The Objectivist Concept of Truth

[Boydstun]

Objectivist Concept of Truth (2013)

Rand wrote in 1966: “Truth is the product of the recognition (i.e., identification) of the facts of reality. Man identifies and integrates the facts of reality by means of concepts. He retains concepts in his mind by means of definitions. He organizes concepts into propositions—and the truth or falsehood of his propositions rests, not only on their relation to the facts he asserts, but also on the truth or falsehood of the definitions of the concepts he uses to assert them, which rests on the truth or falsehood of his designations of essential characteristics.” (ITOE 48)

Brand Blanshard’s book Reason and Analysis appeared in 1962. (Leonard Peikoff made some use of that book and an earlier one by Blanshard The Nature of Thought in his dissertation completed in 1964.) It was reviewed favorably by Nathaniel Branden the following year in The Objectivist Newsletter. Branden understood that Blanshard was some sort of absolute idealist, but the book offered access to contemporary positivist and analytic philosophy (including the analytic-synthetic distinction), and it offered criticisms of them, which Objectivists might join.

In Rand’s view, Branden said, in his Basic Principles of Objectivism lectures (c. 1968): “All knowledge is contextual, which means: has to be integrated, has to form a logical, consistent, non-contradictory whole. / ‘All thinking’, states Galt, 'is a process of identification and integration’. All logic, then, is a process of context-keeping. No conclusion of a formal logical argument can be considered true out-of-context. Only a full context can determine its truth or falsehood.” (Branden 2009, 75)

Peikoff wrote “Logical processing of an idea within a specific context of knowledge is necessary and sufficient to establish the idea’s truth” (OPAR 171). Peikoff maintained that unless his proposition is true, the fact that we don’t know everything can be turned into the skeptical result that we don’t know anything. If we have no means of possessing any limited knowledge not susceptible to being shown false in the future, no means of knowledge sufficient for truth, then the skeptic can say “for all we know, all of our limited knowledge is false.”

“Logical processing” in Rand’s philosophy, as is well known, includes a lot and is essential to truth and objectivity. To know the number of oval-head #4 five-eighths-inch brass screws I have remaining in their box, I need to count them. That process and result will require not only correspondence, but the right connections among the parts of the process of counting. Moreover, the process of counting is not only necessary; counting, with all my counting crosschecks, is sufficient for truth about the number of screws.

Truth at a conceptual level of cognition is necessarily an integration, and if it were entirely free of any misidentifications in all its network, it would necessarily be true. That is, in this limit of cognitive performance, the cognitive conditions are sufficient for truth. That is Rand's picture. I say Peikoff's establish should stand between verify or confirm, on the one hand, and constitute, on the other; therewith he was not saying something beyond Rand’s picture of ’57 and ’66–’67.

I take issue with Rand’s philosophy on the issue neatly captured in Peikoff’s statement. To start, the “an idea” and the “the idea” will usually have evolved with the advance of knowledge. That all animals are mortal was a truth with the Greeks as with us, but what we mean by animal and mortal have been considerably revised and improved over what it meant to them. The reference class of what is meant by animal has broadened and understanding of what is living process and its cessation has expanded tremendously. But Peikoff’s statement can likely be elaborated so as to take all that into account without substantive retreat.

I attended Lecture 6 in Peikoff’s 1992 series The Art of Thinking. Peikoff remarked there, allowing for inaccuracy in my notes, that he does not see the preface “in the present context of knowledge” as sensible for: (i) perceptions or memory, (ii) automated conceptual identifications (table in contrast with hostility or pneumonia), and (iii) axioms (philosophical [very delimited; widest framework] and mathematical [very delimited subjects]). Saying “in the present context” in the cases where it is sensible is not proof against error. One can have been fully rational to have held views based on errors one later sees. However, error is not inevitable for the methodologically conscious adult. That is what I have in my notes.

Suppose one’s knowledge were based on perceptual observation and correct reasoning upon them, including correct use of mathematics in application to them. Then it would seem fair to say that “Logical processing of an idea within a specific context of knowledge is necessary and sufficient to establish the idea’s truth” (OPAR 171). Perfect conceptual identifications, even though not all the identity of their referents are known, if perfect in all presently known connections with observations and with all other perfect conceptual identifications, are sufficient to establish the conceptual identification’s truth.

Leaving aside the three categories of knowledge set aside in Lecture 6, there remains much in our knowledge that is also virtually perfect knowledge, because it has been so thoroughly tested for contradiction in its many connections, and because these durable propositions have been given ever more exact delimitation with the advance of science. “All animals are mortal” or “I must breathe to live” are examples.

Even for a given context of knowledge, our integration and checking for contradictions is an incomplete work in progress. Meanwhile, we are adding new information, more context for knowledge, and beginning its integration and checking for contradiction. For all conceptual identifications in a condition of significantly incomplete integration and checking, correct logical processing is insufficient to establish truth (cf. Peikoff in Berliner 2012, 303–4). At first blush, this is no problem for the Rand-Peikoff view, for that just means that the knowledge is not to be rightly taken as certain knowledge.

Rand’s picture in Peikoff’s bold statement is significantly incorrect in my view because as one’s (scientific) knowledge grows one’s knowledge of what was one’s previous context of knowledge also grows. One continues to learn what were the ways in which one's previous generalizations were over-generalizations (and in what ways they were inexplicit, indefinite, or vague). There was no reason to suppose that the Galilean rule for addition of velocities was only a close approximation to the low-velocity portion of a different rule for addition of velocities more generally, no reason until the electrodynamical results in the nineteenth century. There was no reason to post a specific caveat before then, along the lines of "for all velocities we've experienced so far."  It remains that in present truth there is past truth and so forth to the future. We cannot know entirely which elements of scientific truth today will stand in a hundred more years of advance nor how those elements will have been transformed and connected with new concepts. Our repeatable experiments will still be repeatable (notwithstanding the unfounded imaginings of the Hume set), whatever new understanding we bring to them.

Peikoff is correct when he writes “No matter what the study of optics discovers, it will never affect the distinction between red and green. The same applies to all observed facts, including the fact of life” (1991, 192).

Peikoff’s sufficiency clause—its application to all cases for which the proviso of delimited truth-context pertains—is not necessary to foil skeptical maneuver. That rational thinkers sometimes have very reasonably taken something for true that is later shown to be false does not justify skepticism. Every such showing of falsehood is a showing of truth and a showing that skepticism concerning the type of knowledge at hand is false. Neither does the skeptic, nor the relativist, have justification for skipping to the contradictions of earlier science with later science, skipping, that is, the context of non-contradiction as a norm, the everywhere-context of things as they are and our ability to know them.

Rand read John Hosper’s book An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis in 1960–61. Rand’s firm anchor of truth in correspondence and the primacy of existence comes through in her marginalia on truth, on propositions, on definitions and tautology, and on logical possibility (Mayhew 1995, 68–70, 75–80). Rand objected to shuffling the question “What is truth?” into “What are true propositions?”. She jotted: “Truth cannot be a matter of propositions, because it is a matter of context” (Mayhew 1995, 68).

Like Aristotle’s, Rand’s is a substantial theory of truth. It pertains to the real, the cognitive agent, and the right relation between them. It declines linguistic stances as well as deconstructionist and relativistic stances towards truth. Aristotle’s writings “present truth in the context of a multifaceted account of knowledge that includes epistemological and psychological dimensions and in which truth directly pertains to issues of meaning, reference, intentionality, justification, and evidence . . .” (Pritzl 2010, 17). Rand can agree with Aristotle that being is the single constant context of truth. She can agree with Aristotle in holding truth to be not only saying of what is that it is, but saying of what is what it is (Metaphysics IX.10). However, she should deny Aristotle’s views that intellectual truth is an irreducible type of being and that “cognition is an identity of knower and known” (Pritzl 2010, 17).

Rand’s has an integration element in her correspondence theory of truth (Peikoff 2012, 12–15).  Integration is essential for truth in Rand’s theory. Fact is interconnected and multilayered in Rand's picture. Fact caught in mind will be truth, and truths will not be isolated in their facts nor in their relations to other truths.

In Rand’s metaphysics, every existent stands in relationships to the rest of the universe. Every existent affects and is affected (ITOE 39). Rand does not go so far as the coherence theorist who would hold that relations to other things is what constitutes what something is.

Concerning the historical roots of the integration element in Rand’s theory of truth, I think the main root is not the coherence views of absolute idealists, nor of Spinoza before them, but the views of Aristotle.

“Truth is the product of the recognition (i.e., identification) of the facts of reality. . . . The truth or falsehood of [man’s] propositions rests, not only on their relation to the facts he asserts, but also on the truth or falsehood of the definitions of the concepts he uses to assert them, which rests on the truth or falsehood of his designations of essential characteristics.” (ITOE 48)

Rand’s conception of the connectivity of facts for truth and her requirement of definitions designating essential characteristics for concepts in assertions are among the integration elements in Rand’s theory. Her theory is revised Aristotle.

Aristotle wrote that "a definition is a phrase signifying a thing's essence" (Topics 101b37). Fundamentally, "the essence of each thing is what it is said to be in virtue of itself. For being you is not being musical; for you are not musical in virtue of yourself. What, then, you are in virtue of yourself is your essence" (Metaph. 1029b14-16). For Aristotle the essential predicates of a thing say what it is, what it is to be it. To say that man is musical does not say what man is. It says something truly of man, but it does not say what is man. 

Thus far, Rand concurs. "A definition must identify the nature of the units [subsumed under the concept being defined], i.e., the essential characteristics without which the units would not be the kind of existents they are" (ITOE 42). Moreover, the essential characteristic of a kind under a concept is "the fundamental characteristic without which the others would not be possible. . . . Metaphysically, a fundamental characteristic is that distinctive characteristic which makes the greatest number of others possible; epistemologically, it is the one that explains the greatest number of others" (ITOE 45).

Aristotle held that all natural bodies are a composite of matter and form. He took form, rather than matter, to be what makes a thing the kind of thing it is. Essence is a form (Gill 2010, 120; Peikoff 1985; Witt 1989, 116–19; Bolton 2010, 40–46).

Rand rejected this component of Aristotle’s metaphysics (ITOE Appendix, 286). "Aristotle held that definitions refer to metaphysical essences, which exist in concretes as a special element or formative power. . . . Aristotle regarded 'essence' as metaphysical; Objectivism regards it as epistemological" (ITOE 52). For Aristotle what makes gold gold or an animal cell an animal cell is a metaphysical essence, a metaphysical form. Metaphysical essential forms in Aristotle’s account are traditionally seen as universals; Charlotte Witt argues they are particulars (1989, chap. 5).

In our modern view, the essence of the chemical element gold, that in virtue of which it is gold, is: having such-and-such numbers of protons and neutrons bound in a nucleus and the electrons about it. That is what makes its further distinctive properties possible. The essence of a living animal cell is that it offsets the potentially catastrophic drive of water inward through its wall by pumping sodium ions out through its wall. That is what makes possible its further distinctive properties (distinctive, say, from a living plant cell). These essences are physical. The essence of a human being—rational animality—is physical and mental. These are all essences in Rand's sense. They are physical or mental, but not metaphysical in the form-sense of Aristotle's essences.

For Rand "an essential characteristic is factual, in the sense that it does exist, does determine other characteristics, and does distinguish a group of existents from all others; it is epistemological in the sense that the classification of 'essential characteristic' is a device of man's method of cognition" (ITOE 52). Proper essential characteristics in Rand’s theory of definitions required for truth use factual characteristics about a thing to state what it is. Aristotle, in contrast, did not take the essence of a thing to be one of its characteristics among others. He did not take it to be a characteristic of a thing. The form that is the essence of a thing, the form that makes it what it is, is prior in every way to the individual thing it makes possible (Witt 1989, 123–26).

In Rand’s metaphysics, entity, not substance, is the primary existent. Though characteristics and relationships presuppose entities, an entity is nothing but its characteristics and relationships, for entities, like all existents, are nothing but identity. Rand’s realism of definition and essence reaches rock bottom of reality, while dropping some Aristotelian doctrines of substance, essence, and form.

Rand contended that one must never form any convictions “apart from or against the total, integrated sum of one’s knowledge” (1961, 26). That integrated sum is one’s entire cognitive context, “the entire field of a mind’s awareness or knowledge” (ITOE 43).

We have noted Rand’s statement “No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the sum total of his knowledge” (AS 1016). To the extent that his mind deals with valid concepts, “the content of his concepts is determined and dictated by the cognitive content of his mind, i.e., by his grasp of the facts of reality” (ITOE 43).

It is not the integration that makes the content true, though the integration is necessary to truth, necessary to the grasp of fact. Peikoff writes “If one drops context, one drops the means of distinguishing between truth and fantasy” (OPAR 124). That is partly due to the nature of facts. The context of knowledge is the context of grasped fact, which is a context of fact. Facts have contexts, independently of our grasp of them (cf. OPAR 123).

The contextual character of truth in an Objectivist account should be hands-on-world, rather as Rand’s essential characteristics of concepts are hand-on-world. Recall that in Rand’s theory of definition, the fundamental characteristic serving as the essential characteristic of a concept is both metaphysical and epistemological; it tells relations of dependency in the world and relations of explanation in the mind. The relations of context in the world will naturally include more than relations of dependency, and relations of context in the mind will include more than relations of explanation.

My contention that the essential characteristic(s) of a concept, in Rand’s epistemology, is not only epistemological, but metaphysical, is consistent with Rand’s text saying that an essential characteristic is factual and does determine other characteristics, its being fundamental being a metaphysical fact. However, on the face of it, my contention contradicts Rand’s statement “Aristotle regarded ‘essence’ as metaphysical; Objectivism regards it as epistemological” (ITOE 52).

In Rand’s view, “the metaphysical referent of man’s concepts is not a special, separate metaphysical essence, but the total of the facts of reality he has observed, and this total determines which characteristics of a given group of existents he designates as essential” (ITOE 52). She goes on immediately to say in what sense an essential characteristic is factual and in what sense it is epistemological. Rand is excluding from her concept of an essential characteristic the overblown sort of metaphysics Aristotle gives to essence, and she is introducing epistemological factors that bear on correct identification of an essential characteristic. She is not excluding metaphysics as a crucial, determining factor in the identification of essential characteristic(s).

I concur with Rand. Essence as in her conception of an essential characteristic is not metaphysical in the full sense of the metaphysical that Aristotle gives to essence. However, in a less ponderous sense of the metaphysical, Randian essential characteristics are both metaphysical and epistemological. Rand requires a metaphysical basis for the designation of essential characteristics for our concepts of things. Furthermore, an essential characteristic should be not only a fact distinguishing a group of existents from all others within the present context of human knowledge; the essential characteristic of items under a concept should be additionally a fundamental one, the fundamental one on which the greatest number of the items’ other species-differentiating characteristics depend. This is metaphysical structure.

Rand should agree with Aristotle that capability for learning grammar would be an improper distinction among animals for capturing the essence of that which is man (Top. 102a18–30; ITOE 49). This is due to facts of dependency. This is metaphysical structure.

It would not do in Rand’s epistemology to follow Descartes in his idea that the primitive essence of matter is extension. That is a good distinguishing and logically necessary characteristic of matter (provided we take extension to stand for all aspects of spatiality). But it ignores the ontological primacy of entities among existents. And space is an existent. Concrete relationships are existents. A proper definition of matter must set it correctly in its relation of non-containment to consciousness (ITOE Appendix 247–50), and it must situate matter in relation to entities. Matter can be rightly defined in that second aspect partly by finding a fundamental distinctive commonality—say mass-energy—for all materials, but the standing of materials in relation to entities must also be captured in a proper definition of matter. There is much metaphysical structure in Randian definition according to essentials.

Consider too a definition of solidity. I like to define it as a state of matter in which there is resistance to shearing stresses, or more exactly, in which there is an elastic zone of resistance to shearing stresses. This definition states physical relationships. It reflects metaphysical structure and physical structure within that metaphysical frame (assuming a proper concept matter). It reflects also context of cognition (and of potential vital action). That is to say, it reflects also the present state of knowledge of matter, an epistemological circumstance.

Rand allows that with further understanding of matter I may have to expand my definition of solidity. Expanding “does not mean negating, abrogating or contradicting; it means demonstrating that some other characteristics are more distinctive” of solidity (ITOE 47). The qualification of a characteristic to be taken for essential continues to rest on the identities given to our consciousness so far—including relations of difference, similarity, and dependency—identities basing the economical scope of cognition and effective action we attain by rightly recognizing them.

I have spoken of relations of context in the world and relations of context in the mind. The membership relation is one relation among contents of mind that is not that relation among the mind-independent, concrete objects corresponding to those contents. That is entailed when philosophers say with Aristotle that what-such depends on this-such, but not vice-versa, or when one says with Rand that only concretes exist in reality.

The binding of membership relations to concrete factual relations, though necessarily not by complete identity with the latter relations, is surely a major impetus for integration in abstract knowledge and integration of abstract knowledge with experience. Rand’s cast of concept-class membership relations as analyzable in terms of suspension of particular values in mathematically scaled relations—relations that can express concrete magnitude relations in the world—is a grand structure for integration beyond non-contradiction. It makes the meaning of correspondence in “truth as correspondence with facts” more specific, and it accords with the success of science in improving correspondence by use of mathematics.

 

References

Aristotle c. 348–322 B.C. The Complete Works of Aristotle. J. Barnes, editor. 1983. Princeton.

Berliner, M., editor, 2012. Understanding Objectivism, Leonard Peikoff’s Lectures. NAL.

Blanshard, B. 1962. Reason and Analysis. Open Court.

Bolton, R. 2010. Biology and Metaphysics in Aristotle. In Lennox and Bolton 2010.

Branden, N. 2009. The Vision of Ayn Rand. Cobden.

Gill, M. L. 2010. Unity of Definition in Metaphysics H.6 and Z.12. In Lennox and Bolton 2010.

Hospers, J. 1953. An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis. Prentice-Hall.

Lennox, J. G., and R. Bolton, editors, 2010. Being, Nature, and Life in Aristotle. Cambridge.

Mayhew, R. 1995. Ayn Rand’s Marginalia. ARI.

Peikoff, L. 1985. Aristotle’s “Intuitive Induction.” The New Scholasticism 59(2):185–99.

——. 1991. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. Dutton.

——. 1992. The Art of Thinking. Lecture.

——. 2012. The DIM Hypothesis. NAL.

Pritzl, K. 2010. Aristotle’s Door. In Truth – Studies of a Robust Presence. Catholic University of America.

Rand, A. 1957. Atlas Shrugged. Random House.

——. 1961. The Objectivist Ethics. In The Virtue of Selfishness. 1964. Signet.

——. 1966–67. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Expanded 2^nd edition. 1990. Meridian.

Witt, C. 1989. Substance and Essence in Aristotle. Cornell.

[DavidOdden]

3 hours ago, Boydstun said:

That all animals are mortal was a truth with the Greeks as with us, but what we mean by animal and mortal have been considerably revised and improved over what it meant to them. The reference class of what is meant by animal has broadened and understanding of what is living process and its cessation has expanded tremendously.

I want to butt in with a distracting point that may seem irrelevant but I argue is a central issue. The ancient Greeks did not have the idea “all animals are mortal”, as I understand it, the expansion beyond singular terms originates from William of Ockham. More to the point, the ancient Greeks did not have ideas about animals and mortal, but they did have concepts and perhaps ideas about θήρ and βροτός. Specifying the referents for these words is way above my pay-grade. The nit that I am picking is that one must first inspect the referents as a unit, and see what label (word) is assigned to that unit. Discussion of concepts in Ancient Greek have to focus on facts of Ancient Greek and ancient Greeks. As I understand it, the above terms more closely translate to English as “wild beast” and “mortal man”. All concepts are specific to a language, but the potential to create extensionally-identical units with some label is universal,

Let’s then ask whether concepts have changed in the context of English, but taking other terms like “press” or “arms”. The latter two figure in the US Constitution in the First and Second Amendments. When the document was written, newspapers were literally printed on presses (originally designed for pressing wine), and “arms” were all single-shot muzzle-loaded metal tubes. The concepts “press” and “arms” are not limited to the extant technology of the time, they refer more abstractly to the practice of disseminating “expressions”, and to weapons. Meaning is concepts and propositions, not a list of concrete instances – meaning is intensional, not extensional. Thus the meaning of these concepts has not changed at all.

There are cases where something other than technology or knowledge changes, for example “sick” has gained a new, positive meaning (at least for the time), and in British English, “boot” has been metaphorically extended first to mean “where you step to get into a coach” then “lower luggage compartment”, now “trunk”.

I have deluded myself into thinking that I have a tolerable understanding of the concept “concept” and “proposition”, and I also know what a “sentence” is. I know the history of the word idea but I can’t say very exactly what an idea is (what distinguishes it from a proposition). I would be strongly inclined to say that a proposition is a specific type of sentence, except that propositions generally have to be paired with additional information that overcomes the vagueness of natural language (for instance, “He said that Stephen spoke” does not say who “he” is except it cannot be “Stephen”). In one knowledge context “he” would mean “David”, and in another context it would mean “Fred”. It would be correct to say that a proposition is a pairing of a sentence a context. It is also advantageous to promote language, not just because of my professional interest in it but because sentences can be objectively inspected and are not abstract and unjustified constructs like Cartesian mental images projected onto our brains. This is what the technical concept “semantic interpretation” refers to.

A well-meaninged declaration that “He likes mammals, like lions and penguins”, it not and does not convert into a contextual truth when you discover that the person has a false belief that penguins are mammals. The declaration “He likes mammals, like lions”, is also not rendered contextually false because you can imagine there is some person whose pronoun is “he” yet who have most mammal species. Truth has to be about an objectively correct grasp of reality, unless we resign ourselves to saying that objectively false beliefs make false statements “contextually true”. I do not have a solution to the problem of distinguishing false beliefs, redefinitions of concepts, and “pronominal” terms like “I, that…”, but I would say that admitting false beliefs as contextually true solvent that creates truth from falsehood is not a good solution.

[Grames]

On 10/17/2023 at 1:16 PM, Boydstun said:

Like Aristotle’s, Rand’s is a substantial theory of truth. It pertains to the real, the cognitive agent, and the right relation between them. It declines linguistic stances as well as deconstructionist and relativistic stances towards truth.

 

Hi Steven!  

It also rules out a God-like omniscient perspective as a standard for truth.  Epistemology is normative in part and as ever "ought implies can".  No one is or could ever be omniscient.  A very small subset of the omniscient perspective is that called hindsight.  It may well be that if I knew then what i know now I would not have accounted myself as certain or having knowledge of some item then, but lacking the power of time travel or for projecting information into the past that is an impossible standard as well.  Real cognitive agents are finite and fallible which is why they need a standard of truth at all.

Finite as applied to cognition must also mean rate limited in performing integrations.  Thinking can be slow.  It cannot be that being slow is some kind of original sin that makes it impossible to achieve knowledge or certainty. 

Peikoff wrote “Logical processing of an idea within a specific context of knowledge is necessary and sufficient to establish the idea’s truth” (OPAR 171).

...

Rand’s picture in Peikoff’s bold statement is significantly incorrect in my view because as one’s (scientific) knowledge grows one’s knowledge of what was one’s previous context of knowledge also grows. 

 

Have you considered that the omniscient or hindsight perspective may be the source of your misgivings here?  Or is it that there is a possibility that one never can catch up in fully integrating with the present context of knowledge?  I think these two questions are the same.

 

On 10/17/2023 at 1:16 PM, Boydstun said:

The binding of membership relations to concrete factual relations, though necessarily not by complete identity with the latter relations, is surely a major impetus for integration in abstract knowledge and integration of abstract knowledge with experience. Rand’s cast of concept-class membership relations as analyzable in terms of suspension of particular values in mathematically scaled relations—relations that can express concrete magnitude relations in the world—is a grand structure for integration beyond non-contradiction. It makes the meaning of correspondence in “truth as correspondence with facts” more specific, and it accords with the success of science in improving correspondence by use of mathematics.

At what grade-level of reading comprehension do you aim for in your writing?  As I understand the business aspect of writing a lower grade-level of reading comprehension has a potentially larger reading audience, creating a wider scope for dissemination of the ideas within and a potentially larger renumeration for works written for sale.  So pardon me for the pretentious attempt at being your editor but why not just 'bite the bullet' and reuse Rand's phrase "measurement omission" instead of paraphrasing the whole idea and still using a dashed insert?  Also, in the present age of computerized texts there is advantage in having your text use keywords that might be the subject of future scholars' text searches.

 

[Boydstun]

11 hours ago, Grames said:

 

Hi Steven!  

It also rules out a God-like omniscient perspective as a standard for truth.  Epistemology is normative in part and as ever "ought implies can".  No one is or could ever be omniscient.  A very small subset of the omniscient perspective is that called hindsight.  It may well be that if I knew then what i know now I would not have accounted myself as certain or having knowledge of some item then, but lacking the power of time travel or for projecting information into the past that is an impossible standard as well.  Real cognitive agents are finite and fallible which is why they need a standard of truth at all.

Finite as applied to cognition must also mean rate limited in performing integrations.  Thinking can be slow.  It cannot be that being slow is some kind of original sin that makes it impossible to achieve knowledge or certainty. 

Peikoff wrote “Logical processing of an idea within a specific context of knowledge is necessary and sufficient to establish the idea’s truth” (OPAR 171).

...

Rand’s picture in Peikoff’s bold statement is significantly incorrect in my view because as one’s (scientific) knowledge grows one’s knowledge of what was one’s previous context of knowledge also grows. 

 

Have you considered that the omniscient or hindsight perspective may be the source of your misgivings here?  Or is it that there is a possibility that one never can catch up in fully integrating with the present context of knowledge?  I think these two questions are the same.

 

At what grade-level of reading comprehension do you aim for in your writing?  As I understand the business aspect of writing a lower grade-level of reading comprehension has a potentially larger reading audience, creating a wider scope for dissemination of the ideas within and a potentially larger renumeration for works written for sale.  So pardon me for the pretentious attempt at being your editor but why not just 'bite the bullet' and reuse Rand's phrase "measurement omission" instead of paraphrasing the whole idea and still using a dashed insert?  Also, in the present age of computerized texts there is advantage in having your text use keywords that might be the subject of future scholars' text searches.

 

Thanks for these remarks, Grames.

To be presuming that truth we have attained is incomplete in its capture of facts entails there are facts yet to be learned about things, but the unknown facts need not be characterized as a standing in some mind, specifically, as in a God-like omniscience-perspective. Facts, including facts yet to be learned, are the straightforward and mind-independent place for work of mind (i.e., 'Existence exists' is the prior). You are not alone in your view. Your viewpoint, which I do not share, is among a large intellectual vineyard I'm familiar with in some of its varieties. It is begun in Kant (well, maybe Descartes with less sophistication than Kant), it is a primacy of epistemological conditions, which are putative objective conditions. It has varieties in the post-Kant and need not be whole Kant. I'm pretty sure it is found in Sellars, but his books are on my shelves still unstudied. It is found moderately in Van Fraassen's Constructive Empiricism in philosophy of science. There is a strand in Peirce of that color: “Truth is that concordance of an abstract statement with the ideal limit towards which endless investigation would tend to bring scientific belief.”

I wrote this paper in 2013. I have since written anew (~C~) about that controversial passage on truth in OPAR. I say now that the “and sufficient” bit in Peikoff’s remark is unobjectionable if it is taken in the context of (i) the Objectivist distinction of truth and fact, where the former is a reflector of the latter and (ii) the Objectivist notion of truth as an active ongoing identification. The sufficiency claim is within a broadly correspondence view of truth if it means that empirical-truth unity can become so strong (I give an historical scientific example) that it becomes no longer plausible that it is not a reflection of a unity in the world.

I did not simply say “measurement-omission” because it would allow the reader to do a routine glide-over without raising to explicit awareness its detailed meaning. And as I articulated in “Universals and Measurement,” Rand slides back and forth, without registration of it, between two different sorts of what is omitted: One is ‘which member of a designated collection’ (this is nothing distinguishing Rand’s conception of the abstract from any other philosopher’s). The second is ‘which measure-value (along a designated dimension shared by the collection) of which member of a designated collection’ (the original and substantive idea of Rand concerning the abstract). Unless I spell out that second one, it is opaque that that is what I’m intending. I also draw out as often as possible the view of Rand, a correct view, that measurement is not just set-stuff, but that magnitude structures are in the world apart from our set-characterizations such as in numerical capture of those structures with scaled devices (she used 'quantity' where I use 'magnitude'). If I were teaching epistemology, there would first be teaching some proofs in Euclid.

In general, however, I know that parts of my writing often put unnecessary burden on the reader to unpack my meanings, and this is due to my haste. I am trying to do better on that by drawing things out more. I succeeded with that improvement in my paper “Kant versus Rand – Much No to Walsh and Miller”* due to cues from my superb editor. 

I recall something like this when reading Whitehead. One is reading along quite comfortably when suddenly one comes to a paragraph in which there is special vocabulary and the earth shakes and one thinks What on earth is he saying? Rand once remarked that she rejected resorting to neologisms (in Whitehead and Heidegger, there are plenty). I’ve resorting to them only rarely, and those aside, I think all of my “hard to get the meaning” bits, unlike Whitehead's, are repairable if I will slow down.

Russell once reported asking Whitehead why he doesn’t make his meaning plainer, Whitehead replied that then he wouldn’t get any philosophy done, and Russell found that reply entirely acceptable. I can sympathize, but I’m trying to do better with the writing.

Edited October 24, 2023 by Boydstun

[Grames]

10 hours ago, Boydstun said:

You are not alone in your view. Your viewpoint, which I do not share,

That is not my viewpoint, but a viewpoint not compatible with "Rand's substantial theory of truth".  I led off my message with "It" and the referent of that "It" was "Rand's substantial theory of truth" from the quote that was given immediately above in that post.  Long form writing and message board writing are very different, so my apologies for contributing to your confusion by not spelling things out more explicitly.   

To be clear, I agree with your "... unknown facts need not be characterized as a standing in some mind, specifically, as in a God-like omniscience-perspective."  I was making the point that arguments based on hindsight have similarity to arguments based on that God-like omniscience-perspective.  If the omniscient perspective is rejected then so should the hindsight perspective be rejected.

[Boydstun]

 

Necessity and Form in Truths –SB

 

Edited February 9 by Boydstun