Consider the following example: you're walking thorugh the savannah with some of your family in search of a little breakfast. You come across a type of animal you've never seen before. It has dark brown fur with a white stripe down its spine. As you approach, it lunges at your merry band, sinking its teeth into your eldest daughter's neck and killing her. Now let's say we asked you what the probability is that the next animal with dark brown fur and a white stripe you see would be dangerous. You'd probably say 100 percent, and that's the most rational guess you could make since the single dark-furred, white-striped animal you've encountered proved to be dangerous.
Now let's say you accidentally happen upon another one of the these creatures. This time the animal sits there peacefully, even assuming the probability that the next animal with dark brown fur and a white stripe down its spine will be dangerous. Again we ask you, what is the probability that the next animal with dark brown fur and a white stripe down its spine will be dangerous. You'd probably pause. Rationally, your answer should be 50 percent, since as of this moment, one of two has proved dangerous. But your gut says something different. It's true that it is no longer reasonable to expect that all individuals of this species are dangerous, but on an intuitive level you know it's better to be safe than sorry. In your heightened emotional state, the cost of taking a longer path to avoid the brown and white critter is far less than the risk of losing another life. And in this case, your intuitive mind is right. While avoiding all animals with dark fur and white stripes would be an irrational calculation rooted in emotion (namely, fear), it is also an adaptive one.
Of course, this isn't just true in the jungle. In modern life too, listening to intuition and being more sensitive to the possibility of harm will serve you better on average than evaluating each individual situation rationally and objectively, particularly in situations that require rapid decisions for which you have incomplete information. [Out of Character, 188-189]
It's important to note that Desteno and Valdesolo are not simply stating in a preference. There is a large body of research supporting this view. Ironically, Ayn Rand might have been able to appreciate this truth, had she been paying more attention to the implications of one of her most important epistemological doctrines, unit-economy. In her short treatise on epistemology, Rand explains unit economy as follows:
Since consciousness is a specific faculty, it has a specific nature or identity and, therefore, its range is limited: it cannot perceive everything at once; since awareness, on all its levels, requires an active process, it cannot do everything at once. Whether the units with which one deals are percepts or concepts, the range of what man can hold in the focus of his conscious awareness at any given moment, is limited. The essence, therefore, of man’s incomparable cognitive power is the ability to reduce a vast amount of information to a minimal number of units—which is the task performed by his conceptual faculty. And the principle of unit-economy is one of that faculty’s essential guiding principles.
The very fact that human beings can only hold a small amount of information in consciuosness at a given moment makes reasoning about complex matters very difficult, if not impossible. Since the brain can only hold a few pieces of data within consciousness at a given time, complexity leads to cognitive over-load. Intuition is the cognitive faculty that enables individuals to make quick decisions concerning complex matters. Because these quick decisions aren't as accurate as slow, deliberate, peer-reviewed reasoning, it tends to err on the side of safety, as noted in the above example. Human beings are prewired to be extra cautious about potential sources of harm. That is why the infant child, having once burned his hand touching a flame, doesn't repeat the experiment a second time. He does not (as Objectivism implies) make some difficult calcuation involving the law of identity and its corollary, causality; he knows nothing nor is capable of understanding such abstruse constructs. Moreover, as any scientist would tell you, one experiment can hardly be consider decisive. The child avoids the flame because he instinctively (i.e., emotionally) understands: it's better to be safe than sorry.
According to social psychologist Jonathan Haidt:
Brains evaluate everything in terms of potential threat or benefit to the self, and the adjust behavior to get more of the good stuff and less of the bad. Animal brains make such appraisals thousands of times a day with no need for conscious reasoning, all in order to optimize the brain's answer to the fundamental problems of animal life: approach or avoid?...
In a landmark review article, [social psychologist Robert] Zajone urged psychologists to use a dual-process model in which affect or "feeling" is the first process. It has primacy both because it happens first (it is part of perception and is therefore extremely fast) and because it is more powerful (it is closely linked to motivation, and therefore it strongly influences behavior). The second process — thinking — is an evolutionarily newer ability, rooted in language and not closely related to motivation.... The thinking system is not equipped to lead — it simply doesn't have the power to make things happen — but it can be a useful advisor. [The Righteous Mind, 55-56]
Rand also believes in what could be described as a dual-process model involving conscious reasoning on the one hand and the subconscious on the other; but Rand reverses the primacy, making conscious reasoning the first process and subconscious evaluations the second process (hence Peikoff's assertion, spoken in Rand's presence: "There is nothing in the subconscious besides what you acquired by conscious means."). In the Randian model, the subconscious is "programmed" by the conscious mind. For Rand, the appraisals we all make thousands of time a day are "lightning-like estimates of the things around you, calculated according to your values." Where do these values come from? Ideas.
Your subconscious is like a computer—more complex a computer than men can build—and its main function is the integration of your ideas. Who programs it? Your conscious mind. If you default, if you don’t reach any firm convictions, your subconscious is programmed by chance—and you deliver yourself into the power of ideas you do not know you have accepted.... If your subconscious is programmed by chance, its output will have a corresponding character. You have probably heard the computer operators’ eloquent term “gigo”—which means: “Garbage in, garbage out.” The same formula applies to the relationship between a man’s thinking and his emotions.
The Randian model assumes that the subconsious is a blank slate: all its content derives from the conscious mind. If an individual focuses his mind and programs his subconscious with "rational" convictions, his emotions will tend to be rational. If, however, the individual fails to focus him mind and merely integrates whatever ideas he happens, by accident, to have been exposed to, his emotions will tend to be irrational and, if used as a guide to action, dangerous. Such an individual does not know whether his subconscious "is true or false, right or wrong, whether it’s set to lead him to success or destruction, whether it serves his goals or those of some evil, unknowable power. He is blind on two fronts: blind to the world around him and to his own inner world, unable to grasp reality or his own motives, and he is in chronic terror of both."
There are a number of very serious problems with Rand's view. To begin with, it is entirely inconsistent with evolution. As even Rand would probably have admitted, her model is not consistent with animal (i.e., non-human) cognition. Animals don't program their subconscious minds. Their brains make thousands of instant appraisals everyday. These appraisals are not based on conscious convictions integrated into their subconscious minds. Now according to evolution, humans evolved from animals. The human brain, therefore, evolved from the brains of lower animals. Hence, we would expect that a human brain would constitute a further development of the animal brain, rather than a complete re-write. In other words, the human power of conscious reasoning would be built upon, rather than replace, the animal brain. Otherwise, the human brain would in effect have to be redesigned by evolution from the ground up. But this is not how evolution works. If Rand were right about how the subconscious works, to maintain logical consistency, she would have to believe that the human brain was designed by some agent (e.g., God, space aliens, the flying spaghetti monster, etc.). Since she denies the existence of any such entitites, her view of the subconscious is logically insupportable.
The second problem with Rand's view is that it does not accord with the evidence. The brain simply does not work the way Rand claims it does, and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of experiments corroborating this fact. As Jonathan Haidt explains:
Psychologists used to assume that infant minds were blank slates.... But when development psychologists invented ways to look into infant minds, they found a great deal of writing already on that slate.
The trick was to see what surprises babies. Infants as young as two months old will look longer at an event that surprises them than an event they were expecting.... if the infant's mind comes already wired to interpret events in certain ways, than infants can be surprised with the world violates their expectations.
Using this trick, psychologists discovered that infants are born with some knowledge of physics and mechanics: they expect that objects will move according to Newton's laws of motion, and they get startled when psychologists show them scenes that should be physically impossible (such as a toy car seeming to pass through a solid object). [The Righteous Mind, 63]
Many more experiments could be made to corroborate this refutation of Rand's view. Emotions are not the results of programming by the conscious mind. They are, on the contrary, products of the cognitive unconscious, which is man's evolutionary inheritance from his mammalian ancestors. They are adapative, which means: they developed to meet specific needs of animals — namely, the necessity, in some situations, to make very quick judgments. They supplement, rather than contradict or oppose, man's rational faculty. Indeed, as we shall soon discover, man's rational faculty depends upon his emotions, and cannot function properly without them.
24 comments:
Greg,
Did you get a review copy of Haidt's book?
Did you get a review copy of Haidt's book?
Yes, I'm in the process of reading it. Haidt does a superb job of going over the evidence against the "rationalist" view of morality. It provides what Pareto's work on the same subject lacks: the psychological evidence corroborating what Pareto observed through his own immense reading. Haidt's analysis of the motivational complexes driving social conduct seems to be an improvement on Pareto's rather crude taxonomy of sentiments.
He does not (as Objectivism implies) make some difficult calcuation involving the law of identity and its corollary, causality
Given the context, you can't possibly make the case that this is what Objectivists actually believe. This is such blatant exaggeration that I needn't even adress it further.
The very fact that human beings can only hold a small amount of information in consciuosness at a given moment makes reasoning about complex matters very difficult, if not impossible. Since the brain can only hold a few pieces of data within consciousness at a given time, complexity leads to cognitive over-load.
Yeah, the capacity of the conscious mind to hold stuff is pretty limited. This is where concepts are brought in, to help make the process of reasing about complex matters more condesned and efficient, so you don't have to deal with a whole bunch of "concretes." Rand writes:
concepts enable man to hold in the focus of his conscious awareness much more than his purely perceptual capacity would permit. The range of man’s perceptual awareness—the number of percepts he can deal with at any one time—is limited.(http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/unit_economy.html)
You tend to portray Rand's view of reasoning as this intense, neurotic internal dialogue of cost-benefit analysis, in which one spends immense amouts of time assessing every possible outcome of a given situation, and you take it as far as applying it to a young child, as I have shown above. But this is little more than a giant straw man. Rand viewed reason as the means by which man's mind deals with the external world. That humans need to learn stuff in order to survive, and that it's not automatic:
Man cannot survive, as animals do, by the guidance of mere percepts. A sensation of hunger will tell him that he needs food (if he has learned to identify it as “hunger”), but it will not tell him how to obtain his food and it will not tell him what food is good for him or poisonous. He cannot provide for his simplest physical needs without a process of thought.(http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/man.html)
Logic, in her view, is really just the tool for doing this, for taking the data one receive's from the external world to create or integrate with useful knowledge:
Logic is man’s method of reaching conclusions objectively by deriving them without contradiction from the facts of reality(http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/logic.html)
Greg, you write intelligent things. To this I would add that most of your writings could stand just fine on their own, without the whole Rand-bashing element. It's unnecessary. You'd get more respect, IMO, and not the inital reaction from people: "WTF? This guy is obsessed with his hatred of Rand!"
"Man cannot survive, as animals do, by the guidance of mere percepts. A sensation of hunger will tell him that he needs food (if he has learned to identify it as “hunger”), but it will not tell him how to obtain his food and it will not tell him what food is good for him or poisonous. He cannot provide for his simplest physical needs without a process of thought."
Funny how our ancestors somehow managed to evolve into humans without needing Rand's system.
"You'd get more respect, IMO, and not the inital reaction from people"
From Objectivists and fans of Rand, you mean. From my perspective, "people" in general are A) unaware of many of Rand's concepts; or B) do not believe in all of them with the same depth and fervor as Objectivists; or C) think the ideas are a bit out-of-step with the real world. And then there are the minority who buy into it completely.
I would be fairly surprised if anyone who was both literate and not an Objectivist read this blog and decided it was a hateful "obsession" over Rand. I've seen discussions from people who absolutely loathe Rand; by comparison, this blog is remarkably tame.
KW:
> To this I would add that most of your writings could stand just fine on their own, without the whole Rand-bashing element. It's unnecessary.
OK, KW, another part of Argument 101 is that if you're going to make a criticism, you should generally provide some examples.
So you say Greg is "Rand-bashing". Can you provide us with some quotes demonstrating this alleged "Rand-bashing"? Then, by way of contrast, a couple of examples of criticisms of Objectivism done in a style you approve of.
CW:
I would be fairly surprised if anyone who was both literate and not an Objectivist read this blog and decided it was a hateful "obsession" over Rand. I've seen discussions from people who absolutely loathe Rand; by comparison, this blog is remarkably tame.
Literate Non-Objectivist here, speaking up to confirm the truth (in my case at least) of this statement.
Here is some of what Mr. Nyquist and Mr. Barnes would be doing if they were really the irrational haters the true-believer Randians claim them to be:
-- Linking favorably to (and quoting at length from) Michael Prescott's essay "Romancing the Stone-Cold Killer", in which Rand's own diaries show her to have based her fictional male heroes on a teenage forger, kidnapper, and multiple murderer: http://michaelprescott.net/hickman.htm
-- Citing favorably this Bloomberg article on Wall Streeters as psychopaths, and noting the similarity between the types of behavior Objectivists laud and the types that brought down the world's financial systems: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-03/did-psychopaths-take-over-wall-street-asylum-commentary-by-william-cohan.html
In fact, I posit that the Objectivists attacking Nyquist and Barnes are doing so not because N&B are irrationally hypervicious; if N&B were irrationally hypervicious by Objectivist lights, they would be a great tool to use to beat over the heads of Objectivism's critics, much in the same way that the "Get A Brain! Morans" photo is now shorthand among the American Left for "illiterate right-wing bozo".
No, the real reason N&B set off the Red Alert klaxons at Objectivist Central is precisely because they don't use the easy, broad-brush swipes, but have a knowledge of Objectivism and Rand (and her chief apostles) sufficient to be able to demonstrate not only that she was in most cases wrong, but ridiculously self-contradictory, as bad if not worse than the Holy Writs of the religions she disdained. (Speaking of which, how in the world can be both an Objectivist and a Fundamentalist Christian, as former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford claims to be? Or did he just like the bits in both Holy Writs about how it is good for powerful men to do what they like and it's women's role to cheerfully submit?)
Funny how our ancestors somehow managed to evolve into humans without needing Rand's system.
Funny how they managed to survive right up until the mid 1950's without Rand's system! Gee, how incredible!
I would be fairly surprised if anyone who was both literate and not an Objectivist read this blog and decided it was a hateful "obsession" over Rand.
All I can say, from personal experience, and at first glance, is that I would find a blog titled "My Philosohical Musings and Insights" far more inviting than "Not-Well-Known Philosopher X Was Wrong About A Lot of Things and Here's Hundred's of Really Long Essays on Why."
So you say Greg is "Rand-bashing". Can you provide us with some quotes demonstrating this alleged "Rand-bashing"? Then, by way of contrast, a couple of examples of criticisms of Objectivism done in a style you approve of.
In my previous comments I have given examples where I think Greg sound's like he's dramatizing Rand's character and actions. As for the contrast, I haven't seen any. But what would suffice would be something like "Rand said X. Now let's try and understand why and from where she would have come up with this. Then, let's look at relevant evidence and see whether or not X makes sense."
not because N&B are irrationally hypervicious;
Both are indeed quite calm in their tones, Nyquist more so than Barnes. I posit that their errors are subtle and well hidden.
how in the world can be both an Objectivist and a Fundamentalist Christian, as former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford claims to be?
Anyone can claim that they're anything they want.
"Funny how they managed to survive right up until the mid 1950's without Rand's system! Gee, how incredible!"
But according to her, they didn't. According to her, they always had her system in play.
When I originally wrote "Rand's system", I wasn't referring to Objectivism, but rather the way Rand described the system of human survival requiring a specific level of thought (as opposed to the animal "percepts"). My reply takes an opposing stance, in pointing out that prehistoric humans and their evolutionary ancestors managed to survive without requiring particularly deep or rational thought.
Rand makes one unfounded assumption: that stripped of his intellect, a man would be utterly incapable of survival in the wild. Why should this be so? Though we may not rely on them in modern life, our bodies still carry urges and responses that could conceivably direct us towards survival. Edible food tends to smell and taste good. Spoiled or poisonous food tends to smell and taste bad. We avoid pain and discomfort, and excesses of heat and cold. Our reactions to startling noises and sudden movements are integral defense mechanisms. How much reason and intellect does survival actually require? In the face of this, Rand's statement about man's survival is at least highly debatable, if not outright wrong.
Which isn't to imply that somehow intellect is bad or inferior (which is the accusation I've often seen Objectivists level when this kind of thing comes up); just that it may not be as essential to base survival as Rand would like to assert, and without that pillar to rely on as an indisputable fact, some of her other assertions may rest on shakier foundations.
CW
>Our reactions to startling noises and sudden movements are integral defense mechanisms.
IIRC Rand directly contradicts herself in the ITOE on this issue. Normally she claims that unlike animals, man has no automatic survival mechanisms except his reason. But she makes this claim, and then the opposite - on the following page as I recall - that we *do* have automatic mechanisms that tell us what is good and bad for us. I'm on holiday right now but will provide the cite on return.
Hey thanks Literate Non-Objectivist, your comment is appreciated. It seems KW is just trolling; he's backpedaling already on his claim that Greg is "bashing" Rand - now Greg's sin is, oddly, "dramatizing" Rand, whatever he means by that. And of course he doesn't provide any actual quotes when challenged, merely some handwaving. This is typical; Objectivists don't have much game. "Bias" is just the boilerplate response to their critics as they usually don't have the wherewithal to formulate an argument in response.
KW:
>But what would suffice [as acceptable Rand criticism] would be something like "Rand said X. Now let's try and understand why and from where she would have come up with this. Then, let's look at relevant evidence and see whether or not X makes sense."
But this is a very strange complaint, as this is the standard modus operandi here at the ARCHNblog. Most of the articles have exactly these elements. For example, this one! Let's walk you through it step by step:
- The "X" that Rand said in this article is that emotions are not tools of cognition.
- Why and from where she came up with it? Greg explains how "The Randian model assumes that the subconscious is a blank slate: all its content derives from the conscious mind" and how her theory follows from assuming this model.
- Finally, what about the relevant evidence to see whether or not Rand's claim "X" makes sense? Greg supplies examples of the latest cognitive science - a science which, unfortunately, clearly contradicts it. And of course this is just one of a detailed multipart part series bristling with just such "relevant evidence."
So there it is, exactly what you demand, right there in black and white staring you in the face. I await with interest your acknowledgement of this.
Now, to repeat a question I asked you earlier but you did not answer: why do you demand that Rand's critics must be "calm" and "academic" and make their case with the utmost care and detail when discussing her work, yet you don't make the same demand of Rand, who is nothing like "calm" or "academic" when discussing almost any other thinker or subject?
Why do you have one rule for Rand, KW, and another for her critics?
But what would suffice would be something like "Rand said X. Now let's try and understand why and from where she would have come up with this. Then, let's look at relevant evidence and see whether or not X makes sense."
Daniel has already explained why this is an inaccurate charge. I find another aspect of this charge fascinating, which is this: KW is here advancing an ideal of criticism which he refuses to follow himself. In other words, he complains about critics of Rand not understanding Objectivism, yet he makes no effort on his own part to understand the critics. Instead he makes vague, unsubstantiated charges (such as dramatizing charge against myself), buttressed by ad hominem charges about an "obsession with Rand." At no time does KW evince that he understands any of the criticism of Rand advanced here or elsewhere.
This is no where more apparent than in his brief discussion of Huemer's criticism of Rand in the previous thread:
In Objection (i), [Huemer] does a pretty good job of outlining what Objectivism calls the 'subjective-intrinsic' split, but then he attributes Rand's position to the former.
Sorry KW, but you don't understand what Huemer is saying. While Huemer's "absolutist" morality comes pretty close to Rand's "intrinsicism," "agent-relative" is not the same thing as Rand's subjectivism. You can't dismiss criticism unless you understand it. Nor is Rand's third category applicable to Huemer, since he does not recognize the existence of any such category.
One thing I noticed about Objectivists and Rand sympathizers almost from the start: they are not even capable of understanding criticisms of Rand, let alone refuting them. Instead, they look for some convenient excuse to dismiss the criticism out-of-hand. Usually, this involves some form of the ad hominem fallacy. Either the views of the critic or the critic himself is attacked. This constitutes a fallacy of logic and is therefore irrational.
Both are indeed quite calm in their tones, Nyquist more so than Barnes. I posit that their errors are subtle and well hidden.
In other words, KW can't find the errors or explicate the subtlety, but he does know that Dan and I must be guilty of errors, because Rand can't possibly be wrong. Psychological research shows that this is the basic MO of most people when their ideological views are threatened. They assume (without consciously realizing it) that they can't possibly be wrong and their critics can't possibly be right. It's this mindset that prevents them from being rational about their ideological beliefs. Since it's only through criticism that such rationality can be attained, those who are closed to criticism (and that's vast majority of human beings) will persist in their irrationality until reality itself dislodges them from their dogmatic slumbers.
Have you guys read Rand's repudiation of her "philosophy"? ;-)
So there it is, exactly what you demand, right there in black and white staring you in the face.
Alright, I think the time has come for me to throw in the towel. As I initially expected, it didn't take long for the discussion to become jejune (a word I learned from Greg), a vile, degenerate brawl, with each side yelling "No! It's you who doesn't understand me!"
Daniel, I still maintain that Greg doesn't follow the formula I initally put forth. Greg's typical MO, as I've seen, is to quote a small snippet of something Rand said, without considering the broader context, and interpret it as he chooses. It's pretty easy to take a phrase such as "emotions are not tools of cognition" and interpret it any which way one pleases, without understanding the definitions of the terms used and the greater context in which this statement was made. Thus, he is able to erect straw men such as equating Rand's theory with children starting with the laws of causality and identity, and deducing their conclusions from these. This is anything but the real Objectivist view, which is that young children, like animals, operate at the perceptual level until they learn to process concepts. Also, there is nothing about deduction from axioms, but, rather, induction, which is the process of making generalized conclusions from specific observations.
Even with the striped animal story, Rand would never have said that if this animal killed one of your children, that you should stand there and say "Oh, uh, well, realistically there's only a 50% chance that it's dangerous." This animal took away something of high value to you, and thus, given that it's an animal and therefore unpredictable/you can't reason with it, you should treat all further encounters with hostility.
Greg seems to also misinterpret the blank slate view as well. Sure, the brain is wired to do some things automatically at birth. Do we need to learn to breathe, via conscious processes? Do we need to learn to pump our hearts via conscious processes? Similarily, do we need to learn to feel pain when a part of the body experiences damage? Objectivists don't think these things, and I'm pretty sure nobody does. What Rand meant by blank slate was free of concepts and abstractions.
they found a great deal of writing already on that slate.
Just out of personal curiosity, I would like to see this kind of evidence of "content on the hard drive" at birth. If anything, Damasio's book taught me that the brain isn't anything like a data storage device, where where contents can be visualized in some form.
infants are born with some knowledge of physics and mechanics
Is it really knowledge of physics? How old are these infants? Could it be that they are merely reacting to something that is inconsistent with everything they have seen before? Occam would tell us to go the less-unproved-assumptions route.
Anyway, I have decided that this will be my last comment on this website. Accusations of "trolling" really are an invitation to leave, and thus I will no longer bother you fine people. We have really just reached a stalemate of mutual misunderstanding. Plus, school starts again next week (this should give you an idea of my age), and I'll no longer have time to waste on the internet.
I would by no means call myself an Objectivist, if an Objectivist is someone who has studied the philosophy thoroughly, and attempts to live by its principles (if I was, I would have known better than to come here and spend time reading some of Greg's articles, as I did). If I had no doubts about the 'irrefutability' and 'perfection' of Objectivism, I wouldn't spend time exploring it's criticisms. What this experience has taught me, however, is that I have yet to find a "good" opponent of Rand's ideas, and that it's surprising how purportedly educated adults can engage in such juvenile banter.
I shall part with a recommendation. I discovered an excellent paper titled "The Case for Inductive Theory Building" by Edwin A. Locke (Journal of Management, 33, 6, Dec. 2007, pp. 867-890), which begins with a thorough critique of Popper, and then goes to discuss some interesting theories of motivational psychology. If you guys can do a good 'debunking' or 'dissection' of this paper I would be impressed.
"I would by no means call myself an Objectivist, if an Objectivist is someone who has studied the philosophy thoroughly"
If you're truly leaving, well, okay, there's not much to say about it - except this: For someone who backs away from calling themselves an Objectivist, and claims to not have thoroughly studied the philosophy, you have done a fair amount of declaring what Rand and/or Objectivists thought or did not think and implying there's all kinds of missing context that is being left out of these discussions. (Though you're kind of light on concrete examples of said context.)
This is a kind of eating-your-cake-even-as-you're-claiming-it's-not-going-anywhere moment - either you have sufficient knowledge of the material to make these claims (such as they are), or your knowledge is too incomplete to speak with any authority on the matter.
Beating a dying horse department:
Being honestly not familiar with a lot of the names orbiting Objectivist circles, I was nonetheless nagged by the notion I had heard of Edwin Locke before, so I took a shot and entered his name into the Blogger search engine, and two posts appeared.
Here's one. In it, Daniel describes a number of Objectivist tactics in critique, including:
"1. First, they begin with the pro forma objection that the critic is "biased" against Rand, “doesn’t understand Objectivism”, doesn't respect ideas etc. This is despite the fact that, given endless series of intellectual schisms the movement produces, that it is not clear who really does understand Objectivism in the first place.
2. Invoke the Objectivist Double Standard. This means that when Rand makes a wild, evidence-free claim or uses the most malicious, unsympathetic interpretation possible of another thinker’s work (eg Kant), this is ok because with her millennial genius she is in fact grasping the “essentials” of her opponents’ arguments. On the other hand, anyone who criticizes Rand must have read everything she ever wrote or said about anything, and allow her any concession and sympathetic interpretation demanded, no matter how obscure or unlikely."
This sounds familiar, somehow.
The other Locke reference is in a guest post from Neil Parille, detailing things in the Ayn Rand Bookstore Catalog, including, apparently, a lecture on Popper. (No longer available, or at least the link doesn't work - and there's no indication of who delivered the lecture.)
Coincidentally, blogged not long after that is a discussion of an Objectivist look at Popper (but not by Locke): here.
Perhaps the departing KW will find these things interesting, now that I've done some of the legwork.
I did a critique of Locke's critique of Burns' book here --
http://objectiblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/edwin-locke-critiques-goddess-of-market.html
The Ayn Rand Bookstore is finally converting its lectures to MP3 format so you will be able to download them. It should be done by early 2012. I hope they keep the prices reasonable.
-Neil Parille
There is no chance I will be shelling out $32 to read a Randroid like Edwin Locke critique Popper, mainly because I know exactly what the Randroid critique of Popper is already: the same hopeless arguments as in Dykes' hopeless piece (eg the Law of Identity refutes Hume! Er, no....), just styled in the droning, secondhand language of the Rand cultist.
I sincerely hope KW is young enough still to avoid that fate.
Just out of personal curiosity, I would like to see this kind of evidence of "content on the hard drive" at birth. If anything, Damasio's book taught me that the brain isn't anything like a data storage device, where where contents can be visualized in some form.
While most evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics books take these lines, the two that I would most highly recommend as key are 'The Nurture Assumption' by Judith Harris and 'The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature' by Steven Pinker.
While there are many lines of evidence, the strongest pieces come from the identical twin experiments and the degree of concordance of behavior of identical twins raised apart. It is evidence that the genetic code doesn't just influence physical traits, it influences behavioral/mental traits.
Again, it is the kind of evidence that can be doubted by people ideologically opposed to it. But people who at least investigate it find it at least counter-intuitive if you really thought that environmental influences were more powerful than genetics. It opens the mind to considering other lines of empirical evidence rather than accepting answers in advance of the evidence that may confirm or dis-confirm it.
Even with the striped animal story, Rand would never have said that if this animal killed one of your children, that you should stand there and say "Oh, uh, well, realistically there's only a 50% chance that it's dangerous." This animal took away something of high value to you, and thus, given that it's an animal and therefore unpredictable/you can't reason with it, you should treat all further encounters with hostility.
Then what is the point of induction, if you can't adopt a 50/50 attitude towards the animal after having 50/50 experiences? What is the *inductive* justification for having a 100% aversion to the animal if the inductive experiences yield only a 50/50 pattern?
While I understand that you are likely right that Rand would not behave like Greg claims, is it because Rand is being inconsistent with what a strictly inductive view of things should lead her to or because Greg is misrepresenting what Rand wrote about induction?
Or is it that what she thinks "induction" is is not what Popper would define it as being? But that rather than understand the particular problem being discussed, she might have heaped opprobrium on things without spending significant time to understand them?
I can't hold enough data in my head to consistently criticize the logic of Objectivism and perform my daily job. But what led me away from Objectivism was that I found over and over again that
1) Rand often misrepresented what she was criticizing because she refused to take the time to describe what she criticized in terms that where acceptable to her opponent (e.g. her descriptions of the "is-ought" problem) or to discuss the source material in depth and
2) there were many empirical facts about human nature that Rand glossed over when analyzing people because she didn't appreciate the strengths of the experimental approach to science (she took a far more rationalist approach to what was possible in science, including psychology).
Whatever one may think of Popper, the most valuable thing I believe anyone who studies his thought will get from it is how easy it is to fall into seeking facts that confirm what one already believes while refusing to look at ideas that are inconsistent with what one already believes. Many people cannot tolerate the kind of experimental open-mindedness that is implied by understanding that one can wrong about even things that one feels certain about, but it is not a big deal to the practical existence of most people. It is a big deal if it leads to your accepting ideas that hinder your growth. And it is how Objectivism affects things that often promote well being (positive relationships with people in particular) that makes understanding its limitations important and makes this blog a treasure.
MY apologies - Greg never claimed Rand would behave in a certain way. What I really meant was that Objectivists would probably avoid the animal 100%, but that is because they are not using inductive reasoning - in other words, they are influenced by subconscious processes that are inconsistent with what they might verbally express about how inductive reasoning works.
Sometimes, Objectivists are not even clear on what they mean by inductive reasoning. I get the impression that they think inductive reasoning is when they have found a causal connection that they can claim with satisfaction. Such a view still has limitations, but is not strictly speaking, inductive reasoning.
Greg seems to also misinterpret the blank slate view as well. Sure, the brain is wired to do some things automatically at birth.
It's not a question of what the brain is wired to do automatically at birth. It's a question as to whether there exists innate predispositions that influence behavior. For example, the Founding Fathers believed that human beings were predisposed toward political factionalism. The checks and balances of the American Constitution were a contrivance to deal with these predispositions. Another example might be the widespread evidence that shows that most human beings are not "rational," that human beings are driven primarily by "intuition" (more precisely, by the cognitive unconscious), and that reason is often used to rationalize our opinions and conduct to the world. Besides the mountains of research compiled by cognitive science and experimental psychology which coroborates this hypothesis, there is the example of Objectivism itself, which presents us with paradox of a movement which regards "rationality" as man's highest virtue yet which behaves with a shocking degree of irrationality. I've already noted how KW has lapsed into irrationality (e.g., his ad hominem attacks and his insistence on applying standards to Rand's critics that he himself refuses to follow). This kind of irrationality is rife among Objectivists. Most people become Objectivists when they are very young, before they've had much experience in the world. A young adult neither has the philosophical literacy or the knowledge of human nature necessary to rationally evaluate Rand's more controversial claims. Yet so many of these young people accept Rand as some sort of special authority. I'm not aware of any work of orthodox Objectivism that has been subjected to any kind of rigorous peer review among relevant scientists or scholars. In fact, it's not clear where Rand got most of her notions from. How does Rand know that emotions are merely ideas programmed into the subconscious by the conscious mind? Where's the research that supports this wildly controversial assertion? Where's the research that supports the Objectivist view that there is nothing in the subconscious besides what is acquired through consciuos means? Objectivists not only have no research to back these assertions, they don't appear to care about so serious an omission. Nor does it bother them in the least that there exists a huge amount of evidence against these positions! Objectivists, by and large, are indifferent to evidence (particularly when the evidence goes against their treasured beliefs) and this, too, is irrational. So even when people make all kinds of virtuous noise on behalf of rationality, they still lapse into irrationality! Now how is this to be explained if not on the basis on a predisposition (which requires a great deal of cleverness and effort to overcome) against rationality?
This is anything but the real Objectivist view, which is that young children, like animals, operate at the perceptual level until they learn to process concepts.
This criticism, as far as I can tell, is a response to the following remark: "[A child] does not (as Objectivism implies) make some difficult calcuation involving the law of identity and its corollary, causality; he knows nothing nor is capable of understanding such abstruse constructs." I have emphasized "implies," because this is a word that Objectivists, when criticized, refuse to understand. Part of philosophical criticism is to examine the implications of a doctrine in a variety of contexts, to see if the doctrine holds even in difficult cases. Now if the mind is a blank slate, if there exists no cognitive or emotional predispositions at birth (or later on), why are infants surprised when they see a solid object apparently moving through another solid object? If all knowledge is founded on reason and no knowledge is based on innate predispositions, then the only rational explanation consistent with Objectivism is that the child applies the "law of identity" to the issue at hand. This is the "implied" (rather than the "explicit") view of Objectivism. The fact that Rand does not endorse this implication does not prove that I am attacking a straw man; rather, it merely shows that Objectivist principles cannot be logically applied to specific instances, and that Rand, in denying the implications I've drawn from her principles, is guilty of logical inconsistency.
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