My New Book, Inspired by Ayn Rand, The Enemies of Excellence by George Wilson Adams

[George Adams CPA MBA]

Inviting you to read, and teach, my new book, about Objective Economics and Political Economy, inspired by Ayn Rand, The Enemies of Excellence. The Enemies of Excellence - The Timely and Timeless REFUTATION of DEI! https://theenemiesofexcellence.com/

[Reidy]

Did Rand inspire you to put a portrait of Kant on the wall?

[Boydstun]

George Adams, like Peter, I was also wondering why you had the painting of Kant on the wall. It is natural to conclude that something in his thought found serious favor with you. Might it be his doctrine that individuals are ends in themselves and should be treated as that? Might it be the deontological character of his ethics? Might it be that he carries along the perfectionist school of thought among German ethicists?*

Edited February 9 by Boydstun

[George Adams CPA MBA]

Peter,

Quote

Sapere aude!

Yes, Rand hated Kant. But Kant’s idea of universality for any proposed action makes sense and accords with Objectivism. I prefer original thinking over doctrinal purity, “substance over form.”

Kant saved us from the empiricism of David Hume.

Kant’s idea of built in concepts is parallel to Noam Chomsky’s idea of a universal grammar built into human brains. To clarify, I despise Chomsky’s political views.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited February 9 by George Adams CPA MBA

[EC]

There are no "built-in concepts", humans are born tabula rasa conceptually. Concepts are formed via a conscious volitional mind interacting with existents in reality via perception, or the valid more abstract concepts are non-contradictory concepts of concepts that are properly integrated via reason, hierarchical in nature and even the most abstract of concept must be properly traced back in the hierarchy of concepts back in a non-contradictory manner back to concepts properly derived from the senses. There are no floating abstractions nor intrinsic concepts.

[George Adams CPA MBA]

Stephen,

 

Thank you for your comments. Yes I do admire some aspects of Kant's thought while paying decent respect to Rand's serious concerns. Surely we can all agree on Kant's motto: Sapere Aude!

 

Individuals are indeed ends in themselves. There really is no such thing as a team or group and it seems that both Kant and Rand share a celebration of individualism.

 

While I admire Rand's reverence for reason we must be careful. As Kant said, there are limits to reason. These limits have become clearer in the 20th century and here are two key points:

 

(1) Kurt Godel's Incompleteness Theorem's showed that some propositions in math can neither be proved nor disproved. The piercing eyes of Math have a blind spot.

 

(2) Quantum Mechanics, especially Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, shows that there are limits to knowledge at the physical level.

 

Kant was far ahead of his time and operated mostly from insight and intuition in articulating the view that we should not make a God of reason, even though reason is the best tool we have to understand the world.

 

 

[necrovore]

1 hour ago, George Adams CPA MBA said:

Kant’s idea of built in concepts is parallel to Noam Chomsky’s idea of a universal grammar built into human brains.

The usual argument for that idea is that young children frequently use nouns and verbs correctly without knowing what "nouns" and "verbs" are. The problem with that argument is that such children spend a lot of time around adults who use nouns and verbs correctly because they do know what they are, and thus the children have a lot of examples, and they will develop a sense of what matches up with the examples and what doesn't, and they also get corrections from the adults.

I'll agree with EC that "there are no built-in concepts." The senses have certain features "built in" such as the ability of your eyes to automatically adapt to the ambient light level, but these are not "concepts." They are pre-conceptual.

If there is something in the brain like some kind of pre-emphasis for nouns and verbs, then it is also pre-conceptual.

34 minutes ago, George Adams CPA MBA said:

Kurt Godel's Incompleteness Theorem's showed that some propositions in math can neither be proved nor disproved. The piercing eyes of Math have a blind spot.

In Ayn Rand's philosophy there are two kinds of propositions (not confined to math) which can neither be proved or disproved.

The first kind is axioms. Unlike mathematical axioms, philosophical axioms are self-evidencies which have to be used and asserted even in any attempt to deny them. The three main axioms are existence, consciousness, and identity, although there are a handful of corollary axioms.

The second kind is the arbitrary, which are statements designed to be impervious to evidence or proof. Kurt Godel discovered the mathematical equivalent of those.

34 minutes ago, George Adams CPA MBA said:

Quantum Mechanics, especially Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, shows that there are limits to knowledge at the physical level.

Before quantum mechanics was discovered, our knowledge was even more limited

I don't think Ayn Rand made any claims that require (or promise) such "unlimited" knowledge. In fact, I think she sided with Aristotle in saying that the infinite only denotes a potentiality; any actual quantity is finite.

----

I should recommend a couple of books:

Leonard Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand.

David Harriman's Induction in Physics and Philosophy.

Edited February 9 by necrovore

[necrovore]

p.s. @George Adams CPA MBA I did not see a Table of Contents for your book. Is there one publicly available? I like to have a vague idea what's in a book when I'm considering a purchase.

[Ogg_Vorbis]

5 hours ago, EC said:

There are no "built-in concepts", humans are born tabula rasa conceptually. Concepts are formed via a conscious volitional mind interacting with existents in reality via perception, or the valid more abstract concepts are non-contradictory concepts of concepts that are properly integrated via reason, hierarchical in nature and even the most abstract of concept must be properly traced back in the hierarchy of concepts back in a non-contradictory manner back to concepts properly derived from the senses. There are no floating abstractions nor intrinsic concepts.

Thankfully, Kant didn't say that people have built-in concepts. If they were built-in, they wouldn't be a priori concepts and would lack the necessary force of lawfulness or that of a natural order of things. And gathering concepts does not lend them the a priori necessity they require for lawfulness. Causality wouldn't be a law of nature. Principles and laws can't be derived by observation, no matter how many observations of causal events have been made. 

How did Rand discover that causality is a law of nature? 

Edited February 10 by Ogg_Vorbis

[Boydstun]

6 hours ago, George Adams CPA MBA said:

Stephen,

While I admire Rand's reverence for reason we must be careful. As Kant said, there are limits to reason. These limits have become clearer in the 20th century and here are two key points:

(1) Kurt Godel's Incompleteness Theorem's showed that some propositions in math can neither be proved nor disproved. The piercing eyes of Math have a blind spot.

(2) Quantum Mechanics, especially Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, shows that there are limits to knowledge at the physical level.

Kant was far ahead of his time and operated mostly from insight and intuition in articulating the view that we should not make a God of reason, even though reason is the best tool we have to understand the world.

Thanks for the response, George.

Rand agreed that there are limits to reason, but she meant only that reason is tied to the senses. Reason in her meaning is the power of identifying and integrating what is given in perception (including in our actions). Such powers have definite limited characters. For Kant, reason usually means a narrower faculty which is boss of the faculty of the understanding, and this reason does not deal with what is in experience directly, only through the understanding. His reason and understanding together might approximate what Rand defined as reason (hers is a sort of theoretical and explanatory definition of reason friending the dictionary definition from ordinary usage).

Even with his limitations on reason, Kant did make a top god of reason, both in his usual narrow sense and that reason in its commerce with the understanding. His ethical theory attempts to replace God with Reason. It is reason and its needed autonomy that is the source of true morality in his view. As for his idea that knowledge, which is product of sensory experience, the understanding, and reason, needed to be reined in from the German rationalists (Wolff, Moses Mendelssohn, . . .): that was for the purpose of shielding religious faith from the growing body of scientific knowledge and the philosophers assimilating it and weighing it. The limitations he argued were, accordingly, on letting knowledge intrude on religious turf (and especially while a religious zealot had the ear of the King). 

Kant would be in one way sour over what Gödel discovered in his fabled incompleteness theorem, the one showing that some arithmetic truths we know to be true cannot be proven true in a purely deductive system. (The case of the unprovability either way of the Axiom of Choice in set theory is not the famed theorem of Gödel, if I recall correctly; maybe I'll look it up tomorrow.) For it strongly suggests that in arithmetic at least, we have some intellectual intuition after all, which Kant denied we have. On the other hand, he could smile and take this limitative result of Gödel's as showing that arithmetic as a science is synthetic a priori knowledge, Kant's way of characterizing it, not the way the Logicists were trying to characterize it. Kant would not take that Incompleteness theorem as supporting the limitations he was concerned to place on knowledge. I do not myself take it as limiting knowledge, but as adding to our knowledge of deductive systems, specifically some limitations of them. We seem still to have endless rational knowledge of arithmetic; there is no indication that there are any truths in arithmetic we as a species cannot come to know.

Similarly, the Heisenberg Indeterminacy Principle is a discovery of fact about the nature of physical quantities having the physical quantity called 'action' as their product. Those are known as the canonically conjugate pairs in classical Hamiltonian mechanics. Such are the pairs: linear momentum of a body and position of that body; energy of a body and time of that occasion, if my memory is approximately correct. The discovery was that the quantity 'action' comes in a minute minimum value. The discovery and mathematical development and precise experiments in the physics that is quantum mechanics is one of the most extended and magnificent attainments in human knowledge.

 

Edited February 10 by Boydstun

[George Adams CPA MBA]

Necrovore,

Yes, and it is available here: https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Enemies_of_Excellence.html?id=cl7oEAAAQBAJ

Also attaching two (2) screenshots from the aforementioned link.

 

[DavidOdden]

I am compelled to insert a few technical corrections regarding universal grammar and Chomskian linguistics, which has been invoked here. First, Chomsky has held 1,900 different positions, often 7 at the same time. He is famous for saying “this is implicit in my earlier work”. Boiling away various temporary ornamentations of his, his theory has two aspects: a theory of the “faculty”, and a theory of the substance. Categories like noun, verb, vowel, nasal, quantifier are “things”, the substance, which he has claimed that are in a genetically endowed list of things that we know at birth. Those are the “innate concepts”. Over the years, the size of that list was waxed and waned, right now it is very small and for many practitioners (such as myself) it is null. Then there is the “faculty” aspect, the ability to do things. There too we find a range of views, one being that there is a list of things that you can and cannot do in language, and one that claims that there is little to nothing pre-specified.

My position is that language is one aspect of the faculty of reason (which is itself an aspect of general cognition), so as far as I am concerned, the language faculty is not characterized with any substantive limits. However, language and reasoning still have a nature. It is the ability to structure words and form concepts that are part of human nature, and language is the essential tool for forming concepts and expressing propositions. The problem with radical tabula rasa theory is that you cannot learn a language or a fact with a completely blank brain, thus the conceptual faculty cannot itself be learned (how would a child know to learn “concepts” as opposed to storing every sense-image that they encountered; how would a child learn the principle of conceptual economy rather that the principle of maximal precision?).

A faculty is a built-in ability to create a cognitive structure based on sensory input, and language (general, not a specific language) is the most obvious instance of a faculty. When you learn a language, you do not memorize all of the words and sentences of the language, you learn a small set of atoms, and a set of rules for building larger labels (whole words and sentences). Those rules have a definite nature, which in fact mirrors the hierarchical nature of knowledge plus some knowledge of what a rule does (for instance, unifies two concepts into one, or positions one thing after another). There is a kind of “negative knowledge” to the effect that prime numbers or the Fibonacci sequence do not play a role in grammar, which is not directly stated as such (i.e. no rule computes with a word is in a prime-numbered position, or even an odd-numbered position), instead it simply follows from the fact that that mechanism is not part of the faculty of language, which is universally available to all humans and happens automatically upon exposure to language, unlike the ability to sing on key or compute prime numbers which takes conscious training.

In discussing “Chomskian linguistics”, you have to carefully distinguish Noam Chomsky’s current idiosyncratic beliefs and behaviors, from the theories of those whose interest is the mental mechanism that enables humans to have language. Extreme-nativist Chomsky (P&P theory) is fully incompatible with the Objectivist epistemology, but even Chomsky no longer believes in that, and his linguistic views are much closer to mine, which are, of course, based on Objectivism.

[AlexL]

On 2/9/2024 at 10:50 PM, George Adams CPA MBA said:

there are limits to reason [...]

(1) Kurt Godel's Incompleteness Theorem's [...]

(2) Quantum Mechanics  [...]

Neither proves "limits to reason" or to knowledge.

[Doug Morris]

On 2/9/2024 at 4:50 PM, George Adams CPA MBA said:

(1) Kurt Godel's Incompleteness Theorem's showed that some propositions in math can neither be proved nor disproved. The piercing eyes of Math have a blind spot.

We can not prove mathematically that arithmetic is consistent.  But we can make a rational judgment about it.

On 2/9/2024 at 4:50 PM, George Adams CPA MBA said:

(2) Quantum Mechanics, especially Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, shows that there are limits to knowledge at the physical level.

To what extent does Quantum Mechanics, including Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, actually show that there are limits to knowledge at the physical level?  To what extent does it instead simply show that subatomic particles must be viewed as waves of a certain kind, not as point particles?

 

[Ogg_Vorbis]

Similar to Kant's concept of inherent structures shaping experience, you posit a universal "faculty of language" present in all humans. This innate ability lays the foundation for language acquisition and allows learners to internalize grammatical rules and form concepts.

You highlighted the role of rules and structures in language, akin to Kant's emphasis on categories and schemata organizing our understanding. By learning a small set of "atoms" and rules, individuals can construct complex concepts and express them through language.

You acknowledged the crucial role of concepts in language and emphasizes that "a faculty is a built-in ability to create a cognitive structure based on sensory input." This aligns with Kant's view of concepts being necessary for structuring our understanding of the world. However, you acknowledged limitations in learnability, suggesting that not all cognitive structures or rules are equally learnable, unlike Kant's emphasis on the uniformity of a priori categories.

Your view is a relative form of tabula rasa. A new mind at least contains built-in faculties, abilities. This, as you perhaps know, lacks the a priori quality of the Kantian forms and categories. So while, in that view, one can be reasonably certain that causality is a law of nature, certainty itself is only a psychological state. It doesn't by itself guarantee that causality is in fact a law of nature or a corollary of existence. 

Furthermore, the requirement that one use the concept of causality in order to deny it does not, by itself, prove that causality is a law of any kind.

[Ogg_Vorbis]

Chomsky's theory is just a theory anyway. And it is under dispute from different angles which caused Chomsky to refine it several times. At any rate, it's problematic and not a subject for philosophy.

[George Adams CPA MBA]

There seems to be substantial evidence in favor of Chomsky's conjecture (I don't think he claimed any actual proof) that human brains have a built in faculty for language. Children of course soak up language like a sponge. If there really is a universal grammar it's almost certainly genetic.

 

The gold standard for empirical research into genetics has always been so-called twin studies, in which the impact of genes is teased out by studying two genetically identical people.

 

The gold standard for linguistics (at least one of them) is the study of so-called "feral children." These are literally wild children who have never been socialized and grow up surrounded only by nature not people. Feral children seem to develop basic concepts Rand would have acknowledged such as "food" or "fire is hot."

 

So this begs the question: according to Objectivism which comes first - language or concepts? I would say people develop concepts based on their real world experiences and the evidence of their senses. Then these concepts are mapped into the language they are taught. Children learn the words for food or fire. Feral kids are not taught any language but still have concepts. I agree completely with Rand's view they we are not born as robots or pre-taught machines. We have fundamental freedom which begins with the freedom to think.

 

 

 

 

 

[tadmjones]

Lacking a formal exposition ,so in a more philosophical frame, linguistics and conceptualization are means to the end that is meaning. And that awareness is the only capacity that can facilitate identification.

As Stephen is fond of saying existence is identity. The capacity the facilitates the apprehension of identity is the primary.

[DavidOdden]

12 hours ago, George Adams CPA MBA said:

according to Objectivism which comes first - language or concepts?

The attempt to order language before concepts, or vice versa, is a logically flawed enterprise, because neither exists without the other. Both are essential properties of the faculty of reason. A concept, in Rand’s analysis, is not simply a mystical assemblage of generalized entities that somehow cohere, a concept is an open-ended definition with a label. There are no definitions without language (inspect all of Rand’s examples of concepts), and the labels are the representational filing device for concepts, i.e. morphemes, expressed either with physical gestures, written symbols, or in its normal state, sound.

Claims about feral children are vastly overstated and over-romanticized. First, no children are taught language at all, they learn language on their own from peo-ple speaking in their environment. Second, that process begins before birth. Fetuses do not learn words, but they learn, from exposure, many facts about the language of their environment. Remember that the womb is not a soundproof chamber. Third, there are virtually no decent scientific studies of feral children, and no evidence about the cognitive state of actually-feral children (children who exist without human contact: you can see why it is logically impossible to test for the existence of concepts in a feral child, were you to find one.

 The one somewhat-studied such child was Genie, for whom there is no publically available scientific evidence regarding her initial cognitive abilities although we weakly knew in principle how to assess their existence. There is no evidence at all that she had concepts when rescued (after substantial psychological treatment, she gained a limited ability in language given substantial intervention efforts, which apparently failed for the most part).

There is a misunderstanding of concepts as involving some sort of universal “inner language” where actual language learning involves discovering the relation between universal inner language and actual individual languages. Under the universal inner language theory, of course, all humans are born with something like a language already built in, and early Chomskian linguistics did take that stance, and therefore by definition all children must have built-in concepts in some kind of Cartesian “universal machine language” for humans. We know better now (I am not sure whether Chomsky himself knows better). Under that theory, one must claim that feral children have concepts and can form propositions, they just can’t express it in ordinary ways. In fact, feral children are so severely damaged, cognitively, that they really provide evidence for nothing about the nature of language.

Concepts and language are developed in parallel, by iterated reasoning. A child observes that mom, dad and the dog are different existents which have different properties. The child associates the sounds of “mommy”, “daddy” and “doggie” with the referents (or whatever names are assigned to those people / beasts). They learn to differentiate, after more exposure to the world, learning that “daddy” and “grampa” are different names and different people. So far, these are names, not concepts. The leap to concepts comes when they learn of types, and can distinguish “doggie” from “kitty”.

Feral children are not really a "gold standard" in linguistics, they are a sound-bite gimmick that Cartesian linguists used to invoke as supposed factual support, but for what? In fact, it just suggests (does not show) that there is an age past which a first language cannot be acquired by normal means, that age being around the age of majority. But children do acquire language well before that, except in extreme cases usually involving severe child abuse or mental / physical disability.

[EC]

On 2/16/2024 at 10:48 AM, DavidOdden said:

The attempt to order language before concepts, or vice versa, is a logically flawed enterprise, because neither exists without the other. Both are essential properties of the faculty of reason. A concept, in Rand’s analysis, is not simply a mystical assemblage of generalized entities that somehow cohere, a concept is an open-ended definition with a label. There are no definitions without language (inspect all of Rand’s examples of concepts), and the labels are the representational filing device for concepts, i.e. morphemes, expressed either with physical gestures, written symbols, or in its normal state, sound.

Claims about feral children are vastly overstated and over-romanticized. First, no children are taught language at all, they learn language on their own from peo-ple speaking in their environment. Second, that process begins before birth. Fetuses do not learn words, but they learn, from exposure, many facts about the language of their environment. Remember that the womb is not a soundproof chamber. Third, there are virtually no decent scientific studies of feral children, and no evidence about the cognitive state of actually-feral children (children who exist without human contact: you can see why it is logically impossible to test for the existence of concepts in a feral child, were you to find one.

 The one somewhat-studied such child was Genie, for whom there is no publically available scientific evidence regarding her initial cognitive abilities although we weakly knew in principle how to assess their existence. There is no evidence at all that she had concepts when rescued (after substantial psychological treatment, she gained a limited ability in language given substantial intervention efforts, which apparently failed for the most part).

There is a misunderstanding of concepts as involving some sort of universal “inner language” where actual language learning involves discovering the relation between universal inner language and actual individual languages. Under the universal inner language theory, of course, all humans are born with something like a language already built in, and early Chomskian linguistics did take that stance, and therefore by definition all children must have built-in concepts in some kind of Cartesian “universal machine language” for humans. We know better now (I am not sure whether Chomsky himself knows better). Under that theory, one must claim that feral children have concepts and can form propositions, they just can’t express it in ordinary ways. In fact, feral children are so severely damaged, cognitively, that they really provide evidence for nothing about the nature of language.

Concepts and language are developed in parallel, by iterated reasoning. A child observes that mom, dad and the dog are different existents which have different properties. The child associates the sounds of “mommy”, “daddy” and “doggie” with the referents (or whatever names are assigned to those people / beasts). They learn to differentiate, after more exposure to the world, learning that “daddy” and “grampa” are different names and different people. So far, these are names, not concepts. The leap to concepts comes when they learn of types, and can distinguish “doggie” from “kitty”.

Feral children are not really a "gold standard" in linguistics, they are a sound-bite gimmick that Cartesian linguists used to invoke as supposed factual support, but for what? In fact, it just suggests (does not show) that there is an age past which a first language cannot be acquired by normal means, that age being around the age of majority. But children do acquire language well before that, except in extreme cases usually involving severe child abuse or mental / physical disability.

I enjoy your posts.  It's like you take my own thoughts on subjects and then express them much more eloquently than I can currently due to constantly being in a relatively stressful situation mostly outside of my control and essentially uncaused by myself that no matter what I do to attempt to thwart it keeps getting continually sabatoged via outside sources.