymous],” (Novum Organum, Book 1, Aphorism 3) or: knowledge is power. Ignorance of the cause frustrates one’s ability to produce the effect, in other words: ignorance is impotence. Thus, “[n]ature to be commanded must be obeyed,” Bacon warns us: understanding and following nature is the route by which we can take control of it. Regarding the creation of practical works: all that we can do is combine or separate natural bodies, and the rest is done by nature alone. Even in this regard, the fields dedicated to practical applications, such as those of mechanics, physicians, alchemists, and mathematicians, have only met with little success. We are fooled by the seemingly expansive list of productions from the mind and from the hand, such as books and manufactures, when the reality is that we've only derived many results from a few things known, without knowing an expansive amount of general scientific principles. Even these things known, Bacon points out, were discovered by chance and trial-and-error rather than science; the state of science of his day was merely pleasing arrangements of matters already discovered, not a method for discovering anything or a plan for new works. Bacon identifies the cause: we falsely extol the powers of the human mind, while never searching for its instruments, its helps. The present sciences are useless for discovering effects, so the present system of logic is useless for the discovery of the sciences (of knowledge). The Scholastic logic that Bacon is discussing consisted of voluminous explanations of deductive reasoning, which relies on what we already know for its contents; since we know very little true things, Bacon explains, this logic only serves to stabilize and cement erroneous thinking caused by our preconceived notions, rather than discovering new and true things. The deductive argument structure, or syllogism, is not applied to the principles of science, and is useless for reaching intermediate axioms (principles that are more abstract than first-level principles of daily life, but less abstract than the highest principles of a science), as it can't compete with nature's subtleties. Aristotle described a syllogism (and thus deductive reasoning) as a proposition being true of necessity, specifically because certain other propositions were assumed to be true; because this is what a syllogism is for, Bacon criticizes it as forcing our assent to the truth of propositions, but not our assent to the reality of things. To explain this, Bacon succinctly describes his fundamental problem with the syllogism and all deductive reasoning, one which cuts to the heart of the issue of how deduction can lead to certain knowledge: "The syllogism consists of propositions, propositions consist of words, words are symbols of notions. Therefore if the notions themselves (which is the root of the matter) are confused and over hastily abstracted from the facts, there can be no firmness in the superstructure." (Aph. 14, p. 14) This confusion has already infected the sciences, Bacon believes: There is no soundness in our notions, whether logical or physical. Substance, Quality, Action, Passion, Essence itself, are not sound notions; much less are Heavy, Light, Dense, Rare, Moist, Dry, Generation, Corruption, Attraction, Repulsion, Element, Matter, Form, and the like; but all are fantastical and ill defined. (Aph. 15) If true, this obliterates the Aristotelian science and logic that dominated Scholastic period education and scientific knowledge. Bacon goes further: besides very simple notions, like "man," "dog," "dove," and perceptions like "hot," "cold," and "black," all other notions are errors, having been improperly abstracted and deduced from the things in experience. There is the same kind of error committed in forming axioms (starting points for deductions) as in abstracting notions, and even abstracting to reach first principles, which depend on "common induction" (which Bacon later calls "enumerative induction")--these errors are intensified in the case of principles and propositions derived from deductive reasoning and the syllogism. From this description, it should be noted how close Bacon's conclusion here is to absolute skepticism. So why doesn't he become a skeptic? Our method and that of the sceptics' agree in some respects at first setting out, but differ most widely, and are completely opposed to each other in their conclusion; for they roundly assert that nothing can be known; we, that but a small part of nature can be known, by the present method; their next step, however, is to destroy the authority of the senses and understanding, while we invent and supply them with assistance. (Aph. 37) Part of this assistance is precisely pointing to people how mistaken our notions are, so that we'll do something to solve the problem. The Anticipations of the Mind There are only two ways to investigate and discover the truth. One way rapidly ascends from the evidence of the senses and particular facts to the most general principles or axioms, and from these now supposedly indisputable truths, derives and discovers the intermediate axioms and principles—which is the current and false path. The other way constructs axioms from the senses and particular facts by a gradual and continual ascension, until it finally arrives at the most general axioms and principles—which is the true but untried way. Both ways begin with the senses and particulars, and ends with the greatest generalities, but there is a vast gap between the one and the other. The first method barely deals with particulars and experiment at all, whereas the other method regularly deals with them, points out and defines new particulars, and invigorates the sciences. Lastly, the first presents from the outset some abstract and useless general axioms, while the other gradually rises to those general axioms which are the truly the most common in nature (Bacon's view is that the most general principles of science will span across a great variety of nature). When left to itself, human reason exercises thought in the same way as if it were guided by logic, as both paths follow the first method; the mind is comfortable starting at generalities, so that it can avoid mental labor, quickly tiring from carrying out experiments, and this vice is increased by practicing logic, because it gives one's thinking the aura of a vain pretentiousness more suitable for debate. In a patient and reflective person, his reasoning faculty may try the correct path to truth for a while, but produces very little, since reason without its instruments cannot reach the underlying reality of things. Bacon calls the human reasoning which we rashly and prematurely apply to nature the "anticipation of nature," and the reasoning which is properly deduced from things the "interpretation of nature." Anticipations will be agreed to much more readily than interpretations, since they are deduced from a very few familiar instances, and quickly are understood and satisfy our imagination; interpretations are deduced from various subjects and are widely dispersed, such that it takes work to understand them, and must appear at first to be needlessly overcomplicated. Anticipations and the standard logic are suited to force assent rather than things, and thus right for the sciences founded on opinion and dogma. Anticipations are so hopeless for understanding things that even if all the intellects of all men of all ages were to combine and transmit their mental labor, no great progress would ever be made in science: radical errors made in the first productions of the mind are not cured by the excellence of newer minds who use the same erroneous method as a remedy. "It is idle to expect any great advancement in science from the superinducing and engrafting of new things upon old. We must begin anew from the very foundations, unless we would revolve forever in a circle with mean and contemptible progress." (Aph. 31) The Four Idols of the Mind Bacon's entire explanation here has been an inductive argument: the state of both our knowledge of the world, and of our practical works, is pathetic, and this is caused by our unaided reason (anticipations of nature or of the mind) and the present logic. Next, he states the fundamental cause of our inability to produce any great science or knowledge or works to "command nature": the idols of the human mind.The idols are false notions that are deeply rooted in our reason (Bacon also refers to them as "arbitrary abstractions"); accordingly, they are difficult to detect and assess, and even when they are assessed, they will impair our thinking and thus our attempt of furthering the sciences, so Bacon proposes to warn us about them so that we may be on guard from here on out. According to him, there are four classes of idols: Idols of the Tribe, Idols of the Cave, Idols of the Market, and Idols of the Theatre. Explaining the nature of the idols is the way to safeguard his "interpretation of nature," in the same way that refuting sophistic arguments safeguarded Aristotle's presentation of syllogistic, deductive logic (his Sophistical Refutations). In accordance with this goal, he presents the Idols of the Tribe, Cave, and Market as his "refutation of the unaided reason," and the Idols of the Theatre as his "refutations of the philosophies and the refutations of the demonstrations," just as he said he would refute such things in the Great Instauration's "Plan of the Work." The Idols of the Tribe are founded in human nature itself, the tribe of people with their common nature. These idols are caused by the belief that man's senses are the measure of things, when the truth is that perception (of the sense or of the mind) is the measure of the individual but not the measure of the universe. We distort the nature of things by mixing our nature with it, and our mind is akin to a false mirror which takes in light rays at uneven increments, and this thinking produces idols. The Idols of the Cave are found in each individual person due to their personal experiences, education, opinions accepted, and so on, as opposed to the idols of the tribe which affect people due to their common nature. Idols of the Market are formed by the association and conversations of people, for it is among others that the meaning of words are imposed and understood, and semantics leads us into pointless controversies and entertaining fantasies. The last are the Idols of the Theatre, which form in our minds from the dogmas of various philosophies and from the erroneous law of scientific reasoning, both inductive and deductive. Here, Bacon refers to not only the present and past philosophies, but of many more to come, and not merely about entire systems of philosophies, but of many disparate principles of science which have been mistakenly accepted. A large section of the Novum Organum is dedicated to explaining the idols, so my goal is to stick to the aspects of the causes of the idols which directly corrupt our ability to practice induction as Bacon understands it. The Idols of the Tribe are formed by our taking notice and delight in the positives or affirmative instances of something (which suggests a regularity, like lightning appearing with a cloud), whereas we should be indifferent to both affirmatives and negatives alike; in the formation of a valid axiom and principle, the negative instances are the more forcible of the two (for a reason we'll see later). For the Idols of the Cave caused by our seizing on and being satisfied with some distinction or theory made, Bacon warns us to hold such dwellings with particular suspicion, so that it doesn't distort other investigations into nature. In the case of Idols of the Market, poorly-abstracted words that men daily use can corrupt even attempts which point the way towards truths about nature. The Idols of the Theatre are notions from false philosophies, often formed by considering too much on only a few topics, or very little on a great many topics, and generally on too confined a basis for experiments and natural events, and reaches conclusions on very minuscule grounds. Lastly, before discussing Bacon's theory of induction, we should look at what theory of induction he was rejecting, since he believes that the older form of induction is damaging our ability to reach certain conclusions, the very same criticism he levies against deductive reasoning. In general, induction is known as the process of reasoning by which the mind rises from an awareness of particular facts to a general proposition about a class of things. Bacon wants to differentiate his theory of induction from the ancient theory, called "enumerative induction." In an enumerative induction, one simply observes that something has a property, like a swan appearing white, or a series of swans appearing white, and generalizes the property to all members of that class, such as reasoning that "all swans are white." Bacon calls such a long-practiced form of induction "childish," "puerile," (here he means "immature") as it leads to uncertain conclusions, and faces annihilation from one contradictory instance. This makes sense: without more information, we can't know why swans are naturally white, so our conclusion is incomplete, and it falls apart if any non-white swans exist (in fact, black swans exist). In general, induction by enumeration reaches a general conclusion on too small a number of facts, and only on the most obvious facts at that—it starts with the evidence of the senses and immediately flies off to the highest generalities, but never reaches the cause which explains the truth of the generalization. Conclusion Some idols are easier to remove than others, but Bacon believes that the only proper cure to this "Problem of Idols" is the creation of notions and principles (axioms) based on true induction. This cure of true induction will vastly improve our thinking and scientific methodology, and result in the attainment of great amounts of deep knowledge concerning the nature of things, and a wave of new inventions to improve our lives. Bacon's view is that the goal of science and knowledge is to benefit the welfare of humanity, not to simply have knowledge for itself or simply satisfy our curiosity. Besides calling this kind of induction "true," Bacon also remarks that it is "legitimate," "good," "genuine," and a "more certain and guarded method." Bacon's theory of induction will be the subject of Part 2. Meta-blog, automatic cross-post

A final “basic proof” of the principle that reason is man's basic means of survival. Now that I've given a reduction of the principle, an attempt at proving it, observed literally weeks of examples, and listened to Dr. Peikoff's presentation of his induction, I'm more than ready to explain this principle. The purpose of this essay is merely to show that reason is crucial and incredibly important to human survival. It's not to fully demonstrate why it is the “basic” means; this would involve contrasting it other means of survival in order to show why they are derivative. An induction is a generalization that makes a causal connection, and this connection can be implicit or explicit. The form that this induction takes is “Every M is R (for whatever causal reason)”: every man's basic means of survival, for some causal reason, is reason. The induction itself can be broken up into three stages, which need to be validated in order to reach the proof. (1): Certain things are required for survival. (2): Certain actions are necessary to gain these things (needed for survival). (3): Therefore, a certain thought process is required in order to take these actions. In order to reach (1), it has to be assumed that there is such a thing as life and death, and observation confirms this for all living things. And one would also have to know that living things can face hardship and difficulties while alive, and overcome them, like when prey outruns and exhausts the predators chasing it. That's the basic knowledge needed for the idea of “survival,” that living things face this problem of survival. Assuming this then, all we need to know for (1) is that there are certain objects, goods, things that are required for survival, without which the relevant living thing will die. Immediately, three classes of things come to mind: food (including water), clothing, and shelter. These are non-controversial examples, and no knowledge of Objectivism is needed to know them: in fact, these three are the widely recognized basic human needs. These three (at the minimum) allow us to survive by giving us the physical fuel needed to continue living, and protect us from the environment, especially temperature changes and other animals. While one is producing an endless list of foods, pieces of clothing, and shelters, and thinks of them when one considers “things required for survival,” a striking observation should be made and noted: our modern technological age. We have transportation-tools that make us much faster in traveling, such as bicycles, buses and cars, and medicinal-tools to aid us in combating and curing diseases, and healing our injuries. The technology of parachutes allow us to survive falls from heights that would otherwise be fatal, and that of airplanes and spaceships allow us to counteract the force of Earth's gravity with the force of lift. All of these have some relation to the basic needs, such as curing a patient's crippling disease in order for the patient to get back to living his life, which in part means consuming food under his own power. Here, we begin to connect basic needs with certain tools or things needed to acquire those needs. We use weapons to hunt animals for food; we create a water system with ducts, valves, and pumps to process and filter water so that's suitable for drinking; we use hammers, nails, precision-cut pieces of wood, and construction machines to build a house which shelters us from the environment; we use pins, needles, threads, and pieces of cloths produced from animal furs to create clothing to keep us warm or cool. Tools are indispensable to human survival, we come to realize. That's all we need for (1), the first induction that “certain things are required for survival.” The next question, which (2) answers, is: how do we get (1), the very things we need to survive? Something or some process is involved, in order to reach these things required for survival. Here we know that these things are important, but we don't know where these things come from or what role reason plays, if any. What do we need to do in order to move forward? This is when we explicitly use an essential element needed in any valid induction: the method of contrast, the method of discovering an important difference, and observing where things agree (have the same attributes/characteristics). (In theories of induction like that of John Stuart Mill, these are known as the method of agreement and the method of difference.) We need to know if there's some field or area where the things we're talking about do not apply. In other words: what is present when this technology is present and absent when this technology is absent? We have a large stock of physical tools and goods, and we know that humans are present when this technology is present and absent when it is absent, so the question is: is there another species that doesn't have technology—that isn't surrounded by boats, hammers, buildings, hospitals, factories, etc.? The contrast that highlights where the differences lie is between us and the other animals, who don't possess technology. Harry Binswanger's “genus” method would certainly help here: about what regarding people and animals are we making a contrast? We've reached the point where we can discuss different species with different means of survival—the question is where, which “genus” proposition, should we start with? We could start with “every living thing has a means of survival” or “every conscious being has a means of survival.” Plants use chemical assimilation to survive; animals use consciousness and motion. And by contrast, other animals are guided by their senses, whereas we are guided by our thinking. And this last becomes our point of reference, of the contrast between other conscious beings and ourselves. There's something distinctive about our mode of consciousness and about our sole possession of technology, of artificial or “man-made” objects. There is a connection between our consciousness and technology that explains why animals, who possess a different kind of consciousness, cannot understand or create what we can. They simply take and use what's around them, whether from nature or from the results of human action (like a cat playing with a ball of yarn, something that we made). We, on the other hand, can't just take from nature because the things needed for our survival are not just here, like lamps, syringes, and apple juice. So, what do we do to get these things needed for survival, in contrast to the animals? If we want food in the form of meat, we have to hunt living animals. We create tools like bows and arrows, spears, traps, and guns to capture, harm, and kill animals. And we use other tools to prepare them for our consumption, like fire, pots, pans, and seasonings we've mixed together. So the fields of weaponry and cooking comprise the kinds of actions we need to get our basic needs. To get food in the form of vegetables and fruits, we use tools to create the conditions required to grow the plants. The right seeds, a shovel to dig up the earth and bury the seed, a hoe, a till, an irrigation system, fertilizer, pesticides designed to successfully grow crops and to allow trees to bear fruit. Thus, the field of agriculture is necessary for survival, as well. To get clothing, we have to capture or breed animals and skin them, tan the furs, or grow crops and harvest their produce, like cotton, and process the material, such as with the sewing, pressing, and dyeing methods, trimming the cloth to fit particular sizes of people, and so on; this means that tailoring is a more technical field involving hunting and agriculture that we nonetheless require. And if we want shelters or homes, we need to build tools to cut down trees into precise pieces of wood, tools to mix sand, gravel and limestone into cement, and water to turn that into concrete, bulldozers, cranes and other caterpillar-track tractors to push material, drill holes, position the material that will become the shelter, and all of this happening according to the design plans of a lead engineer or architect; therefore, the field of civil engineering and architecture are also required to acquire our basic needs. So we begin with what the animals begin with, the raw materials of nature, but we combine and separate them and reposition to create new things that we require for our survival. There's a process of cause-and-effect occurring here, and at this stage we now know that a process of production is involved whenever we do the kinds of things needed to acquire the things needed for survival. Production is any process of turning raw natural materials into some sort of artificial object, and it integrates all the human objects we are now considering. Therefore, production is our answer to the question: how do we get these things? This is the end of stage 2, and while we haven't finished the induction, we are getting close: we've proved that certain things are needed for survival, including tools, and we've just proved that the field of production is required for us to make those essential things, or to produce tools necessary for their acquisition (or tools to make other tools, and so forth). The third, and final, question is: what allows us to engage in production, what enables us to create tools and provide for our needs? We again turn to the method of contrast: what is present when a process of production is present, and absent when production is absent? A mental process of thought is always involved in any act of production; in other words, reason is the root of production. And the only way to reach this idea is by observation and inferences made thereby. Let's take the example of a major productive action in human history: the production of fire. To artificially produce fire, rather than use it only when it's naturally produced (like from a lightning strike), someone had to understand the importance of friction, that friction is the cause, and fire is the effect, such as quickly rotating a stick on a wooden base and blowing on the resulting charcoal. And someone would have had to grasp that all sorts of woods can produce fire when used properly, and that the materials for a fire should be kept away from excessive winds, or things that could smother it like dirt, rocks, or water. This means that a certain amount of generalizing and abstraction was needed to produce fire: every fire, every body of water, every piece of wood, every trail of wind, and every occurrence of friction may be different, but we can strip away or abstract out the differences and discover the key similarities which unites them. This is how we can produce fire not just by accident, but practically at will, in a variety of conditions and environments. So even very primitive productive achievements like fire require the faculty of reason. And the same kinds of mental activity are needed to cook, to mix and administer medicine, cure a disease, plot out a course and reach a destination with artificial transportation, and all other productive courses of action that we engage in. Reason, we learn from these sort of thoughts (or already know), is the mental power that allows our mind to understand cause-and-effect relationships, form generalizations and abstractions, draw inferences, and make judgments. Consider that it's our tool of reason that allows us to plan long-range. Another difference between us and the other animals is that they don't have this capacity (except in special cases, like bears preparing for hibernation, and even this is a form of non-productive activity). Reason, which makes us aware of cause-and-effect, also makes aware of a future that may come to pass, and allows us to connect our present to it: this allows us to carry out long-range actions with an ultimate goal or object in mind, an expectation. Cooks may take hours preparing their ingredients to be processed into tasty food; hunters may spend weeks preparing weapons and tracking their prey; construction workers, engineers, and architects may spend months or years planning and physically constructing a new building. Animals can't do any of these, because they act on their perceptions and respond to their environment, and often the benefits of productive activity aren't immediately perceived or understood. We use reason to predict the future, or consider future consequences, and guide our actions accordingly, and this ability has a lot of survival value: without it, production would be impossible, or a useless exercise at best. Language is also an important result of reason. Not only do we think, but we create means to make our thoughts physically perceivable (whether by sight, hearing, or touch), both to improve and retain our own thinking and to communicate with others. To build even the simplest tool, like a pencil or a cup, we need a set of instructions to make it effectively, and for that we need to be able to read, and before that we would have needed someone to have been engaged in thought and wrote down the set of instructions we want to follow. It's language that makes it possible for us to carry out a vast range of productive activities, like a team of hunters communicating and thereby flanking their prey, a head chef teaching his less-experienced cooking students, and a group of construction workers and engineers coordinating in order to build a sewer system. Lastly, there's the most obvious field which demonstrates the relation between reason and survival: the field of science. It took centuries of scientific discoveries made by many scientists to produce the motor, the engine, the car, the airplane, the skyscraper, the T.V., and the internet. Science opened completely new paths to production that would have been impossible without it, such as modern air travel, and the machines used in mass production. Reason allows us to produce theories about the world, and create practical inventions to conform to these theories. Where would modern medicine be if the field hadn't accepted William Harvey's theory that the purpose of the heart is to pump and circulate blood? And without James Lind's initial proof that citrus fruits treat and cure the disease known as scurvy? Where would the modern practice of projectile warfare be without the theories of motion produced by Galileo Galilei? Once one begins to trace out the history of science leading to our technological age, the relation between reason and survival becomes impossible to honestly ignore. Upon a survey of all sorts of fields, one can reach the general conclusion that reason is a practical faculty; it isn't just the power to gain knowledge and satisfy our curiosity and wonder (as the philosophers of ancient Greece contended), but also to amply sustain and vastly improve our survival. This is how we reach the end of stage 3, the final induction. Reason is the faculty that makes production possible, which makes the things needed for our survival possible. To summarize the argument: Induction #1: We require certain physical objects to survive (ex. Food, water, clothing, shelter). Induction #2: We perform acts of production to gain these objects (ex. transportation, weaponry, agriculture). Induction #3: We engage in various processes of reason unique to us that allow us to produce (ex. thinking, inferring, long-range planning, isolating a problem, grasping cause-and-effect, generalizing, abstracting). The summation or combination of these generalizations is the induction we set out to prove: reason is man's means of survival. A valid induction must state or imply the cause of why something is the way it is or carries out the actions it does, so to state the relationship explicitly: reason is man's means of survival because production is the application of reason to the problem of survival. The proof for this being the cause is contained in reaching induction #3 above, but it's also contained in understanding any given act of production. Meta-blog, automatic cross-post

Reason as man's basic means of survival— The first thing to say about this is that a child or an animal would not reach this principle—the principle isn't on the level of percepts, thus it wouldn't be obvious from using the five senses. So something else is needed. It will likely be helpful to start with definitions of these terms. "Reason": the power of comprehending, inferring, or thinking especially in orderly, rational ways. "Man": first-level concept, so only an ostensive definition. (You can point to people, and you don't need to know that man is the “rational animal” to reach this principle--in some sense, this principle is a precondition of that definition.) "Means": how an aim is achieved. "Basic": something that acts as a base or starting point from which higher-level things are constructed upon. "Survival": continuing to live despite problems, hardships, adversity, etc. To begin, we should consider what all living things do all the time. Dogs, cats, horses and men sleep, eat, breathe, run (gallop), respond to sounds, and a plethora of other actions. These (and many more) are first-level generalizations that we gain simply from observations of the relevant animals. And plants, in time, grow from seeds, sprout, spread, grow over and around surrounding objects, and engage in reproduction. These are first-level generalizations too, available in principle to sense-perception. The next logical step is to connect what you know about people and the other animals with what you know about plants (and bacteria, once one knows about them)--that living things as a whole engage in activities that inanimate matter and natural forces never do. This is a second-level or higher-level generalization, not validated by self-evident means such as the process of perception, but rather by reasoning based on the perceptual generalizations I've noted. This integration makes the claims about classes of animals like dogs and humans and about plants stronger, as it points us towards a (if not the) causal factor—the fact that they're alive. Living dogs sleep, but rocks (upon observation) do not—more importantly, deceased dogs do not sleep, either. There's a causal connection between non-living things and inanimate objects that separates them from entities that are still alive. A piece of gravel or dirt remains motionless and doesn't change in any visible respect unless some outside force acts on it, but people, ants, and even flowers change and move with or without external interference. (Though this motion is much more limited in the flower's case.) Those things that aren't alive cannot carry out a vast number of actions that living things can—this unites dead things with the earlier generalization that inanimate objects cannot do a host of things that living things can, as both dead and inanimate things are classed under the phrase “not alive.” What idea connects the peculiarity of living things' actions with the difference between life and death and between life and non-living things? Self-initiated action and goal-directed action, two ideas which point towards the same actions in living things. Life gives organisms a capacity to self-initiate actions without recourse to external events: animals eat, drink, play, and heal whether the weather was windy, rainy, sunny, or balmy—within a certain range, the events that befall inanimate matter have no significant effect on living creatures. By the same token, these actions are all goal-directed, and the ultimate goal of all such actions are the continuation of life. We learn this generalization from both observation and reasoning. Starvation is what happens to living things when they are deprived of the food needed to make their energy and thus maintain their body; death by bleeding out is what happens when they are deprived of the blood needed for the delivery of substances to the body's cells. When something external injures a living thing, or something internal to the body fails to operate right or is damaged, the living thing can die. Organisms self-initiate goal-directed actions in order to continue living, and this prevents their death. This explains their peculiarity when compared to the reactions of the dead and inanimate objects. Differences in the kinds of actions of living and non-living things brings us to a key generalization needed for this proof: All living things survive. (This is a necessary generalization needed for the proof, I think.) Life is an ongoing process of self-maintenance, and the world around us presents all sorts of difficulties and obstacles to overcome, whether in the form of natural disasters, other harmful living things, or sheer accidents. Such a realization allows us to connect our concept of “survival” to the forgoing points, particularly to the field of self-initiated, goal-directed actions. This connection allows me to restate a point: Organisms self-initiate goal-directed actions in order to continue living, and this prevents their death, i.e., they carry out this kind of action in order to survive. This brings us to a generalization that is implicit in this point about survival: survival doesn't happen by chance or through accident, but through a certain means, a certain process. The flight of a bird is its means of survival; running after prey is a wild dog's means of survival; cooking our food before eating it is a means of survival for us. We already know the cause of why animals, plants, indeed, why all living things survive, and that this takes the form of definite courses of actions varying with the kind of living thing being observed: all we need for the next generalization is integration. Every living thing has a means of survival. This is a vast integration, covering all living things that I'm aware of, and all living things that I may ever become aware of. “Every living thing has a means of survival,” is a broad proposition, and the proposition we're trying to prove is contained within: all that's needed now is to draw out some implications which are currently hidden. (Though I've pointed this out as an “implication,” I'm emphatically not using deduction. I'm still performing an inductive integration.) Observing all forms of life, we notice that not all living things act in the same basic ways—plants have no awareness and take in the substances needed for their survival, while animals direct their attention to the perceptual objects of their environment, and follow mechanisms like pleasure and pain, and people learn about facts far outstripping their limited perceptual field. One observes reeds, flowers, trees, algae, and other plant life, and reaches the generalization that assimilation of substances in the environment is not only a means of survival for plants: it is every plant's basic means of survival. Animals and people assimilate things too, but they survive by utilizing a whole field of new actions which exploit their awareness of their environment, like fish swimming, octopi spraying ink, chameleons camouflaging to elude predators, and wolves forming packs. Without consciousness, an animal would be lost in this world, unable to identify its allies or enemies, its source of food and water, and would be completely oblivious to the ubiquitous dangers confronting a living thing, including its feelings of pleasure and pain. Due to the importance of consciousness for animals, I can generalize that consciousness, for those organisms who possess it, is their basic means of survival. From this step, we could even tie together our knowledge of plants' means of survival and reach a further, more abstract generalization: “every living thing has a basic means of survival.” Proving that “reason is man's basic means of survival” requires working through the vast generalization that “every living thing has a basic means of survival.” The assimilation inherent in plants takes different forms (e.g. compare an ordinary flower to a Venus fly-trap when it comes to eating); the same is true of conscious beings. Jellyfish are restricted to the sensory stage of consciousness, which they use to react to stimuli from both predators and prey. (This is due to their body-encompassing “nerve net” instead of the central nervous system and brain that we're accustomed to.) Biologically more complex animals like octopodes, cats, eagles, and lions possess the perceptual stage of consciousness. Like us, they aren't aware of mere stimuli, but of persisting things, of objects, of entities, of the environment in which they live. That perceptual animals can't live on the more limited sensations of, say, a jellyfish, is open to observation: just imagine if you had to live off of the impulse of sensations which you couldn't integrate into some kind of thing you could direct your attention to—you'd get nowhere and accomplish nothing, and without assistance you would quickly die. An important point towards the proof I'm reaching is: humans couldn't live on the perceptual stage of consciousness, let alone the sensory stage. What's the relevant difference between other animals and humans that justifies that negative generalization? There are many differences between us and the perceptual animals we study in biology, but we must focus on two fundamental differences that highlights the next step in my induction: (1) the natural endowments of animals compared to us and (2) the control mechanism of the consciousness of animals as opposed to our own. (1) The other animals naturally have very dangerous weapons and other means of survival that we do not possess, or possess only to a limited extent. Panthers have ferocious claws: we do not; Cheetahs and other animals are blisteringly fast; we're pretty slow; Sharks have multiple sets of razor-sharp teeth, made for tearing flesh; ours are not suited for such a task. Birds can take flight and perform deadly aerial assaults, and fish have gills and fins and can quickly navigate bodies of water; without special instruments and inventions, we cannot do or possess any of these things. The method of survival for the other animals is primarily physical; they utilize their physical advantages to deal with reality to the best of their ability. Rather than relying on our perceptual field, or our fingernails, muscle strength, or agility, we principally rely on our minds. We learn how animals move in the water, and use our minds to develop carbon-fiber fins to mimic them; we discovered the connection between fire and our food, so we can improve the flavor, texture, and tenderness of what we eat, something that other animals haven't grasped. In this “information age,” a good deal of our lives isn't spent foraging for food or finding mates, like other animals, but using inventions of others' minds to interact with people across the world and impact not just our immediate environment, but a whole neighborhood, a town, a country, even the world (as inhabited by humans). And we can spend our time like this because the problems of survival have largely been solved by the minds of others, and this principle is more obvious in the more technological parts of the world; for instance, while other animals and prehistoric men had to hunt, I have the luxury of merely microwaving already hunted, skinned, and prepared/processed food. By contrast to other animals, then, the method of survival for humans is primarily intellectual. (2) As we've learned from a study of biology and physiology, all bodily functions have control mechanisms. And in the case of humans and other higher animals, the most important functions are controlled by the brain of the organism. With the exceptions of humans, the control of a being's consciousness is also directed by the brain. Animals have an inbuilt capacity to act in certain ways, which the brain automatically makes use of when external conditions call for it, along with the faculty of memory which allows them to learn from the behavior of their parents or other nearby animals. So they learn from their parents (or their siblings or owners) how to stalk their prey (for instance), and then it becomes automatic with an environmental cue, or their instincts will make them act a certain way unerringly. (Like a mother duck's instinctive rejection of a duckling when it smells like a predator.) A significant difference here is that people have no instincts; we can override our biological drive of food or sex, and many of our automatic, subconscious reflexes. Rather than being dominated by instinct, human action, mental and physical, is under our control through the operation of our consciousness. We're able to choose between alternatives, like directing our attention to the outside world or inside our own mind, raising our right or left arm, assessing our own thinking or not. Human consciousness is volitional. But something to consider is that we still wouldn't be much better off if we were restricted to the mental faculties possessed by the other animals. The power of volition only gives us very limited control in the cognitive states we share with animals, and our control over our bodies doesn't create much of a survival advantage than if it were merely instinctive. But volition is the mode of operation for human reason. The faculty of reason gives us a capacity to form concepts, to think, and to use a method of rational thinking known as “logic.” This allows us to form ideas about the world, to gain conceptual knowledge, and exploit conceptual thinking in ways that the other animals can't even fathom. We live principally by comprehending the world around us, by understanding it with our ideas, and acting in accordance with what we know. We use ideas to learn that certain things are magnets, that things fall because of gravity, that imperceptible germs lead to disease in the body, that we love people because of our values. (This is a lead into the principle that “reason is man's means of gaining knowledge,” but won't be pursued here, merely noted.) And we know all of this because one of the powers of reason is thought, the ability to direct one's cognitive focus on a particular subject or issue for a purpose. It's thinking that allows us to make connections between our ideas and the facts out there, in reality, and this point is obvious to introspection. It's my prior thinking as a small kid which allows me to tie my shoes everyday; it's my thinking over the past four years that allows me to write this essay; it's my prior thinking that allows me to know what will happen if I eat rotten food, or if I sit in cold weather without heat insulation, or if I try to get to know someone. We think and reach conclusions everyday, on myriad issues, such as clothing options, whether or not we want to take a swim, or whether and how much we want to sleep at night. We use reason to comprehend, for instance, that it takes time and energy to cover long distances, and thus to reach enough scientific knowledge to know that a car would make us more efficient in reaching destinations; we use reason to comprehend that germs cause disease, so we invent hand soap and sanitizers to cleanse our bodies of such harmful agents. We use reason to conclude that it's the unrestricted political power of certain individuals that leads to the oppression and suppression of individuals in society, and so we develop a system that limits the power of executive officials and the government. Such focus on the facts of reality explains the success of the science and technology of aviation, of automobiles, of manufacturing, of architecture, and many other fields. If we understand the relevant facts, then there is really nothing stopping us from accomplishing our goals, and not only surviving, but surviving in the way that we truly want to. This is how we reach the induction that “reason is man's basic means of survival.” [As I wrote this before listening to Dr. Peikoff's presentation of the inductive proof, it doesn't represent the complete proof, such as by understood and presented by Ayn Rand. The point was to present what *I* think proves this principle, so it would have been counter-productive and rationalistic to simply read what she said, and write this with that understanding in mind. Now that I have listened to the lecture, I'm aware of what's missing in the proof, which I'll correct in a later post. I suggest that others try out this inductive method, too.) Meta-blog, automatic cross-post