How do you personally ground your abstractions?

[Kellymeg80]

Random thought:

Q. What's the worst thing about having sex with a rationalist?

A. It just sucks.

You don't know the HALF of it!

Ohhh, the double entendre there just kills me!

*goes off laughingly*

[Prometheus]

do you find following someone else's argument disturbing or confusing when you don't clearly understand what the referents are and you haven't worked all the steps yourself yet, or can you just "go along" and assume things will be proved eventually?

If I clearly don't understand, then no - I can't assume and go along. I find that I have to identify the definitions to some extent. This is usually done by asking lots and lots of questions, if I'm talking to the person, or if it's a book, simply doing some research on the net or the likes.

If I do have some idea about the issue involved, but haven't yet concretely understood it, then my response actually depends on the person I'm dealing with. If it's a good friend of mine or say an Ayn Rand book, I do assume for a short period of time that things will get clearer. Basically, giving them the benefit of the doubt and being certain that they know what they are talking about. If it doesn't get clearer, then I just go back and start all over again.

The first tends to be a bit confusing, but not the second.

What if there is NO connection at all between the items? Do you ever have to write things down because you can't hold them in your head any more? When?

Never had to write anything down.

Dinesh.

[oldsalt]

I am not able to just go along hoping things will miraculously clear up. It is my experience that it won't.

I write everything down, but I have to because of my "problem." Short-term memory is fleeting and the only way I can make a long-term memory these days is to go over and over and over it until it finally clicks. I have a teeny-weeny crow these days, but it wasn't always so.

I think that the panic I feel comes from my childhood memories of school. I changed schools so often that I never knew where the class was on any subject. I actually thought I might be slow until I overheard my favorite history teacher explain to another teacher that I was too precocious for my own good. After I looked up precocious, I felt much better.

Actually, though I felt ignorant about so many things, I never occurred to me to think myself stupid.

[FaSheezy]

I was recently having an arguement with someone, and his ideas were so.. out there. Floating abstractions, I guess. I kept trying to pick out a piece of evidence from his arguments and ground them, or ask questions, and he would never give me anything, I basically told him I couldnt debate with someone who just picked random things out of their ass.

In that situation, I was very frustrated, I felt hopelessly lost, and it took a conscious effort to remain speaking to that individual. I kept having this feeling that I just want to kill him, just to shut him up. Then I figured, his ideas arent an attack on me, and since they are clearly wrong, he wont get far by thinking like that.

I share that feeling, Betsy. I think the way in which I began to believe in a floating abstraction was because the idea that connected it to reality was wrong. It's scary to find out you've walked out on a ledge and the more you try to figure out how you got there, the more likely the ledge is going to break.

But you have to figure it out, because you realize if you could walk out on a ledge like that and not notice, how many other times have you done it? And from there you learn to be sure and know what you know, because that feeling of falling isnt a good feeling.

Math was one area that shares that kind of emotion for me. Math is cumulative, so if you dont know Algebra 1, you wont understand Algebra 2, and on like that into higher level math. I remember, once, almost crying because I just couldnt understand what was going on. Luckily, I had a wonderful math teacher who would work with me. Must be why math and science are my two favorite and best subjects.

[Betsy]

If I do have some idea about the issue involved, but haven't yet concretely understood it, then my response actually depends on the person I'm dealing with. If it's a good friend of mine or say an Ayn Rand book, I do assume for a short period of time that things will get clearer. Basically, giving them the benefit of the doubt and being certain that they know what they are talking about. If it doesn't get clearer, then I just go back and start all over again.

That's interesting.

After enough experience with Ayn Rand which led me to trust her judgment and expect that if I disagreed with her I was probably wrong somewhere, I still couldn't follow along very far beyond what I clearly understood. I remember reading ItOE for the first time. If I didn't get a point, I would stop dead and look for relevant facts or knowledge to substantiate it. I couldn't go more than a paragraph without doing that. Eventually, I got it all, but it took me a very long time.

I had a different experience with David Kelley's Evidence of the Senses. At the time, it was highly recommended to me by Objectivists I respected. I gave it my best shot but, after the first few chapters, my difficuly with the abstruse language and the complex arguments, belaboring the obvious, really got to me. I lost my "what for" and gave up. I told Harry Binswanger I would try to read the book again when the English translation came out.

[Betsy]

I write everything down, but I have to because of my "problem."  Short-term memory is fleeting and the only way I can make a long-term memory these days is to go over and over and over it until it finally clicks.  I have a teeny-weeny crow these days, but it wasn't always so.

I've always had a small crow. Three items is my limit.

The funny thing is, I have an almost photographic perceptual and associational memory, but I am very poor at deliberately memorizing things without conceptualizing or using mnemonic devices. I'm great at trivia games and quizzes -- I was a winner on Jeopardy! -- by my worst subject was history. I couldn't memorize all those names and dates and facts the way most other Honors students could.

I tried the telephone quiz for "Who Wants to be A Millionaire" thinking that a quiz show would be easy money, but is was more than knowing the right answers. One question was to place four events in chronological order in ten seconds. I knew what came before what, but I couldn't hold all four items in my head and there wasn't enough time to write them down. There were several more questions like that, and I knew all the answers, but couldn't handle a task set up that way.

According to the producers of "Millionaire," 90% of the people who pass the phone quiz are MALE.

[oldsalt]

Wow! You won on Jeopardy! I'm impressed as all get out. It's interesting about males and Millionaire.

I had trouble in history with names and dates until I knew enough history that it all sort of clicked one day. As a student in school, I thought that all those dates were used as just so many questions to be asked on a test. Once I studied Objectivism, however, I understood that placing an event in context was important to understanding the event and the ideas current at the time. You can get a much better picture of the growth of human knowledge and life, and gain a much better perspective on your own era.

Just another effect of Objectivism in my life.

Edited June 20, 2004 by oldsalt

[Fred Weiss]

I have an almost photographic perceptual and associational memory, ...

What do you mean by that?

I tried the telephone quiz for "Who Wants to be A Millionaire" thinking that a quiz show would be easy money, but is was more than knowing the right answers.  One question was to place four events in chronological order in ten seconds.

Can you give an example?

According to the producers of "Millionaire," 90% of the people who pass the phone quiz are MALE.

That's interesting. Why do you think that is?

Fred Weiss

[Betsy]

I had trouble in history with names and dates until I knew enough history that it all sort of clicked one day.  As a student in school, I thought that all those dates were used as just so many questions to be asked on a test.  Once I studied Objectivism, however, I understood that placing an event in context was important to understanding the event and the ideas current at the time.  You can get a much better picture of the growth of human knowledge and life, and gain a much better perspective on your own era. 

Just another effect of Objectivism in my life.

Same here. I was an A+ student in everything but history where I struggled for C's. The funny thing was that when I took the history test on College Boards I got almost 800 because it was a test of historical reasoning.

It wasn't until, with the guidance of Objectivism, I came to see history as a battle between the Good Guys with good ideas and the Bad Guys with bad ideas and how ideas determine who wins, that I came to understand -- and enjoy -- history.

[Betsy]

What do you mean by that?

Without trying, when I see things in my perceptual field, I pick up and store everything and I can easily recall all of it when accessing any of it. When reminded of a passage in a book, I can tell you what it said, which side of the book it is on, how far down the page, and other irrelevant details.

One day I was walking past an artist who was displaying captioned cartoons on easels. After I walked about 100 feet past the cartoonist, I started laughing. That was when I finished "reading" one of the cartoons I had briefly seen as I walked by.

Nowadays, this doesn't happen as often as it did when I was younger because I am more selective in my perceptions and I usually have my "crow space" filled with conceptual units and processing, but it still happens.

Can you give an example?

They asked something like:

Press the numbered telephone keys for each of these in chronological order:

1. The Civil War

2. World War II

3. The Revolutionary War

4. World War I

The right answer is obviously 3 1 4 2, but they didn't give enough time to write things down and I couldn't hold the four items in my head.

That's interesting. Why do you think that is?

More men than women can hold four units in mind at one time.

[DPW]

Without trying, when I see things in my perceptual field, I pick up and store everything and I can easily recall all of it when accessing any of it.  When reminded of a passage in a book, I can tell you what it said, which side of the book it is on, how far down the page, and other irrelevant details.

I am the complete opposite in that regard. Sometimes it seems as thought I'm unable to "see" details. If you and I had a conversation, I would probably be unable to quote your exact words even a few minutes later.

This is particularly troublesome when it comes to romantic relationships. I've found that girls retain details much better than guys (or me, at least) - my ex had the magical power to remember my exact words from a year earlier, and used this ability to great effect.

I also suspect this is why I am no good at art. No matter what I do, I can only see "the head" - not the lines and shading that make it up.

In any case, that's why I so love the Objectivist epistemology: I am unit reduction's greatest fan.

[AwakeAndFree]

Q. What's the worst thing about having sex with a rationalist?

A. It just sucks.

I don't understand this joke. Should I attribute it to ignorance of Rationalism, or of Sex?

[oldsalt]

Betsy, it's rather odd, but before I began to have so much trouble maintaining my perceptual focus and short-term memory, I was very much like you. It was easy for me to retain details, and a lot of work to fully comprehend the principle which unified the details. ITOE was enormously helpful to me in this because it wiped out all of the old horrid methodology I had learned and replaced it with a method of understanding that actually worked all the time!

These days, it is much easier for me to grasp the abstraction, and harder for me to retain the concretes relavent to the abstraction. Because of this, I have to work much harder and be very careful lest I fall into rationalism. Here again ITOE comes to my rescue. I don't think I could have survived the problems I now have if I hadn't learned a proper epistemology.

More "me too" (this is getting ridiculous!) which I hesitated to mention because it is another "me too": I, too, gave up on Kelly's book. When reading the first two chapters, I felt like I was mentally walking through oatmeal. I attributed it to my mental incapacity at first, so I began the arduous task of translating and pinning down the meaning of his words and sentences. I found that I was doing an enormous amount of work with a very small reward for my trouble, because the points he was making weren't worth the struggle required to ascertain the meaning. I've never finished the book.

[coirecfox]

Ok, i'm a big noob to Objectivism(been studying for two years)...What is rationalism, exactly? i kinda have an idea but some clarificaition would help, because reading these posts makes me think i have been guilty of it...

[DavidOdden]

I, too, gave up on Kelly's book.  When reading the first two chapters, I felt like I was mentally walking through oatmeal.

I assume you mean "The Evidence of the Senses". I got a splitting headache trying to get through it. By comparison, Huemer's book on more or less the same topic was vastly more intelligible (although it still was something that I had to read slowly and reread parts of -- but I did read it). What really struck me was how pointless this obsessive historicism is, and also how typical it is of "professional" philosophers.

[DavidOdden]

Ok, i'm a big noob to Objectivism(been studying for two years)...What is rationalism, exactly? i kinda have an idea but some clarificaition would help, because reading these posts makes me think i have been guilty of it...

That's spelled "newb" .

Rationalism is the idea that one can create knowledge without reference to perceptual experiences, i.e. you can use pure reason -- and nothing else -- to learn things. Our rejection of rationalism does not mean that you should not use reason, and it does mean that what you use reason to do is integrate knowledge, to form new concepts. Rationalism is usually contrasted to empiricism, but there were serious problems with empiricism not the least of which was that empiricism devolved into nihilism.

[Spearmint]

Ok, i'm a big noob to Objectivism(been studying for two years)...What is rationalism, exactly? i kinda have an idea but some clarificaition would help, because reading these posts makes me think i have been guilty of it...

Its a bit complicated, because like a lot of terms, the word has evolved a few slightly different meanings. In the context of this thread, rationalism is referring to what is today normally known as Continental Rationalism, which is a philosophical movement originating with Descartes and evolving through the work of others such as Spinoza/Leibnitz/etc. In order to understand the Rationalist tradition, you'd really have to compare it to the doctrine which opposed it at the time, namely the Empiricism championed by Locke and Hume. Rationalists generally believed that knowledge about the world could be obtained by means of pure reason alone - ie by the mind meditating upon itself without making any reference to the evidence of the senses. Empiricism on the other hand claimed that all knowledge had to be derived from sensory data, and that anything that reason claimed to know over and above this should be dismissed as mere sophistry. The work of Immanuel Kant was largely an attempt to synthesize these opposed doctrines, and formed the basis for much of modern philosophy.

However, in anglo-american philosophy today, the word 'rationalism' is normally used to mean something quite different. Someone calling themself a 'rationalist' is normally assumed to be saying that they rely on reason (along with empirical experience) as the primary means of gathering knowledge, rather than alternatives such as faith/revelation/etc. Like a lot of other terms, you have to work out what definition of the word a person is using by examining the context (a general rule is that when a person uses it a way that seems to be insulting, they mean it in the Continental sense).

Objectivists would not be rationalists in the former sense, but they would be in the latter.

[Betsy]

What is rationalism, exactly? i kinda have an idea but some clarificaition would help, because reading these posts makes me think i have been guilty of it...

First of all, rationalism is nothing to be guilty about. Rationalism is a psycho-epistemological problem -- a bad habit in thinking -- and not a moral problem. Also, rationalism is a habit that is extremely difficult to overcome or conquer completely. I know many fine Objectivists who have struggled with it for years, usually successfully, and then they'll occasionally slip and say, "Damn! Did I do that again?"

Rationalism is the mental habit of holding and trying to use concepts one hasn't personally inductively derived from sense perception. As a result, a rationalist doesn't know what he is talking about and his ideas are "floating abstractions" not firmly attached to reality. Ideas, to a rationalist, are just something he likes to talk about and play with, like game tokens, but which have very little relevance to his daily life. Most of a rationalist's mental activity is an attempt to deduce the nature of reality from axioms or from arbitrarily chosen or misunderstood abstract ideas rather than from investigating reality and inductively forming conclusions about it.

The best discussion I have ever heard about rationalism, along with practical advice about how to recognize and cope with it, is in Dr. Peikoff's "Understanding Objectivism" course.

[gnargtharst]

Betsy's standard for "crow measurement" was the question: "If you are going to a store to buy a number of totally unrelated items, how many can you remember without having to write them down?"

I dont' think this will measure the crow. The act of "remembering" (in the sense of *trying* to remember something) implies conceptualization -- using *some* method to *remember* the disparate items; once you do that, you're no longer talking about the crow.

About the only method I know of to measure a person's crow, is to ask them to remember several items and quickly name the items before the person has a chance to form a conceptual framework into which they put your named items. If the person knows they will be asked to remember something, they will *listen* with some attempt to remember using some technique (repeating the items in their head, forming a "story" with the items, rhyming, etc.), in which case, what you get is not their "perceptual memory" (i.e., the crow), but a conceptualized version.

(A variation of this, is that the person can know they will be asked to remember something, but the items named should be completely alien to the person. When someone taught me this concept years ago, they told me to remember the following names, and then quickly read the names of 5 paper companies . Since I had previous knowledge about paper companies, I couldn't conceptualize them as fast as he spoke them. I remembered 3, I think.)

[Kellymeg80]

I don't understand this joke. Should I attribute it to ignorance of Rationalism, or of Sex? 

Perhaps attribute it to ignorance of sex with rationalists :-P

[Betsy]

Betsy's standard for "crow measurement" was the question: "If you are going to a store to buy a number of totally unrelated items, how many can you remember without having to write them down?"

I don't' think this will measure the crow. The act of "remembering" (in the sense of *trying* to remember something) implies conceptualization -- using *some* method to *remember* the disparate items; once you do that, you're no longer talking about the crow.

That's why I said "totally unrelated items." Once you relate them -- by associating them with each other, or conceptualizing them, or using mnemonic devices -- you are reducing the units.

I picked that "homey" example because I noticed there is a striking difference between the way my husband and I handle it. I'd be going out and my husband would say, "While you're out, could you get some soda ... and some bagels ... and pick up the movie tickets ... and a muffin -- either apple or bran as long as they're fresh. Oh yeah, we're running low on milk." By the time he mentioned the bagels, I'd be running for a pencil. If it were me asking him to get the same things, he'd just ask, "Anything else?," not write down anything, and return with everything. We're definitely different that way.

Actually, "crow space" seems to correlate with the perceptual ability to "subitize" -- to perceive the number of (a group of items) at a glance and without counting. That's how actual crows "count" in the example Ayn Rand gave. Most people can subitize between 3 - 7 units and some animals can subitize up to a dozen. That seems to define the limit of the number of units that can be held perceptually in consciousness.

If someone can only hold three units in mind at one time -- and I know this is true of me by introspection -- there is a lot of pressure to conceptualize in order reduce the number of mental units without losing any. If someone can hold seven units at one time, he can go along with many assumptions and wait for them to be summed up or integrated later. Thus, I think it would be easier for someone with a big "crow space" to hold a lot of floating abstractions without the discomfort and distress felt by someone with a small "crow space." If men, in general, can hold more mental units, that might be one reason why more men than women tend to be rationalists.

[coirecfox]

ah, thank you all...i think many people out there think objectivists are rationalists because of Rand's statement "reason is a man's only means to knowledge"(she did say that, right?)...have any of you founf this to be true?...and btw... online gamers spell "newb," "noob"...that's why i spelled it that way

[Spearmint]

ah, thank you all...i think many people out there think objectivists are rationalists because of Rand's statement "reason is a man's only means to knowledge"(she did say that, right?)...have any of you founf this to be true?...and btw... online gamers spell "newb," "noob"...that's why i spelled it that way

Rand took reason to be the tool used to integrate sensory perceptions and form/analyze concepts, rather than the detached "pure thought" that others defined it as. "Reason" as Rand uses the term is significantly different from it's use in the writings of someone like Kant or Descartes.

[DPW]

I picked that "homey" example because I noticed there is a striking difference between the way my husband and I handle it.  I'd be going out and my husband would say, "While you're out, could you get some soda ... and some bagels ... and pick up the movie tickets ... and a muffin -- either apple or bran as long as they're fresh.  Oh yeah, we're running low on milk."  By the time he mentioned the bagels, I'd be running for a pencil.  If it were me asking him to get the same things, he'd just ask, "Anything else?," not write down anything, and return with everything.  We're definitely different that way.

Unfortunately, that's not because he's a man. That's because he's really really smart!

[gnargtharst]

From Betsy: "That's why I said "totally unrelated items." Once you relate them -- by associating them with each other, or conceptualizing them, or using mnemonic devices -- you are reducing the units."

Ah. I took your example wrong, thinking you meant actively *remembering* the items in order to recall them later at the store. I take it what you really meant was more along the lines of remembering the items for the few moments from when they were spoken, to when they were conceptualized (or written down).

(Another good crow measurement is to ask somebody to remember a group of words, and then give them words in another language. Don't use tricky pronunciation or talk too fast, but don't talk too slow either, allowing the rememberer time to conceptualize them. It's interesting: people usually say "you spoke too fast, I couldn't understand you", but in fact they *did* understand --i.e. "hear" -- they just couldn't conceptualize the words quick enough to retain them).

I'm a little skeptical of Betsy's theory of why men tend towards rationalism -- my first thought is that rationalist thought, though disconnected from reality, is usually conceptual. Wrongly conceptual, but conceptual. In other words, the rationalist is able to transcend his crow, so why would his conceptual ability be tied to it? Perhaps just an extension of habitualized thinking methods? I don't know -- it's worth digesting. (Do people with small feet tend to underestimate long distances?)

Also, why would there be a difference in the size of the crow between the sexes? Maybe ancient Man the Hunter used a larger crow when he when out to get dinner, too.