True, Original, Important

[ruveyn1]

Ruveyn,

 

Edward Zalta takes the discipline of logic to be “the study of the forms and consequences of predication” (2004, ch. 23). That conception of logic fits well with Rand’s conception of logic as “the art of non-contradictory identification.” Valid inference is a subsidiary division of what is modern logic, as expressed by Zalta. Rand's definition is an instance of her general proposition "Consciousness is identification." Her definition of logic locates its place within that general conception of consciousness and dovetails fine with logic from Aristotle to Quine (through first-order predicate calculus with quantification and identity* and through some of modal logic [s5 is fine in Rand's metaphysics], though possibly with some embrace of relevance logic displacing standard material implication). I count Rand's definition of logic as true, original, and important.

 

* As in "the morning star is the evening star" or "ruveyn is Bob Kolker."

Did logic identify the molecular structure of water?  I think it took more than logic to do that.

 

ruveyn1

[Boydstun]

On the normativity of logic in real-world cognition, Bob (#26), some serious thinking is here.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

More on with Marc’s list (#6):
 

That reason is man’s basic means of survival was a big point with Schopenhauer (1819). Rand remarked in some interview clip that she read some of him when she was sixteen, if I recall correctly. I don’t know if she would have retained this point from him or whether she just came to it in the way he did. His picture was that only by reason (in roughly the Randian sense) is man able to survive and to attain science and its benefits; instinct and faith are out. However, unlike Rand, he did not go on to set the proposition as major timber of moral context.

Peter, thank you very much for the information and insight in #12 (and #14). Hilary Putnam in The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy examines the history of the dichotomy from Hume to present day. He argues against the dichotomy and argues that from its beginning it was dependent on another false dichotomy, that between the analytic and the synthetic.

[Boydstun]

Another idea on Marc’s list (#6), though he is unsure it was original with Rand, is the idea “The primary choice is the choice to focus.”

 

So far as I know, the only prior expression of this idea, or very nearly this idea, was from William James in The Principles of Psychology (1890).* He writes “To sustain a representation, to think, is, in short, the only moral act” (II 566).

“Effort of attention is thus the essential phenomenon of will. Every reader must know by his own experience that this is so, for every reader must have felt some fiery passion’s grasp” (562). James goes on to illustrate his points persuasively, in detail.

 

Here are some more of his conclusions:

In action as in reasoning, then, the great thing is the quest of the right conception. (531)

 

In all this one sees how the immediate point of application of the volitional effort lies exclusively in the mental world. The whole drama is a mental drama. The difficulty is a mental difficulty, a difficulty with an object of our thought. If I may use the word idea without suggesting associationist or Herbartian fables, I will say that it is an idea to which our will applies itself, an idea which if we let it go would slip away, but which we will not let go. Consent to the idea’s undivided presence, this is effort’s sole achievement. Its only function is to get this feeling of consent into the mind and for this there is but one way. The idea to be consented to must be kept from flickering and going out. It must be held steadily before the mind until it fills the mind. Such filling of the mind by an idea with its congruous associates, is consent to the idea and to the fact which the idea represents. If the idea be that, or include that, of a bodily movement of our own, then we call the consent thus laboriously gained a motor volition. . .

On page 531, in describing the “reasonable type” of decision, it was said that it usually came when the right conception of the case was found. Where, however, the right conception is an anti-impulsive one, the whole intellectual ingenuity of man usually goes to work to crowd it out of sight and to find names for the emergency, by the help of which the dispositions of the moment may sound sanctified, and sloth or passion may reign unchecked. (564–65)

 

To sum it all up in a word, the terminus of the psychological process in volition, the point to which the will is directly applied is always an idea. There are at all times some ideas from which we shy away like frightened horses the moment we get a glimpse of their forbidding profile upon the threshold of our thought. The only resistance which our will can possibly experience is the resistance which such an idea offers to being attended to at all. To attend to it is the volitional act, and the only inward volitional act which we ever perform.

I have put the thing in this ultra-simple way because I want more than anything else to emphasize the fact that volition is primarily a relation, not between Self and extra-mental matter (as many philosophers still maintain), but between our Self and our own states of mind. (567–68)

 

It seems likely that Rand was familiar with James’ thought on will, as windowed above. The Dover edition of James’ book (to which my page citations refer) came out in 1950. The treatise was widely known and available, indeed it was and is a modern classic. It is implausible that Rand’s associate, Nathaniel Branden, a college student of psychology, did not become familiar with James’ The Principles of Psychology.

The greatest difference between James and Rand on what she called the choice to focus lies in her join of this psychology to the thoroughgoing circumstance that reason is man’s basic means of survival. The choice to think, in the intended sense, becomes the choice to live, thence to live as a human animal. The volitional character of a human consciousness, required for his survival, is then justifiably called out in a fresh basic conception and definition of human nature: rational animal or suicidal animal.

 

This nexus is so far as I know original. It is important, true, and a lovely integration.

Edited February 26, 2013 by Boydstun