A few basic questions here on concept formation and its empirical validation. If this topic has come up on here before, as I’m almost sure it has, feel free to point me in the right direction. I couldn’t find anything on this forum.
Do you consider the process of concept formation one that can be validated merely by philosophy, or must Rand’s theory be informed by the sciences that study the mind and early development of thought?
1a. If you say yes to the latter question, to what extent must it be validated by the sciences? Can Rand’s theory be falsified by further findings within the cognitive sciences?
1b. If you answer yes to the former, defend your answer. Why aren’t Rand’s claims about concept formation, especially in regards to early development, not a matter that science can disprove? I realize philosophy can be informed by science, but many seem to claim it cannot be falsified by science, since this violates the hierarchy of knowledge. If the last proposition is true, and Rand’s concept formation can be demonstrated as false by scientific demonstration, is it still philosophy?
And an open question to either side: do you believe Rand’ss theory has been validated or invalidated to some extent by findings in psychology and cognitive science?
A few basic questions here on concept formation and its empirical validation. If this topic has come up on here before, as I’m almost sure it has, feel free to point me in the right direction. I couldn’t find anything on this forum.
Do you consider the process of concept formation one that can be validated merely by philosophy, or must Rand’s theory be informed by the sciences that study the mind and early development of thought?
1a. If you say yes to the latter question, to what extent must it be validated by the sciences? Can Rand’s theory be falsified by further findings within the cognitive sciences?
1b. If you answer yes to the former, defend your answer. Why aren’t Rand’s claims about concept formation, especially in regards to early development, not a matter that science can disprove? I realize philosophy can be informed by science, but many seem to claim it cannot be falsified by science, since this violates the hierarchy of knowledge. If the last proposition is true, and Rand’s concept formation can be demonstrated as false by scientific demonstration, is it still philosophy?
And an open question to either side: do you believe Rand’ss theory has been validated or invalidated to some extent by findings in psychology and cognitive science?
No truly philosophical subject needs special science input. By definition if it requires non-ubiquitous input from a specialized context it is not philosophy. Im familiar with the claim that Rands ideas about sensations in infants are not philosophical but require special knowledge to be determined. Is this what you are concerned about?
Not really. I think Rand’s comments on perception are either strictly philosophic or irrelevant to the core of the philosophy (Sensation as an actual period of chaotic theater, for instance)
My question relates to concept formation, to how we know this really is how children first form concepts.
…1. Do you consider the process of concept formation one that can be validated merely by philosophy,…
Could you explain what you mean by “validated… …by philosophy”? Do you mean: validated by observations that are possible to most laymen? Or do you mean something else?
There is a sense in which other sciences cannot contradict philosophy (particularly metaphysics and epistemology), but I think we need to be careful about just what we mean when we say that. After all, philosophy and other sciences all come from observations that we make. We are the ones who classify them into the various sciences. So, when we derive some principle from our observations, and find that it deals with very fundamental aspects, that is universally applicable across all sciences, then it we would classify it as being in philosophy. In theory, if a biologist dug deep enough he would have to reach this more fundamental abstractions about Metaphysics and Epistemology. Similarly, if a physicist dug deeply enough he would do so too, and an economist, and so on. Therefore, this fundamental principle underlies all the other sciences.
Typically, the broad principles of Metaphysics and Epistemology are discovered from more ordinary, non-specialized observations and the biologists, physicists and economists take them as true rather than re-discover them. In this sense, the specialized sciences depend on philosophy. For instance, every scientist must implicitly grant notions like “existence exists”, must follow a logical process, and so on. However, if we imagine a scenario where some biologist or economist actually does discover that one such broad principle is false, then – if he is right, he’s right. He could have made a philosophical discovery. Or, it is possible that the error discovered by any such specialized scientist was never part of philosophy proper. It is possible that he found a flaw in the derivation used by some philosopher, but that the final derivation still stands.
Validated merely by means of theorizing from first principles, let us say. We do not have to necessarily regard science when we form a principle in philosophy.
My question is whether Rand’s theory fits this description? Does Rand’s theory of concept formation follow merely from philosophic observation of the world around us, and not into the realm of the special sciences? Granted, this is a notoriously hard line to define. It’s even more so when Objectivists accept that inductive reasoning is not limited to the sciences. Still, it seems to me that Rand would have to be informed in some aspects of psychology in order to make her generalizations about how humans conceptualize, especially at a young age.
The information provided by psychology would be conveyed via concepts. How concepts are properly validated is a question addressed by epistemology.
The analysis of light by Newton and subsequent discoveries by Herschel and Ritter which led to identification of wavelengths, fits in well with measurement omission.
Reality is a continuum. The sciences overlap one another as their discoveries move further away from their core specialties. A discovery of a contradiction would indicate an epistemological error. If the error is determined to be within the identification of the process of concept-formation, would it invalidate it or identify a previously undiscovered refinement to it?
In this way, the various sciences may be synergistic and interrelated, providing a spiral of knowledge that can redound upon itself.
So then how do we establish the proposition that children develop concepts in a certain way, as opposed to another way? Your argument begs the question. It assumes the Objectivist theory of concepts.
Rand seems to offer what is a description of how people do form concepts, and that this is the appropriate way to do it. She does say there is a right way and a wrong way to form a concept, but that humans will naturally come upon how to form them. Is there any evidence that the way a child forms early concepts as length is by measurement omission? We may be able to introspect ourselves and see that this is a good way to form concepts, but Rand claims more than that.
Assuming the Objectivist theory of concepts was not the intent. Observation provides us with the evidence that children do form concepts. Specifically, concepts of entities. Mom offers junior a cookie at the same time states the word “cookie”. Why does junior eventually relate the metaphysical cookie to the sound “cookie”?
My girlfriend and I visited my grandson when he was about 3 or 4 years old. It just so happened that she owns a pair of tennis shoes that were the same make and color as my grandson’s grandmothers. When he saw the shoes sitting among the other shoes on the mat, he started to search for his grandmother. To risk begging the question again, “similarity” took a step of validation in my mind.
What is it about “cookies” and “shoes” that permits us as children or adults to discriminate them from one another? What permits us to differentiate “cookies” from “shoes” and integrate into the various concepts? Am I just restating your question here in different words?
I agree kids have concepts. But Rand developed a method that she said was the way children, generally, formed early concepts. My question is how do we know this particular method is correct? It’s seems that, prima facie, people recognize distinct entities and form concepts. How do we know they do it via measurement omission and integration via CCDs?
Thanks, cause this is at least helping me form my question better.
Are we consciously omitting measurements? Are we consciously integrating within a CCD? In his lecture Consciousness As Identification, Binswanger suggests that the CCD is the unnoticed background. An extreme example he used was comparing light blue with dark blue with inflation. We see the light blue is different from the dark blue but when we get to inflation, we just have to stop. Put the light blue with dark blue and yellow, and the unnoticed CCD of “hue” jumps out and permits us to see the similarity between the blues. I recognise this is close to begging the question again, but consider what your mind does presented with “3”, “7”, and “a purple square”, vs. “3”, “7”, and “802”. 3 and 7 could be viewed as close together, or odd relative to 802 being much larger or even. Do you have to identify “number” as the CCD, or does the difference and similarity along the CCD just stand out to you. As I try to sort out my own conceptual chaos, it is often easier to identify things which belong together than it is to identify the CCD that gives them that common background.
What is the metaphysical basis for differentiation and integration along a line of similarity?
Granted, having been exposed to concept-formation as a formally laid out process, seeing reports of propositions being compared to mathematical equations in physiological studies, the desire to embrace the findings as further demonstration of the accuracy of that process are there. Are there other processes of concept-formation outlined by the nominalist, subjectivist or other any other school? This is not an arguement for Rand’s identification as being correct.
I agree with Binswanger that CCD is implicit, which is why I would not presume to just go on accounts of young children, and there is evidence that most humans have already reached the conceptual stage of consciousness before they can even utter coherent words. A proper study would probably deal with object recognition.
Most purely philosophic theories are more metaphysically based than epistemologically based. Nominalists still take up the realist fallacy that in order for something to have a universal property, there must really be some such “universal” out there, in the world. So, most nominalist theories are not terribly interesting to us.
I’ve pointed out before that Peter Abelard has a similar method for identifying universals as Rand, though neglected measurement omission, which of course is key. Conceptualism in general is very similar to Rand. I would say that Rand was wrong for rejecting the school of thought entirely.
Concept formation exists within cognitive science and often bares results closer to that of Objectivism than any philosophy. Just doing a search for concept formation in Google, you come up with this Wiki article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept_learning
A few basic questions here on concept formation and its empirical validation. If this topic has come up on here before, as I’m almost sure it has, feel free to point me in the right direction. I couldn’t find anything on this forum.
Do you consider the process of concept formation one that can be validated merely by philosophy, or must Rand’s theory be informed by the sciences that study the mind and early development of thought?
1a. If you say yes to the latter question, to what extent must it be validated by the sciences? Can Rand’s theory be falsified by further findings within the cognitive sciences?
Ayn Rand first validated the theory to her own satisfaction by introspection. Then she systematically covered all the different concepts for different kinds of things in ITOE and showed how it was generally applicable. Everyone that sees validity in the theory has done their own bit of introspection to reproduce the findings. Her theory leads to a natural and fundamental introduction of hierarchy to knowledge which she put to use over and over to productive effect. Throughout all this she is presenting a normative theory of how concepts could and should be formed. A normative theory cannot be falsified except to show it doesn’t lead to the consequences expected and required of it. That hasn’t happened yet, and won’t.
The only other kind of validation the theory can get is scientific validation with scientific third-person perspective objectivity.
Introspection is not scientifically objective meaning that it is inherently not third person but first person in its observing perspective. The further scientific validation of Rand’s theory of concept formation comes down to finding a third person perspective on concept formation. In my opinion that can be done in part with computer modeling, leaving the last step to validating the correspondence between the computer model used and actual brains. I don’t forsee any technological breakthroughs to allow real-time mind-reading at the resolution of individual cells, and until that happens only inferences induced from the similarity between models and reality can be possible.
An aside: There is overlap between the set of facts used and referred to by epistemology and child development, and everyone has been themselves a child once and many have their own children. These facts cannot be said to be owned by either the special study of child development or philosophy.
And an open question to either side: do you believe Rand’ss theory has been validated or invalidated to some extent by findings in psychology and cognitive science?
There is too great a distance between the fields still to say that one impacts the other yet. Still, I am a fan of “hierarchical temporal memory” model and I think at the least one can make a case for the scientific empirical validation of the correspondence theory of truth in perception. I can see a great deal of other enabling features of the HTM model that correspond with features of Rand’s theory.
Grames, do you think Rand’s treatment of concepts was exhaustive? By which I mean, do you think she covered every kind of true conceptual class? I know she said she considered concept formation only a hypothesis to be tested, but by applying it to all various kinds of concept classes such as concept of entity, of consciousness etc, do you think she got every concept class that could exist? If not, does this mean trouble for the theory?
Basically I’m looking for a necessary link between concept and measurement omission. Why must a concept be built upon measurement omission? This seems to me to be an empirical question, since it deals only with human cognition. As Peikoff and Rand have said, concept formation is specifically about how WE form concepts and not how an altered sort of consciousness might do it. (The latter half of the conjunction is my own, but I assume it follows necessary from the former)
In regards to Hawkins, I don’t have time to investigate too much right now. Just a brief question. Does Hawkins’ theory of hierarchy queue with the Objectivist hierarchy, i.e from perceptual data to first level concepts and further abstraction from there? Also, is there any aspect of measurement omission in his theory?
Grames, do you think Rand’s treatment of concepts was exhaustive? By which I mean, do you think she covered every kind of true conceptual class? I know she said she considered concept formation only a hypothesis to be tested, but by applying it to all various kinds of concept classes such as concept of entity, of consciousness etc, do you think she got every concept class that could exist? If not, does this mean trouble for the theory?
I don’t know if she got them all, but I don’t see how the theory couldn’t accommodate anything that came along. In one way Rand is exhaustive: there are concepts at the first level, there can be names assigned to particulars so particulars can be dealt with conceptually, and there are abstractions from abstractions. Everything is a special case of one of those methods, or a combination of them.
Basically I’m looking for a necessary link between concept and measurement omission. Why must a concept be built upon measurement omission? This seems to me to be an empirical question, since it deals only with human cognition. As Peikoff and Rand have said, concept formation is specifically about how WE form concepts and not how an altered sort of consciousness might do it. (The latter half of the conjunction is my own, but I assume it follows necessary from the former)
In regards to Hawkins, I don’t have time to investigate too much right now. Just a brief question. Does Hawkins’ theory of hierarchy queue with the Objectivist hierarchy, i.e from perceptual data to first level concepts and further abstraction from there? Also, is there any aspect of measurement omission in his theory?
I’m taking these together because my answer relies on Hawkins. Concepts are built on measurement omission because that is what the brain does over and over at all levels of cognition, from sensation to perception to conception. Animals do it, and his hacked up prototype software does it. Hawkins does not speculate about concept formation and does not address language but I have no hesitation doing it. Measurement omission is the general phenomena that creates all cognitive hierarchies. Of course Hawkins doesn’t use Rand’s vocabulary but the mechanic is clearly there when several similar patterns involving excitations of multiple neurons on a lower layer can all activate the same single neuron on a higher layer. The main difference between human and other animal intelligences is the depth (or height?) of the hierarchy humans have access to. Human intelligence is not a freak of nature, it is just more of the same capacity that was already in there.
Hawkins uses (if I remember) something like seven layers just to model the human neo-cortex, but there are also layers dedicated for each of the modes of sensing. It is not known how many total layers there can be, probably dozens. So the sensation-perception-conception hierarchy is basically correct but in reality it is finer grained than that with each of those requiring multiple layers to function. What “layer” refers to also has structure. Measurement omission occurs across every layer boundary going up the hierarchy in the process of recognition, and going down the hierarchy is the recall of memory.