Aristotle's "Secret Revolt" Against Reason

"...every discipline, as long as it used the Aristotelian method of definition, has remained arrested in a state of empty verbiage and barren scholasticism...." - Karl Popper

In her effort to rebuild philosophy anew, free from the influence of the modern post Kantian philosophy she despised, Ayn Rand chose to rehabilitate Aristotle's original methodology as the basic OS on which she was to run her shiny new Objectivism software. Aristotle, with his fundamental role in formalising logic, plus his interest in the natural world, must have seemed like the ideal partner for her ambition of healing the breach between empiricism and rationalism which had first been opened by the skeptical enquiry of David Hume.

Unfortunately, Rand's decision turned out to be what I conjecture to be her most profound mistake. Rand did not realise how deeply Aristotle's method was already a part of her hated modern philosophy; how, with its emphasis on definitions and "true" meanings(what Rand called "checking your premises"), it diverted debates over real problems into fruitless arguments over mere words; arguments, as it turns out, that cannot be logically resolved. It matters not a whit whether Rand applied Aristotle's essentialism at the "epistemological" level rather than the "metaphysical" level - the logical issues are the same.

The result is that her philosophy has followed the same path as those who also adopted the Aristotelian method lock stock and barrel; into unproductive scholasticism, full of sterile schisms and, despite unprecedented levels of publicity for a philosopher, a startling lack of intellectual, aesthetic, or political progression. In true scholastic fashion, this lack of progress stands in inverse proportion to the huge amount of sheer verbiage Objectivism generates. It can produce any number of works allegedly defining art - "What Art Is" - yet despite all this huffing and puffing over preliminaries, can't seem to produce much in the way of actual art. It will spend countless hours discoursing on the vital importance of epistemology to the survival of the human race; but, in 40 years, has not gone any further in developing it than Ayn Rand's "Introduction." As Karl Popper puts it, it leads to "always sharpening one's pencil, and never writing anything." Such are the hidden consequences of the Aristotelian method.

The inescapable logical problems with Aristotle's definition-based methodology, and its subtly deleterious influence, are not widely discussed in general philosophical circles, and are almost completely unknown in Objectivism. Given what I view as its importance, to philosophy in general and Objectivism in particular, I present the most simple and thorough criticism of this silently destructive methodology that I know of: Karl Popper's "Two Kinds of Definition" (adapted from Chapter 11 of his brilliant "The Open Society and Its Enemies"). Enjoy.

(Warning: Long post. And don't let its length let you miss Greg's recent interesting discussion of the basic differences between Rand and Nietzsche below)


TWO KINDS OF DEFINITION
By Karl Popper

"The chief danger to our philosophy, apart from laziness and woolliness, is scholasticism, . . . which is treating what is vague as if it were precise...." - F. P. Ramsey

The problem of definitions and of the 'meaning of terms' is the most important source of Aristotle's regrettably still prevailing intellectual influence, of all that verbal and empty scholasticism that haunts not only the Middle Ages, but our own contemporary philosophy; for even a philosophy as recent as that of L. Wittgenstein suffers, as we shall see, from this influence. The development of thought since Aristotle could, I think, be summed up by saying that every discipline, as long as it used the Aristotelian method of definition, has remained arrested in a state of empty verbiage and barren scholasticism, and that the degree to which the various sciences have been able to make any progress depended on the degree to which they have been able to get rid of this essentialist method. (This is why so much of our 'social science' still belongs to the Middle Ages.) The discussion of this method will have to be a little abstract, owing to the fact that the problem has been so thoroughly muddled by Plato and Aristotle, whose influence has given rise to such deep-rooted prejudices that the prospect of dispelling them does not seem very bright. In spite of all that, it is perhaps not without interest to analyse the source of so much confusion and verbiage.

Aristotle followed Plato in distinguishing between knowledge and opinion. Knowledge, or science, according to Aristotle, may be of two kinds - either demonstrative or intuitive. Demonstrative knowledge is also a knowledge of 'causes'. It consists of statements that can be demonstrated - the conclusions - together with their syllogistic demonstrations (which exhibit the 'causes' in their 'middle terms'). Intuitive knowledge consists in grasping the 'indivisible form' or essence or essential nature of a thing (if it is 'immediate', i.e. if its 'cause' is identical with its essential nature); it is the originative source of all science since it grasps the original basic premisses of all demonstrations.

Undoubtedly, Aristotle was right when he insisted that we must not attempt to prove or demonstrate all our knowledge. Every proof must proceed from premisses; the proof as such, that is to say, the derivation from the premisses, can therefore never finally settle the truth of any conclusion, but only show that the conclusion must be true provided the premisses are true . If we were to demand that the premisses should be proved in their turn, the question of truth would only be shifted back by another step to a new set of premisses, and so on, to infinity. It was in order to avoid such an infinite regress (as the logicians say) that Aristotle taught that we must assume that there are premisses which are indubitably true, and which do not need any proof; and these he called 'basic premisses'. If we take for granted the methods by which we derive conclusions from these basic premisses, then we could say that, according to Aristotle, the whole of scientific knowledge is contained in the basic premisses, and that it would all be ours if only we could obtain an encyclopaedic list of the basic premisses. But how to obtain these basic premisses? Like Plato, Aristotle believed that we obtain all knowledge ultimately by an intuitive grasp of the essences of things. 'We can know a thing only by knowing its essence', Aristotle writes, and 'to know a thing is to know its essence'. A 'basic premiss' is, according to him, nothing but a statement describing the essence of a thing. But such a statement is just what he calls a definition. Thus all 'basic premisses of proofs' are definitions.

What does a definition look like? An example of a definition would be: 'A puppy is a young dog.' The subject of such a definition sentence, the term 'puppy', is called the term to be defined (or defined term); the words 'young dog' are called the defining formula. As a rule, the defining formula is longer and more complicated than the defined term, and sometimes very much so. Aristotle considers the term to be defined as a name of the essence Of a thing, and the defining formula as the description of that essence. And he insists that the defining formula must give an exhaustive description of the essence or the essential properties of the thing in question; thus a statement like 'A puppy has four legs', although true, is not a satisfactory definition, since it does not exhaust what may be called the essence of puppiness, but holds true of a horse also; and similarly the statement 'A puppy is brown', although it may be true of some, is not true of all puppies; and it describes what is not an essential but merely an accidental property of the defined term.

But the most difficult question is how we can get hold of definitions or basic premisses, and make sure that they are correct - that we have not erred, not grasped the wrong essence. Although Aristotle is not very clear on this point, there can be little doubt that, in the main, he again follows Plato. Plato taught that we can grasp the Ideas with the help of some kind of unerring intellectual intuition; that is to say, we visualise or look at them with our 'mental eye', a process which he conceived as analogous to seeing, but dependent purely upon our intellect, and excluding any element that depends upon our senses. Aristotle's view is less radical and less inspired than Plato's, but in the end it amounts to the same. For although he teaches that we arrive at the definition only after we have made many observations, he admits that sense experience does not in itself grasp the universal essence, and that it cannot, therefore, fully determine a definition. Eventually he simply postulates that we possess an intellectual intuition, a mental or intellectual faculty which enables us unerringly to grasp the essences of things, and to know them. And he further assumes that if we know an essence intuitively, we must be capable of describing it and therefore of defining it. (His arguments in the Posterior Analytics in favour of this theory are surprisingly weak. They consist merely in pointing out that our knowledge of the basic premisses cannot be demonstrative, since this would lead to an infinite regress, and that the basic premisses must be at least as true and as certain as the conclusions based upon them. 'It follows from this', he writes, 'that there cannot be demonstrative knowledge of the primary premisses; and since nothing but intellectual intuition can be more true than demonstrative knowledge, it follows that it must be intellectual intuition that grasps the basic premisses.' In the De Anima, and in the theological part of the Metaphysics, we find more of an argument; for here we have a theory of intellectual intuition - that it comes into contact with its object, the essence, and that it even becomes one with its object. 'Actual knowledge is identical with its object.')

Summing up this brief analysis, we can give, I believe, a fair description of the Aristotelian ideal of perfect and complete knowledge if we say that he saw the ultimate aim of all inquiry in the compilation of an encyclopaedia containing the intuitive definitions of all essences, that is to say, their names together with their defining formulae; and that he considered the progress of knowledge as consisting in the gradual accumulation of such an encyclopaedia, in expanding it as well as in filling up the gaps in it and, of course, in the syllogistic derivation from it of 'the whole body of facts' which constitute demonstrative knowledge.

Now there can be little doubt that all these essentialist views stand in the strongest possible contrast to the methods of modern science. (I have the empirical sciences in mind, not perhaps pure mathematics.) First, although in science we do our best to find the truth, we are conscious of the fact that we can never be sure whether we have got it. We have learnt in the past, from many disappointments, that we must not expect finality. And we have learnt not to be disappointed any longer if our scientific theories are overthrown; for we can, in most cases, determine with great confidence which of any two theories is the better one. We can therefore know that we are making progress; and it is this knowledge that to most of us atones for the loss of the illusion of finality and certainty. In other words, we know that our scientific theories must always remain hypotheses, but that, in many important cases, we can find out whether or not a new hypothesis is superior to an old one. For if they are different, then they will lead to different predictions, which can often be tested experimentally; and on the basis of such a crucial experiment, we can sometimes find out that the new theory leads to satisfactory results where the old one breaks down. Thus we can say that in our search for truth, we have replaced scientific certainty by scientific progress. And this view of scientific method is corroborated by the development of science. For science does not develop by a gradual encyclopaedic accumulation of essential information, as Aristotle thought) but by a much more revolutionary method; it progresses by bold ideas, by the advancement of new and very strange theories (such as the theory that the earth is not flat, or that 'metrical space' is not flat), and by the overthrow of the old ones.

But this view of scientific method means that in science there is no 'knowledge', in the sense in which Plato and Aristotle understood the word, in the sense which implies finality; in science, we never have sufficient reason for the belief that we have attained the truth. What we usually call 'scientific knowledge' is, as a rule, not knowledge in this sense, but rather information regarding the various competing hypotheses and the way in which they have stood up to various tests; it is, using the language of Plato and Aristotle, information concerning the latest, and the best tested, scientific 'opinion'. This view means, furthermore, that we have no proofs in science (excepting, of course, pure mathematics and logic). In the empirical sciences, which alone can furnish us with information about the world we live in, proofs do not occur, if we mean by 'proof' an argument which establishes once and for ever the truth of a theory. (What may occur, however, are refutations of scientific theories.) On the other hand, pure mathematics and logic, which permit of proofs, give us no information about the world, but only develop the means of describing it. Thus we could say (as I have pointed out elsewhere ): 'In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable; and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.' But although proof does not play any part in the empirical sciences, argument still does; indeed, its part is at least as important as that played by observation and experiment.

The role of definitions in science, especially, is also very different from what Aristotle had in mind. Aristotle taught that in a definition we have first pointed to the essence - perhaps by naming it - and that we then describe it with the help of the defining formula; just as in an ordinary sentence like 'This puppy is brown', we first point to a certain thing by saying 'this puppy', and then describe it as 'brown'. And he taught that by thus describing the essence to which the term points which is to be defined, we determine or explain the meaning of the term also.

Accordingly, the definition may at one time answer two very closely related questions. The one is 'What is it?', for example 'What is a puppy?'; it asks what the essence is which is denoted by the defined term. The other is 'What does it mean?', for example, 'What does "puppy" mean?'; it asks for the meaning of a term (namely, of the term that denotes the essence). In the present context, it is not necessary to distinguish between these two questions; rather, it is important to see what they have in common; and I wish, especially, to draw attention to the fact that both questions are raised by the term that stands, in the definition, on the left side and answered by the defining formula which stands on the right side. This fact characterizes the essentialist view, from which the scientific method of definition radically differs.

While we may say that the essentialist interpretation reads a definition 'normally', that is to say, from the left to the right, we can say that a definition, as it is normally used in modern science, must be read back to front, or from the right to the left; for it starts with the defining formula, and asks for a short label for it. Thus the scientific view of the definition 'A puppy is a young dog' would be that it is an answer to the question 'What shall we call a young dog?' rather than an answer to the question 'What is a puppy?' (Questions like 'What is life?' or 'What is gravity?' do not play any role in science.) The scientific use of definitions, characterized by the approach 'from the right to the left', may be called its nominalist interpretation, as opposed to its Aristotelian or essentialist interpretation. In modern science, only nominalist definitions occur, that is to say, shorthand symbols or labels are introduced in order to cut a long story short. And we can at once see from this that definitions do not play any very important part in science. For shorthand symbols can always, of course, be replaced by the longer expressions, the defining formulae, for which they stand. In some cases this would make our scientific language very cumbersome; we should waste time and paper. But we should never lose the slightest piece of factual information. Our 'scientific knowledge', in the sense in which this term may be properly used, remains entirely unaffected if we eliminate all definitions; the only effect is upon our language, which would lose, not precision, but merely brevity. (This must not be taken to mean that in science there cannot be an urgent practical need for introducing definitions, for brevity's sake.) There could hardly be a greater contrast than that between this view of the part played by definitions, and Aristotle's view. For Aristotle's essentialist definitions are the principles from which all our knowledge is derived; they thus contain all our knowledge; and they serve to substitute a long formula for a short one. As opposed to this, the scientific or nominalist definitions do not contain any knowledge whatever, not even any 'opinion'; they do nothing but introduce new arbitrary shorthand labels; they cut a long story short.

In practice, these labels are of the greatest usefulness. In order to see this, we only need to consider the extreme difficulties that would arise if a bacteriologist, whenever he spoke of a certain strain of bacteria, had to repeat its whole description (including the methods of dyeing, etc., by which it is distinguished from a number of similar species). And we may also understand, by a similar consideration, why it has so often been forgotten, even by scientists, that scientific definitions must be read 'from the right to the left', as explained above. For most people, when first studying a science, say bacteriology, must try to find out the meanings of all these new technical terms with which they are faced. In this way, they really learn the definition 'from the left to the right', substituting, as if it were an essentialist definition, a very long story for a very short one. But this is merely a psychological accident, and a teacher or writer of a textbook may indeed proceed quite differently; that is to say, he may introduce a technical term only after the need for it has arisen.

So far I have tried to show that the scientific or nominalist use of definitions is entirely different from Aristotle's essentialist method of definitions. But it can also be shown that the essentialist view of definitions is simply untenable in itself. In order not to prolong this discussion unduly, I shall criticize two only of the essentialist doctrines; two doctrines which are of significance because some influential modern schools are still based upon them. One is the esoteric doctrine of intellectual intuition, and the other the very popular doctrine that 'we must define our terms', if we wish to be precise.

Aristotle held with Plato that we possess a faculty, intellectual intuition) by which we can visualize essences and find out which definition is the correct one, and many modern essentialists have repeated this doctrine. Other philosophers, following Kant, maintain that we do not possess anything of the sort. My opinion is that we can readily admit that we possess something which may be described as 'intellectual intuition'; or more precisely, that certain of our intellectual experiences may be thus described Everybody who 'understands' an idea, or a point of view, or an arithmetical method, for instance, multiplication, in the sense that he has 'got the feel of it', might be said to understand that thing intuitively; and there are countless intellectual experiences of that kind. But I would insist, on the other hand, that these experiences, important as they may be for our scientific endeavours, can never serve to establish the truth of any idea or theory, however strongly somebody may feel, intuitively, that it must be true, or that it is 'self-evident'." Such intuitions cannot even serve as an argument, although they may encourage us to look for arguments. For somebody else may have just as strong an intuition that the same theory is false. The way of science is paved with discarded theories which were once declared self-evident; Francis Bacon, for example, sneered at those who denied the self-evident truth that the sun and the stars rotated round the earth, which was obviously at rest. Intuition undoubtedly plays a great part in the life of a scientist, just as it does in the life of a poet. It leads him to his discoveries. But it may also lead him to his failures. And it always remains his private affair, as it were. Science does not ask how he has got his ideas, it is only interested in arguments that can be tested by everybody. The great mathematician, Gauss, described this situation very neatly once when he exclaimed: 'I have got my result; but I do not know yet how to get it.' All this applies, of course, to Aristotle's doctrine of intellectual intuition of so-called essences, which was propagated by Hegel and in our own time by E. Husserl and his numerous pupils; and it indicates that the 'intellectual intuition of essences' or 'pure phenomenology', as Husserl calls it, is a method of neither science nor philosophy . (The much debated question whether it is a new invention, as the pure phenomenologists think, or perhaps a version of Cartesianism or Hegelianism, can be easily decided; it is a version of Aristotelianism.)

The second doctrine to be criticized has even more important connections with modern views; and it bears especially upon the problem of verbalism. Since Aristotle, it has become widely known that one cannot prove all statements, and that an attempt to do so would break down because it would lead only to an infinite regression of proofs. But neither he nor, apparently, a great many modern writers seems to realize that the analogous attempt to define the meaning of all our terms must, in the same way, lead to an infinite regression of definitions. The following passage from Crossman's Plato To-day is characteristic of a view which by implication is held by many contemporary philosophers of repute, for example, by Wittgenstein: '. . . if we do not know precisely the meaning of the words we use, we cannot discuss anything profitably. Most of the futile arguments on which we all waste time are largely due to the fact that we each have our own vague meaning for the words we use and assume that our opponents are using them in the same sense. If we defined our terms to start with, we could have far more profitable discussions. Again, we have only to read the daily papers to observe that propaganda (the modern counterpart of rhetoric) depends largely for its success on confusing the meaning of the terms. If politicians were compelled by law to define any term they wished to use, they would lose most of their popular appeal, their speeches would be shorter, and many of their disagreements would be found to be purely verbal.' This passage is very characteristic of one of the prejudices which we owe to Aristotle, of the prejudice that language can be made more precise by the use of definitions. Let us consider whether this can really be done.

First, we can see clearly that if 'politicians' (or anybody else) 'were compelled by law to define any term they wished to use', their speeches would not be shorter, but infinitely long. For a definition cannot establish the meaning of a term any more than a logical derivation can establish the truth of a statement; both can only shift this problem back. The derivation shifts the problem of truth back to the premises, the definition shifts the problem of meaning back to the defining terms (i.e., the terms that make up the defining formula). 14 But these, for many reasons, are likely to be just as vague and confusing as the terms we started with; and in any case, we should have to go on to define them in turn; which leads to new terms which too must be defined. And so on, to infinity. One sees that the demand that all our terms should be defined is just as untenable as the demand that all our statements should be proved.

At first sight this criticism may seem unfair. It may be said that what people have in mind, if they demand definitions, is the elimination of the ambiguities so often connected with words such as 'democracy', 'liberty', 'duty', 'religion', etc.; that it is clearly impossible to define all our terms, but possible to define some of these more dangerous terms and to leave it at that; and that the defining terms have just to be accepted, i.e., that we must stop after a step or two in order to avoid an infinite regression. This defence, however, is untenable. Admittedly, the terms mentioned are much misused. But I deny that the attempt to define them can improve matters. It can only make matters worse. That by 'defining their terms' even once, and leaving the defining terms undefined, the politicians would not be able to make their speeches shorter, is clear; for any essentialist definition, i.e. one that 'defines our terms' (as opposed to the nominalist one which introduces new technical terms), means the substitution of a long story for a short one, as we have seen. Besides, the attempt to define terms would only increase the vagueness and confusion. For since we cannot demand that all the defining terms should be defined in their turn, a clever politician or philosopher could easily satisfy the demand for definitions. If asked what he means by 'democracy', for example, he could say 'the rule of the general will' or 'the rule of the spirit of the people'; and since he has now given a definition, and so satisfied the highest standards of precision, nobody will dare to criticize him any longer. And, indeed, how could he be criticized, since the demand that 'rule' or 'people' or 'will' or 'spirit' should be defined in their turn, puts us well on the way to an infinite regression so that everybody would hesitate to raise it? But should it be raised in spite of all that, then it can be equally easily satisfied. On the other hand, a quarrel about the question whether the definition was correct, or true, can only lead to an empty controversy about words.

Thus the essentialist view of definition breaks down, even if it does not, with Aristotle, attempt to establish the 'principles' of our knowledge, but only makes the apparently more modest demand that we should 'define the meaning of our terms'.

But undoubtedly, the demand that we speak clearly and without ambiguity is very important, and must be satisfied. Can the nominalist view satisfy it? And can nominalism escape the infinite regression?

It can. For the nominalist position there is no difficulty which corresponds to the infinite regression. As we have seen, science does not use definitions in order to determine the meaning of its terms, but only in order to introduce handy shorthand labels. And it does not depend on definitions; all definitions can be omitted without loss to the information imparted. It follows from this that in science, all the terms that are really needed must be undefined terms. How then do the sciences make sure of the meanings of their terms? Various replies to this question have been suggested, but I do not think that any of them is satisfactory. The situation seems to be this. Aristotelianism and related philosophies have told us for such a long time how important it is to get a precise knowledge of the meaning of our terms that we are all inclined to believe it. And we continue to cling to this creed in spite of the unquestionable fact that philosophy, which for twenty centuries has worried about the meaning of its terms, is not only full of verbalism but also appallingly vague and ambiguous, while a science like physics which worries hardly at all about terms and their meaning, but about facts instead, has achieved great precision. This, surely, should be taken as indicating that, under Aristotelian influence, the importance of the meaning of terms has been grossly exaggerated. But I think that it indicates even more. For not only does this concentration on the problem of meaning fail to establish precision; it is itself the main source of vagueness, ambiguity, and confusion.

In science, we take care that the statements we make should never depend upon the meaning of our terms. Even where the terms are defined, we never try to derive any information from the definition, or to base any argument upon it. This is why our terms make so little trouble. We do not overburden them. We try to attach to them as little weight as possible. We do not take their 'meaning' too seriously. We are always conscious that our terms are a little vague (since we have learnt to use them only in practical applications) and we reach precision not by reducing their penumbra of vagueness, but rather by keeping well within it, by carefully phrasing our sentences in such a way that the possible shades of meaning of our terms do not matter. This is how we avoid quarrelling about words.

The view that the precision of science and of scientific language depends upon the precision of its terms is certainly very plausible, but it is none the less, I believe, a mere prejudice. The precision of a language depends, rather, just upon the fact that it takes care not to burden its terms with the task of being precise. A term like 'sand-dune' or 'wind' is certainly very vague. (How many inches high must a little sand-hill be in order to be called 'sand-dune'? How quickly must the air move in order to be called 'wind'?) However, for many of the geologist's purposes, these terms are quite sufficiently precise; and for other purposes, when a higher degree of differentiation is needed, he can always say 'dunes between 4 and 30 feet high' or 'wind of a velocity of between 20 and 40 miles an hour'. And the position in the more exact sciences is analogous. In physical measurements, for instance, we always take care to consider the range within which there may be an error; and precision does not consist in trying to reduce this range to nothing, or in pretending that there is no such range, but rather in its explicit recognition.

Even where a term has made trouble, as for instance the term 'simultaneity' in physics, it was not because its meaning was imprecise or ambiguous, but rather because of some intuitive theory which induced us to burden the term with too much meaning, or with too 'precise' a meaning, rather than with too little. What Einstein found in his analysis of simultaneity was that, when speaking of simultaneous events, physicists made a false assumption which would have been unchallengeable were there signals of infinite velocity. The fault was not that they did not mean anything, or that their meaning was ambiguous, or the term not precise enough; what Einstein found was, rather, that the elimination of a theoretical assumption, unnoticed so far because of its intuitive self-evidence, was able to remove a difficulty which had arisen in science. Accordingly, he was not really concerned with a question of the meaning of a term, but rather with the truth of a theory. It is very unlikely that it would have led to much if someone had started, apart from a definite physical problem, to improve the concept of simultaneity by analysing its 'essential] meaning', or even by analysing what physicists 'really mean' when they speak of simultaneity.

I think we can learn from this example that we should not attempt to cross our bridges before we come to them. And I also think that the preoccupation with questions concerning the meaning of terms, such as their vagueness or their ambiguity, can certainly not be justified by an appeal to Einstein's example. Such a preoccupation rests, rather, on the assumption that much depends upon the meaning of our terms, and that we operate with this meaning; and therefore it must lead to verbalism and scholasticism. From this point of view, we may criticize a doctrine like that of Wittgenstein, who holds that while science investigates matters of fact, it is the business of philosophy to clarify the meaning of terms, thereby purging our language, and eliminating linguistic puzzles. It is characteristic of the views of this school that they do not lead to any chain of argument that could be rationally criticized; the school therefore addresses its subtle analyses exclusively to the small esoteric circle of the initiated. This seems to suggest that any preoccupation with meaning tends to lead to that result which is so typical of Aristotelianism: scholasticism and mysticism.

Let us consider briefly how these two typical results of Aristotelianism have arisen. Aristotle insisted that demonstration or proof, and definition, are the two fundamental methods of obtaining knowledge. Considering the doctrine of proof first, it cannot be denied that it has led to countless attempts to prove more than can be proved; medieval philosophy is full of this scholasticism and the same tendency can be observed, on the Continent, down to Kant. It was Kant's criticism of all attempts to prove the existence of God which led to the romantic reaction of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. The new tendency is to discard proofs, and with them, any kind of rational argument. With the romantics, a new kind of dogmatism becomes fashionable, in philosophy as well as in the social sciences. It confronts us with its dictum. And we can take it or leave it. This romantic period of an oracular philosophy, called by Schopenhauer the 'age of dishonesty', is described by him as follows: 'The character of honesty that spirit of undertaking an inquiry together with the reader, which permeates the works of all Previous philosophers, disappears here completely. Every page witnesses that these so-called philosophers do not attempt to teach, but to bewitch the reader.'

A similar result was produced by Aristotle's doctrine of definition. First it led to a good deal of hairsplitting. But later, philosophers began to feel that one cannot argue about definitions. In this way, essentialism not only encouraged verbalism, but it also led to the disillusionment with argument, that is, with reason. Scholasticism and mysticism and despair in reason, these are the unavoidable results of the essentialism of Plato and Aristotle. And Plato's open revolt against freedom becomes, with Aristotle, a secret revolt against reason.

As we know from Aristotle himself, essentialism and the theory of definition met with strong opposition when they were first proposed, especially from Socrates's old companion Antisthenes, whose criticism seems to have been most sensible. But this opposition was unfortunately defeated. The consequences of this defeat for the intellectual development of mankind can hardly be overrated.

- Karl Popper, 1945

JARS: "Nietzsche-Rand Symposium"

In the next issue of the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, there will be a symposium of sorts discussing the relation between Rand and Nietzsche. During the sixties and seventies, Rand was often accused of being indebted to Nietzsche. One critic went so far as to describe Rand's philosophy as little more than a mixture of Nietzsche and Adam Smith. The motivation behind the linkage of these two literary philosophers is twofold: first, to undermine Rand's claim to originality by suggesting that Rand got all her individualistic notions straight from Nietzsche; and second, to undermine Rand's credibility by associating her with a philosopher who at one time was linked to Hitler and the Nazis.

My own position is that Rand's mature thought is not in any significant way influenced by Nietzsche. Not only is her ideal of man very different from Nietzsche's, but so is her individualism. Nietzsche believed that great men are forged in the crucible of brutal myths (e.g., the myth of eternal recurrence) and harsh adversity ("what doesn't kill us outright makes us stronger"). Rand believed that rational thinking, when zealously followed, lead to the complete integration of emotion and thought, which formed for her the bedrock of human greatness. Nietzsche identified freedom with the battle for freedom; Rand with the attainment of free market individualism. Nietzsche believed in the inevitability of conflict; Rand argued that no conflict was even possible between rational men. Nietzsche equated skepticism with honesty and regarded convictions with immense suspicion; Rand equated even the mildest forms of skepticism with a concerted attempt to undermine man's cognitive faculty. Nietzsche contended that nearly everything men believed were lies, but that some of these lies were psychologically or socially useful; Rand insisted that all lies are bad and that no good can come from believing something that is not true.

This brief sketch should demonstrate that, regardless of the few superficial resemblances between Nietzsche's philosophy and Rand's, they are nevertheless very different philosophers. For those that may still have a few doubts on this score, consider the following. Rand evinces no real understanding or insight into Nietzsche's thought, despite having read at least three of his books. She says of Nietzsche that he advocated sacrificing "others to oneself." Of course, Nietzsche's view on egoism, altruism, and self-sacrifice are actually far more complicated and ambiguous. Consider the following quote from Nietzsche's Anti-Christ:

When the exceptional human being treats the mediocre more tenderly than himself and his peers, this is not mere politeness of the heart—it is simply his duty

Rand's other major complaint against Nietzsche is that he disowned reason in his book The Birth of Tragedy. If Rand had bothered to read the preface of that book, she might have realized that the work is not representative of Nietzsche's mature thought, that he turned against the sort of romantic Wagnerism expressed in its pages and became much more sympathetic to science and even "reason."

Now if Rand didn't even understand Nietzsche, how on earth could she have been influenced by him? Perhaps a case could be made that she was influenced by what she read into Nietzsche; but she was hardly influenced by what Nietzsche actually wrote and meant.

Rand's Anti-Heroic Ethics

ARCHN's chapter on Rand's morality thoroughly explores its various fallacies, especially Nyquist's thoughtfully argued sub-chapter on altruism. However, perhaps the most clearcut example of the highly unrealistic nature of her ethics occurs in her "The Ethics of Emergencies", in The Virtue Of Selfishness.

"The Ethics of Emergencies" comes as standard with the usual Randian features, such the opening arguments from intimidation, wiggy, evidence-free psychological speculations, and the retro-fitting of standard terms, such as "sacrifice", with entirely opposite meanings to the usual ones (Rand often reminds me of something someone once said about Gertrude Stein: "she doesn't seem to know what words mean"). And as always, she maintains her habit of saying something on one page, and then taking it back on the next.

But despite this typical thicket, we can eventually struggle through to find Rand stating an interesting and original ethical position, and stating it clearly.

She takes what she calls the "altruist's favourite example: the issue of saving a drowning person." She then recommends the following:

"If the person to be saved is a stranger, it is morally proper to save him only if the risk to one's own life is minimal; when the danger is great, it would be immoral to attempt it; only a lack of self esteem could permit one to value one's life no higher than that of any random stranger." (emphasis DB)

That's right. If you endanger your life to save a stranger, you are immoral. Not just immoral, but psychologically damaged, in that you lack self-esteem.

Now, let’s try to imagine just such a situation, but in a world where almost everyone has adopted Rand’s moral code. A lone young girl is swept out to sea on a dangerous surf beach. The crowd stands by, doing nothing, as they have too much self-esteem to risk their own life for the young girl, who is after all a ‘random stranger.’ A man plunges in after her. Both nearly drown in the attempted rescue, but eventually after a great struggle he brings the both of them into shore alive. They both lie exhausted, gasping on the beach. Eventually he lifts his head only to be greeted by grim faces and contemptuous stares from the surrounding crowd. One woman eventually speaks, voice brimming with emotion: “That was the most immoral thing I’ve ever seen. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.” The crowd nod fiercely, and turn away in frank disgust.

Or alternately: as the girl is swept out to sea, a man walks to the edge of the churning surf. As she cries for help, he stands there, assessing the situation. Then, having decided it’s just too dangerous, he steps back, and returns to his towel by the shore. A wave of spontaneous applause breaks out among the beachgoers, in appreciation of a truly moral act; a woman says to her young son, “Look at that man just did. I hope you grow up to be just like him.”

While this seems absurd, it is actually perfectly consistent with her general stance of the morality of only acting in your own self-interest. Clearly then, by Objectivist standards, people such as lifeguards, or firefighters, are not heroic as they are usually considered, but pursuing fundamentally immoral professions due to their "lack of self-esteem". But of course, while they repeat her rhetoric, Objectivists stop well short of actually living by it. Having just watched Oliver Stone's "World Trade Centre", where two trapped policemen are rescued by Marines (one a committed Christian) at considerable risk to their own lives, I wondered where the ARI's fierce condemnations of the "immorality" these and other voluntary actions on Sept 11 were.

Because absurd as this seems, this is just what Rand is advocating.

JARS: "Nyquist Contra Rand, Part II" by F. Seddon

Those who wish to read Fred Seddon's reply to my response to his original review of my book are advised to locate a copy of the Fall 2007 edition of the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies and read it for themselves. I will not attempt to summarize it here. I merely wish to respond to one of Seddon's objections. As with his original review of my book, Seddon demonstrates a wanton blindness to the subtleties of my position vis-a-vis Rand and Objectivism. "[Nyquist] thinks Rand and the Objectivists limit logic to deductive logic," Seddon pontificates, "and the triumphantly claims that some modern sciences have proven that 'Most practical knowledge ... is based on generalizations drawn from experience,' that is, on induction." Seddon falls into just the sort of special pleading and word twisting that is more befitting an ambulance chasing lawyer than a philosopher. Instead of trying to understand my point, he only wishes to distort it for his own purposes, so he can evade facing up to the issues I raise. That is what he does with the phrase "generalizations drawn from experience," which he equates not merely with induction, but, by implication, with just the sort of induction advocated by Rand, Peikoff, and Kelley! Never mind that induction, except in a very loose sense of the word that surely would be opposed by Rand and Peikoff, has little to do with generalizations. Induction is a reasoning or inference from the particular to universal. The confusion arises because often the word general is used instead of universal, but it is a mistake to confound the terms general and generalization. The so-called problem of induction would not arise for a mere generalization, because no generalization can be refuted by a single observation. If I say that swans are generally white, that is very different from saying that all swans are white. The observation of a black or a purple swan won't refute the notion that swans are generally white, because generalizations are not universal. They allow for exceptions. But once you grant exceptions, you're no longer in the realm of inductive "logic." Can anyone imagine, for example, Rand or Peikoff advocating the view the laws of nature are only "generally" true, that, in other words, there exist exceptions to them? And so Seddon is merely conflating the term generalization with the term universal and thus basing his whole argument on an ambiguity of language.

Yet this is not the least of it. If Seddon had been attentive to the full context of the passage quoted, particularly what had been written earlier about unconscious knowledge, he should have understood that little if any reasoning takes place when people form the generalizations that make up what I called practical knowledge; that such generalizations are often made intuitively, without conscious direction, from the innermost reaches of the mind's unconscious database. This, in and of itself, makes the whole issue of induction irrelevant. Rand's reason, even when applied to the homely generalizations of everyday life, could be as inductivist as Seddon or anyone else pleases; that still would not allow Rand's empirically unsubstantiated claim that "Reason is man's only means of grasping reality and of acquiring knowledge" to pass muster. If people can gain knowledge intuitively, without direct conscious thinking at all, then the Randian view that only "reason" leads to knowledge becomes unacceptable.

In the greater scheme of things, these technical arguments about the role of reason and "induction" in the Randian epistemology are of little relevance and are only brought up by Seddon to throw sand in our eyes. The real point at issue, which I have raised again and again and which Seddon sedulously evades, is the issue of evidence. Rand made any number of statements about matters of fact concerning human nature, human cognition, and social interaction. Many of these statements are highly controversial, such as man is a being of self-made soul or man's emotional and cognitive mechanisms are blank at birth. Yet Rand provided no evidence for these controversial statements of fact. None whatever! And neither does Seddon. There may be a very good reason for this. Perhaps the lack of evidence stems from the fact that these assertions are not true!

JARS: "Rand and Empirical Responsibility"

The following is my response to Fred Seddon's review of my book Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature. The point of this response was not merely to reply to Seddon's criticisms, but, just as critically, to restate my argument against Rand, which is become even stronger because of new evidence gathered by the sciences of human nature. This essay originally appeared in Fall 2006 edition of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 111-119. Please refer to the JARS issue for a full bibliography.

Rand and Empirical Responsibility

by Greg Nyquist

After going through Fred Seddon’s review of my book, Ayn Rand
Contra Human Nature, I find myself not so much disagreeing
with his points as regarding them as irrelevant. His review more or
less evades what I consider the main point at issue—namely, whether
Rand is right about human nature. If I attempt to answer Seddon’s
specific criticisms, I will merely be caviling about matters I regard as
trivial. However critical I may be of Rand’s Objectivist system, I do
not regard her as a trivial philosopher. Some of the key points of her
philosophy, if true, would entail a major transvaluation of moral,
social, political, and aesthetic values. Rand considered herself a
radical. Let us not underestimate what this means. She challenged
the view of human nature advanced by most of the great thinkers and
poets of human civilization. If she is right and all the thinkers and
poets wrong, the value of most of the great works of mankind’s
literary and philosophical giants, of the dramas of Sophocles and
Shakespeare, the political writings of Machiavelli and Burke, the
novels of Flaubert and Tolstoy, will in some degree be diminished.
Rand’s dislike of Shakespeare, for example, is no mere personal
idiosyncrasy, something that can be brushed aside as inconsequential.
It derives from her vision of human nature. “I refused to believe that
Lear and Macbeth represent what man really is,” she told Barbara
Branden (1986, 45).

With so much at stake, we need to be very careful in how we go
about determining whether Rand’s vision of man accords with reality.
We don’t want to make a mistake and wind up living in ignorance of
the truth about human nature. This is one of those questions that we
need to get right. Those who fail to understand human nature either
expect too much or too little from other people. Political theories
based on false expectations of other people can be dangerous if those
in power are foolish enough to implement them.

Before any attempt can be made to determine whether Rand’s
theory of man accords with reality, we need to get our epistemological
house in order. How should we go about determining whether
Rand’s view of human nature is true? In my book, I suggested that
the best way to settle questions about matters of fact was to consult
the relevant facts. Seddon, however, will have none of this. He
charges me with the great philosophical crime of positivism. But I
have not, nor have I ever been, a positivist. Seddon has merely
imported positivist meanings into some of my words and phrases
where no such meaning was ever intended. All I was trying to suggest
in my book is that controversial assertions about matters of fact, if
they are to be taken seriously, need to be backed with compelling
evidence. I only emphasized the empirical side of knowledge because
that’s precisely where many philosophers, including Rand, fall short.
If I had been criticizing a philosopher who piled fact on top of fact
without rhyme or reason, I would have emphasized the role that
intelligence plays in interpreting and giving meaning to facts. Would
Seddon have then seen fit to accuse me of being a rationalist?

When assessing a controversial assertion about some matter of
fact, the first order of business for the critic is to examine the
evidence presented on behalf of the assertion. In the case of Rand’s
assertions about human nature, this is not so very difficult. Rand
presented no evidence to back up her theory of human nature, so no
evidence needs to be examined. Typical in this respect is her essay
“The Objectivist Ethics.” If you go through this essay, you will find
several bold assertions about human nature. “Man is born with an
emotional mechanism, just as he is born with a cognitive mechanism,”
contended Rand; “but, at birth, both are ‘tabula rasa.’” “Emotions are
the automatic results of man’s value judgments integrated by the
subconscious.” “Emotions are not tools of cognition” (Rand 1964,
28, 27, 29). These are very interesting assertions. It would be nice if
Rand had provided evidence for these assertions so we could evaluate
whether they are true or at least plausible. But Rand gives us nothing.
Not even the tiniest shred or sliver of evidence.

At other points in the essay, Rand introduces moral ideals that
depend on the validity of certain facts. Again she fails to provide
evidence for those facts. Consider some of her remarks about the
virtue of rationality. “Rationality means the . . . acceptance of reason
as one’s only source of knowledge, one’s only judge of values and
one’s only guide to action.” And not only that, but rationality also
“means . . . that all one’s convictions, values, goals, desires and actions
must be based on, derived from, chosen and validated by a process of
thought—as precise and scrupulous a process of thought, directed by
as ruthlessly strict an application of logic, as one’s fullest capacity
permits” (1964, 25–26). This implies not merely that reason is man’s
only source of knowledge; it also gives logic a critical role in the
reasoning process, suggesting that any form of thought that does not
use logic is invalid or cognitively dubious.

Rand’s failure to provide evidence supporting her view of human
nature would not, in itself, indicate that she is wrong. Before any kind
of judgment can be made on the veracity of Rand’s views, the relevant
evidence must be examined. Does there exist any compelling evidence
that stands witness against Rand’s theories?

As a matter of fact, such evidence does exist. Neither the “tabula
rasa” view of human nature advocated by Rand, nor her theory that
emotions are derived from value judgments, would be taken very
seriously by cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, or evolutionary
psychologists working today (Pinker 1997, 31–36, 363–424; Pinker
2002, 38–41; Damasio 1994, 127–64). Even her insistence that
emotions have no legitimate role in cognition would be rejected by
those researchers acquainted with the relevant evidence. “The action
of biological drives, body states, and emotions may be an indispens-
able foundation for rationality,” suggested the neuroscientist Antonio
Damasio (1994, 200), whose research provides compelling evidence
for the role of emotion in the reasoning process (165–222). The
cognitive scientists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson are much less
tentative than Damasio on this issue. “The idea of a pure reason that
can function in the moral domain independent of emotion is
empirically untenable,” they insist (1999, 439).

The most surprising evidence to emerge from these new sciences
of human nature challenges Rand’s contention that reason “is man’s
only means of grasping reality and of acquiring knowledge” ([1971]
1975, 84). If “reason” includes the conscious application of logic (as
Rand would have it), this statement is simply not true. Indeed,
cognitive scientists at the University of Iowa have found that certain
facts of reality can be grasped unconsciously, before any process of
consciously deliberated reason even has a chance to occur.
Yet this is not the least of it. By studying how people actually
think, cognitive scientists have found that thinking based on formal
logic is, for most practical purposes, not terribly useful. The cognitive
scientist Paul E. Johnson, after extensive analysis of how experts in
medicine, engineering, and other skilled professions think when
solving problems related to their specialties, made the following
observation:

I’m continually struck by the fact that the experts in our
studies very seldom engage in formal logical thinking. Most
of what they do is plausible-inferential thinking based on the
recognition of similarities. That kind of thinking calls for a
great deal of experience, as we say, a large data base. If
anybody’s going to be logical in a task, it’s the neophyte,
who’s desperate for some way to generate answers, but the
expert finds logical thinking a pain in the neck and far too
slow. So the medical specialist, for instance, doesn’t do
hypothetical-deductive, step-by-step diagnosis, the way he
was taught in medical school. Instead, by means of his
wealth of experience he recognizes some symptom or
syndrome, he quickly gets an idea, he suspects a possibility,
and he starts right in looking for data that will confirm or
disconfirm his guess. (Hunt 1982, 139–40)

I have quoted this lengthy passage because it goes to the very
heart of my critique of Objectivism. Most practical knowledge (i.e.,
the sort of knowledge used to confront and solve the problems that
we face in everyday life) is based on generalizations drawn from
experience. By making logic one of the essential foundations of
human cognition, Rand, by implication, invalidates the practical
knowledge of everyday life, which depends on logically invalid forms
of reasoning. Most of what we know about human nature, for
example, exists as generalizations from experience. Rand’s tabula rasa
view of human nature, however, rejects any type of generalization that
threatens her over-romanticized conception of man.

As an illustration of this, consider the human tendency toward
self-deception. Literally hundreds of experiments in social psychology
have shown that most people think better of themselves than is
warranted by the facts. “Indeed, most people claim they are above
average in any positive trait you name,” notes the cognitive scientist
Steven Pinker (1997, 422). In other words, most people are incapable
of judging themselves objectively. Worse, they don’t even realize this.
They regard their self-estimations as fair and objective (Pinker 2002,
265).

If most people are and always have been like this, it poses a
serious problem to Rand’s virtue of pride, which requires at the very
least that people be honest about themselves. If there exists a
biological predisposition toward self-deception—and the evidence
strongly suggests that such a predisposition does in fact exist (45–51,
263–66)—then making a virtue of pride may not be such a great idea.
Perhaps it would be far wiser to encourage most people to be humble
as a countermeasure to their tendency toward self-deception and false
pride.

Rand, of course, would never have accepted the notion that
human nature somehow renders pride unattainable for most people.
We know that Rand did not believe in human nature in the traditional
sense of the term; that she believed, instead, that man was a blank
slate who could shape “his soul in the image of his moral ideal, in the
image of . . . the rational being he is born able to create” (1961, 160).
Instead of providing empirical evidence for this rather extraordinary
view, she based it on a logical argument. Free will, she argues, is
“axiomatic” because the opposite view, determinism, is self-contradic-
tory. But if people have free will, they cannot have biological
predispositions or tendencies, Rand concluded, because this would
violate their freedom of choice (169).

The problem with this argument is that it goes in the face of a
growing body of scientific evidence that shows that genes account for
about half of the variation in most psychological traits (Pinker 2002,
48). The tabula rasa view of human nature does not accord with the
best scientific opinion. Nor does it accord with human experience, as
we find it represented in literature. Yet Rand, on the basis of a mere
“logical” rationalization, would turn her back on the empirical
evidence provided by scientific research and by ordinary human
experience.

In my book, I sought to challenge not merely Rand’s vision of
human nature, but also the method of logical rationalization used to
defend it. At one point in his review, Seddon (2003, 366) wonders
“what [I] would have Rand do if not use logic?” I have no problem
with Rand using logic to settle logical problems. I do, however, have
a problem when Rand attempts to settle matters of fact without doing
the necessary empirical research. That is not a very reliable method
of settling controversial issues regarding matters of fact. It is not the
method used by scientists, who seek to supplement their logical
reasonings with a copious fund of empirical research; nor is it the
method primarily used in everyday life, where logically invalid
inferences drawn from accumulated experiences are used much of
time.

The problem with Rand is that she was not an empirically
responsible philosopher. She makes all kinds of controversial
assertions about matters of fact without backing them up with the
relevant empirical evidence. How does Seddon respond to this
criticism? By accusing me (1) of positivism and (2) of equating
sensory observation with knowledge (368–69). But even if I were
guilty of these philosophical sins, that would not get Rand off the
hook. All I have done in my book is compare some of Rand’s most
controversial assertions about matters of fact with the relevant
evidence compiled by cognitive scientists, evolutionary psychologists,
neuroscientists, social psychologists, and sociobiologists. Excellent
research is being done in these fields—research that is helping us
develop an understanding of the human mind based on empirical
science rather than on mere philosophical speculation. Rand’s views
of human nature and cognition don’t altogether square with this
research. Indeed, other than Rand’s insistence on unit economy, most
of her epistemology is either irrelevant and trivial or exaggerated and
untrue. Much the same could be said of her view of human nature,
particularly her tabula rasa view of human psychology. The latest
scientific evidence simply does not support the Randian view on these
issues.

Although Rand’s theories of morality and politics are largely
untouched by recent scientific developments, there are still problems
to be noted. In my book, I argued that her social and political ideals
were unrealizable, and could be dismissed on those grounds alone.
Seddon objects to this line of inquiry, accusing me of “an unwilling-
ness to even consider” normative political theory and of “totally”
misunderstanding “the logic of the social sciences versus the natural
sciences” (371). But the misunderstanding is on Seddon’s part, who
fails to grasp how easily normative political theory degenerates into
advocacy theory and special pleading. Political partisanship, when
combined with the human tendency to self-deception, constitutes an
immense threat to descriptive theory (Hunt 1982, 128–30; Burnham
1963, 287–305). For those of us who prefer truth to ideology and
science to rationalization, one of the techniques to help us avoid the
pitfalls of special pleading and rank partisanship is to zealously
separate descriptive social science from normative theory. But note:
this separation is not motivated by any sort of unwillingness to
“consider” normative social science. We simply don’t want to give
way to the all-too-human temptation to allow our political and social
prejudices from contaminating our scientific work.

Near the end of his review, Seddon expresses puzzlement that I
should consider Rand an important and perhaps even great thinker,
despite regarding her philosophy as a mistake. But here context is
everything. Her philosophy is only a mistake if we assume that Rand
was trying to provide apt description of human nature and the human
condition. On these issues, Objectivism is a failure. It would,
however, be unfair to dismiss Rand and her philosophy on these
grounds alone. If we examine the history of philosophy, it becomes
increasingly evident that most philosophers, as Nietzsche (1968, 202)
pointed out, are “advocates who resent the name.” Philosophy, if we
define it by the example of the great philosophers, is primarily
concerned with providing rationalizations for the idols of human
sentiment. So if, as I contended in my book, Objectivism is largely a
rationalization of Rand’s peculiar vision of man and society, that does
not necessarily make Rand a bad philosopher. After all, isn’t she
merely following in the footsteps of Plato, Hegel, Marx and other
great philosophers, who also rationalized preconceived notions? All
I am seeking to accomplish in my book is to refute Rand’s pretensions
as a realist, as a purveyor of truth and wisdom. She is none of these
things. But as philosophical rationalizer, as casuist par excellence, she
may, for all I know, deserve very high marks.

Although I have little use, personally, for the rationalizing type of
philosophy, I am not so prejudiced as to contend that there is no
merit in it at all. There are, to be sure, some very serious disadvan-
tages to rationalizing a misconceived vision of the world. But there
are some advantages as well that must be weighed in the balance.
When Seddon (2003, 371), for example, suggests that Rand’s “laissez-
faire capitalism is more of a goal to be aimed at than anything that
may actually be,” he has stumbled upon what could prove a rich vein
of analysis. Extend this line of thinking to all of Rand’s thought, and
suddenly Objectivism is transformed into a kind of Sorelian myth.
Rand’s ideals of man and society, as descriptions of truth, may fall
considerably short of the mark, but as myths that inspire individuals
to reach the summit of their potential, there may be real utility in
them.

JARS: "A Beauty Contest for Dichotomies: Browne's Terminological Revolutions"

Roderick T. Long, responding to Gregory Browne's article "The 'Grotesque' Dichotomies Still Unbeautified," contributes a rather technical article that will strike some readers as pedantic and other as niggling. In any case, despite the subtle clarity of much of Long's analysis, to my mind he altogether misses what should be the main point of the whole exercise. At stake in any debate over the analytic-synthetic dichotomy (and that's what the debate really is all about) is the question of what is the best way to determine matters of fact: deductions from first principles (i.e., from "axioms" and the like); or experimental reasonings based on scientifically controlled observations and criticisms from qualified experts (i.e., the scientific method). I contend that the scientific method is far and away the best method of determining matters of fact, and that, when stripped of all the pedantic excesses that Kant placed around it, this is what the analytic-synthetic is striving to assert. And so any attack on this dichotomy, particularly one that goes all the way down to its core truth about the cognitive superiority of "empirical science," is motivated by a desire to give speculative philosophy the same cognitive standing as scientifically tested knowledge and common sense knowledge derived from observation and experience. The Objectivist attack against the analytic-synthetic dichotomy is simply a roundabout way of rationalizing Rand's deplorable empirical irresponsibility. Rand wanted to believe in a theory of human nature that fails to accord with the facts. Since she could not defend her theory on the basis evidence, she chose instead to defend it with the appearance of logic. The argument for the Objectivist version of free will is essentially an argument for Rand's theory of human nature. Bear in mind: she provided no other argument for her view of man--none whatsoever! Her argument is presented as if it were a kind of logical validation on par with empirical evidence. But since this sort of procedure for determining matters of fact is challenged by the analytic-synthetic dichotomy, Rand had Peikoff write his notorious article against it.

Curiously, Browne himself, as noted by Long, complained that Rand and Peikoff have an "excessive aversion" to more geometrico reasoning (i.e., to determining matters of fact through logical or pseudo-logical constructions, rather than through observations, research, and the scientific method). I don't know where he finds this "excessive aversion." If we judge Peikoff and Rand, not merely on what they say, but how they go about their business, it becomes clear that more geometrico reasoning is one of their favorite methods of defending Objectivist dogma.

JARS: "The 'Grotesque' Dichotomies Still Unbeautified"

Gregory Browne, in this essay, replies to criticism of his book Necessary Factual Truth, a work which attempts to combine Misesian apriorism with Randian scholasticism. Rand, argues Browne, essentially pursues the same rationalistic method as the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises. She can do so "because Objectivists believe that all facts except those resulting from human free will choices are ... 'necessary' and that no truths [can be considered] 'non-factual' [i.e., the analytical-synthetic dichotomy is wrong]." This allows Rand to "do ethics the way she does" while harmonizing Rand's economics "with the Austrian economics of Ludwig von Mises."

As an exegesis of the Peikoff/Rand view of the analytical-synthetic dichotomy, Long's analysis is on target. Objectivists reject this dichotomy because they want to justify the rationalistic methodology whereby matters of fact are determined through the manipulation of logical structures. Despite Rand's and Peikoff's lip-service to empiricism and the scientific method, in their actual philosophical works, they tend toward a kind of scholastic rationalism. Hence the axioms, the definition-mongering, the claim that concept formation is at least in some respects analogous to algebra, and the headlong plunge into the dubious quicksands of Aristotelean essentialism.

Having not read Browne's book, I cannot say how convincing (or unconvincing) his defense of necessary factual truths. However, I would be surprised if any convincing arguments could be brought on behalf of the notion of necessary truth. The best that has been said on this issue was provided by George Santayana: "Tradition is rich in maxims called necessary truths, such as 2+2=4, that space and time are infinitely divisible, that everything has a cause, and that God, or the most real of beings, necessarily exists. Many such propositions may be necessary, by virtue of the definitions given to their terms; many may be true, in that the facts of nature confirm them; and some may be both necessary logically and true materially, but even then the necessity will come from one quarter and the truth from another."

In other words, nature (or, for theistically inclined, God) determines what is true, not logic! Here's the problem with logic: There are an infinite number of logical (i.e., necessary) truths only a small fraction of which are exemplified in reality. So how is anyone is supposed to distinguish between the factually true necessary truths and the factually untrue necessary truths? Answer: the best way to determine between the two is by consulting the relevant facts! Evidence, particularly scientific evidence, is the best way of determining factual truth (though not the only way).

What gives the sort of apriori or scholastic rationalism advocated by Rand and Mises the aura of plausibility is that in some circumstances, matters of facts are so complicated that they cannot be determined by the usual logico-experimental methods of science. This is where logical speculation, as long is it is controlled by a strong sense of the elemental facts, can prove useful. Hence the need for the sort of economic reasoning advocated by Mises and Frank Knight, among others. However, we must be aware of the important limitations of this method. Knight calls deductive economic reasoning "the method of successive approximations" and insists that "without empirical correction to real situations" economists are likely to run into trouble.

JARS: "Ayn Rand as Literary Mentor"

Kirsti Minsaas provides a short review of Erika Holzer's Ayn Rand: My Fiction Writing Teacher. In the course of her review, Minsaas indulges in a short discussion of Holzer's and Rand's "shared interest in larger-than-life heroes." Minsaas, as far as I can tell, shares Holzer's perspective about the "objective" need for "romantic heroes," and even goes so far as to describe the type of hero projected in Rand's novels as "sophisticated." So here we have three women--Rand, Holzer, and Minsaas--all expressing sympathy for "larger-than-life" heroes of the Randian variety. Could it be that Randian heroism is a product of peculiar sort of female sentimentalism? I personally don't see anything heroic in Rand's heroes. They are not even gentlemen, as no gentlemen would go around raping women (even when the women want it), dynamiting newly completed housing projects, engaging in piracy and petulant economic sabotage, and spouting self-righteous ideological rhetoric. The Randian hero is an ideologue par excellence, which is another way of saying that he is a man without any real sense of honor.

Minsaas' review also touches upon an even less agreeable subject: Rand's "sense of life" construct, which constitutes one of Rand's very worst theories. Great literature seeks to illuminate the perplexities of the human condition. In the pursuit of this end, literature must sometimes grapple with the tragic side of existence--that is to say, it must cover such things as sickness, pain, infidelity, death, and evil. Rand's excessively secular and rationalist view of life caused her to shrink from such subjects, because her philosophy had no answers to the problems they raised. So she created an elaborate rationalization in order to dismiss novels that raised just the sort of difficult issues which demonstrate the poverty of her philosophy. She argued that the very fact that an author chooses a tragical subject is proof positive that he considers the subject of paramount importance. If an author like Tolstoy writes a novella about death (e.g., The Death of Ivan Illyich), this proves that Tolstoy believes that death is the most significant thing of all, more significant, even then life, which, Rand would argue, proves that Tolstoy has a "malevolent sense of life." But here Rand, as usual, misses the point altogether. The The Death of Ivan Illyich is not a glorification of death, but merely a mediation about death, giving Tolstoy's thoughts about the subject. Whether death is "metaphysically significant" or not, it's clearly an important subject; so why shouldn't a novelist, especially one as great as Tolstoy, provide his take on it? By dismissing the lion's share of great literature as "malevolent," Rand merely encourages her followers to remain ignorant of the some of the best that has been said and thought about the great issues confronting human beings.

JARS: "Putting Humans First?"

David Graham and Nathan Nobis review Tibor Machan's treatise Putting Human's First: Why We Are Nature's Favorite, which is neo-Objectivist attack on the animal right's crowd. The review is somewhat critical. The authors are not impressed by Machan's arguments and they go so far as to accuse Machan of taking an ambiguous stance. At one point in his treatise, Machan writes:

"Should there ... be laws against certain kinds of cruelty to animals? This is not something I am willing to address fully here. Suffice it to say that, for my part, I would not necessarily take exception if someone were to rescue an animal being treated with cruelty, even if this amounted to invading someone's private property. If one spotted a neighbor torturing a cat, albeit on his own private property, one could well be morally remiss in failing to invade the place and rescue the animal."

This is a curious statement coming from someone arguing against animal rights from an Objectivist standpoint. It suggests that Machan feels a certain ambivalence about the subject. It further suggests conceptual poverty of Objectivist views on morality, politics, and justice. In the real world, things aren't so simple as the Objectivist would like them to be. Normal decent human beings are appalled by anyone who receives pleasure from torturing animals. To frame the whole issue in terms of human beings, who are the only creatures entitled to rights and may do anything with their property, and animals who have no rights and are the merely the property which human beings can do anything with, clearly misses the full reality of the issue.

The illustrate the inadequacy of the Objectivist view, take the recent case of two brothers who were sentenced ten years for torturing a puppy. From an Objectivist standpoint, this sentence is an act of injustice. Animals have no rights and while it may be immoral to torture them it should not be illegal. Yet this viewpoint lacks basic common sense. The fact is that any individual who is so destitute of common humanity that he takes pleasure in torturing animals poses a threat to society. Such an individual simply cannot be trusted. Who is to say that in the future he won't take pleasure in torturing human beings as well? Hence there is a kind of justice, or at least a kind of wisdom, in removing him from society.

JARS: "Essays on Ayn Rand's Fiction"

In this article, Susan L. Brown reviews two collections of essays from ARI, the first collecting essays about Rand's novel Anthem, the second collecting essays about We the Living. Although Ms. Brown's reviews are largely positive in tone, she does see fit to complain of "the failure of its authors to cite the work of other scholars who have dealt with some of the issues involved here, and their dogged persistence in conveying the notion that Ayn Rand ... never really change her mind about anything." I suspect that this latter charge goes to the heart of Rand's psychopathology. When Rand revised We the Living, she claimed that she only made "editorial-line changes." Well, that simply isn't the case. Changes were made in the views expressed in the novel. The 1936 version lacked the ideal-man view of her later novels; it has a somewhat ambivalent attitude toward capitalism; and it contained several passages expressing the Nietzschean view that "character is fate" and that people are born to be what they are.

Rand was clearly embarrassed by these views she held earlier in her development and went out of her way to deny that she had ever held them -- despite the evidence to the contrary. But why should it matter whether she held somewhat different views earlier in her career? There is nothing wrong about changing one's mind. Those of us who are critics of Rand might think she changed for the worse; but her admirers could easily embrace the opposite view. Why, then, should both Rand and her apologists shrink from admitting that she changed her mind? It appears that Rand felt there was something shameful in changing one's mind, as if it were immensely degrading and humiliating. Does this, then, explain her intemperate hostility to the notion that all knowledge is ultimately conjectural and that knowledge is largely the product of trial and error and ceaseless self-criticism? Does it explain her uncompromising dogmatism and her ill-fated, limping theory of "contextual certainty"?

Slow Posting Weeks, Upcoming Projects

Just a note to say that my posting will be limited over the coming weeks due to work and travel commitments. Greg may post as the spirit moves him. I'm also working on a couple of longer term projects for the site. One is an "Instant ARCHN" sidebar - an introduction to visitors who have not read the book, so they know what the Sam Hill we are talking about.

Here's a proposed structure. First, some basic critical tools one needs to see what's wrong with Rand's theories:

a) About 'Essentialism'
This will briefly examine the methodological problems philosophy - and Objectivism in spades - inherited from Aristotle and Plato and that Popper exploded in his classic chapter 11 in "The Open Society and its Enemies", illustrated with examples from Rand.

b) The Ayn Rand Word-Game Lexicon
A handy list of the many verbal devices that Rand uses to confuse - oxymorons such as "contextual absolute", her key equivocations over terms such as "man's life", and the other sundry verbal fudges that permeate her work. Then:

Reality Contra Ayn Rand: A Summary of ARCHN's arguments.
This will give capsule overviews of the book's refutations of Rand's various theories
- Theory of Human Nature
- Theory of History
- Theory of Knowledge
- Theory of Metaphysics
- Theory of Morals
- Theory of Politics
- Theory of Aesthetics
Summary of ARCHN's conclusions

If y'all have anything you'd also like to see here, let me know.

I'm also working on a review of "We The Living" and a Popperian look at the unwittingly Platonic roots of Rand's ethical theories. Stay tuned.

Rand's Morality: A Brief Autopsy 2 - addendum

Before being interrupted by other pressing issues (JARS, etc.), I had been doing a short series of posts on Rand's morality. Originally, I had thought of trying to give the actual logic argument for Rand's ethics. One small problem: since Rand herself never provided a logical argument for her theory of morality, it's difficult to know what that would be. One has to build the argument entirely for oneself, trying to draw implicit premises from the rather vague and not terribly enlightening rhetoric that make up Rand's official theory. Fortunately, Michael Huemer has done this troublesome and thankless work for us. His article not only presents the Randian argument in logical form, but he provides, as a kind of bonus, a devastating critique of that argument, in both its logical and rhetorical forms. Here's an example of the most salient point in Huemer's critique:

"The problem is that ... 'rational' and 'man qua man' are simply fudge words. That is, their function in the theory is that they enable Rand to claim almost anything she likes as being supported by her theory, and also to reject any attempt to infer conclusions that she doesn't want from the theory....

"[A] 'fudge word' is a word that functions to make fudging easy. 'Rational' and 'man qua man' are Rand's fudge words. She never gives a precise and unambiguous criterion for their applicability. Thus, suppose someone tries to argue that, on Rand's theory, it would be morally acceptable to steal from people, provided you could get away with it. Then she has at least two fudges she can employ (probably more): (a) She could claim that this is not in your interests, because there is always a risk that you might get caught, and it's not worth it. This works because no one knows how to calculate this risk, so no one can actually refute this claim. This is the sort of thing I have seen many Objectivists do. However, Rand doesn't do this in 'The Objectivist Ethics'; she goes for the second sort of fudge: (b) She can claim that although you would gain money from this, it would not be in your rational interests, or it would not be serving the life of 'man qua man', or that it would reduce you to a 'subhuman' status. Thus, she can immediately bog down the counter-example in an interminable debate about what is or isn't 'rational', 'subhuman', etc., because no precise and unambiguous criterion of the rational, or the human, has been identified. She gets to make it up as she goes along.'

Understanding Objectivist Jargon Pt 8: "Concepts"

"Concepts"= condensations of human knowledge, which also simultaneously transcend all human knowledge. They can never be overthrown - they are valid for all time. They exist only inside individual minds, but are also universal. (Yes, folks, it's a veritable all-you-can-eat-and-have-too cakefest!). Additionally, Rand hints that the true meaning of concepts can be properly determined only by superior men. In other words, Objectivism's version of Plato's Forms.

ARCHN Quotes of the Week 25/2/07

Double helping this week:

"Rand's account of the rise of statism in America indicates that she knew virtually nothing about how political institutions change and develop over time. She took it for granted that such institutions are determined by moral theory. Yet this is hardly the case. Moral theories rarely play a significant role in the evolution of political institutions. Like language, ettiquette, and jurisprudence, political institutions nearly always develop independently of the intentions, moral or otherwise, of those who created them." - Greg Nyquist, ARCHN, p82

"The institutions of man are produced, not by following any sort of definite blueprint or philosophical theory, but by the minute efforts of a large number of individuals each of whom is seeking solutions to specific problems. Those solutions which prove the most useful over time tend to be imitated by others and soon spread throughout the entire social order. Those solutions which, on the other hand, lead to further problems will, over time, become less and less used. Thus a process analagous to Darwinian selection is found behind the formation of social institutions." - Greg Nyquist, ARCHN, p95

Basic Fallacies of Objectivist Epistemology: The Mathematical Comparison

Rand's "Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology" is easily the worst thing she ever wrote. Rambling despite its brevity, almost comically incoherent despite its air of supreme intellectual confidence, and shamelessly fact-free despite its high-toned talk about grounding knowledge in observed reality, that she could consider the epistemological theories therein the "solution" upon which "the fate of human societies, of knowledge, of science, of progress and of every human life depends" is a testament to both her alarming overestimation of her abilities and the uncritical groupie-bubble Rand seems to have lived much of her later life in.

While there are boners on pretty much every page of the ITOE, they fortunately boil down to a smaller number of key fallacies. One of the most central is her notion that concepts must be as precisely constructed as mathematical equations. She makes much rhetorical hay over this alleged precision, and the equally alleged "disasters" that will result if anything so horrendous as an approximation creeps into man's automatized conceptualising. She claims that the validity of man's conceptual knowledge "depends on the precision of his concepts, which require as strict a precision of meaning...as the definitions of mathematical terms." (ITOE, 65, emphasis mine).

This supposed precision of concepts leads to the demand for similar exactitude in the symbols that represent them i.e. words.. Words, Rand insists, must be properly treated "as concepts" with "exact meaning...never allowing a break in the chain linking their concepts to the facts of reality." (ITOE, 20-21). Thus the writer or speaker should use words as precisely as a mathematician uses his numbers or algebraic symbols.

But this results in a basic fallacy, for Rand doesn't seem to realise that words and numbers are two very different things. Words cannot have anything like "as strict a precision of meaning...as the definitions of mathematical terms." This is because unlike words, numbers are almost entirely empty of content. This is their great benefit; as a trade-off for this lack of content we gain total precision and the ability to apply them to almost anything. Words, on the other hand, are content-rich, saturated in millenia of cultural development which has left them full of ambiguities, shades, hues, meanings and histories of meanings. The trade-off for this richness, however, is a concomitant loss of precision.

But don't take my word for it - the difference between the two can be easily demonstrated. If I give you a number you've never encountered before - say, 73647789990.871001 - you don't even require a definition to know what it means. It is precise, but empty.

However, should I give you a word you've never encountered before - say, "passalorynchite" - you will need to look it up in a dictionary if you are to have any hope of knowing its meaning. While it certainly refers to something, its meaning is far richer, and thus more layered and complex. As Karl Popper remarks, words are always "necessarily vague" to a greater or lesser degree, and instead of expecting exact precision when using them, we should be careful to remain "within their penumbra."

Thus the belief that words can, in effect, have "as strict a precision of meaning...as the definitions of mathematical terms" is a fundamental error. This error is part and parcel of another fundamental error, Rand's view of definitions, which we will examine in a later post.

Understanding Objectivist Jargon Pt 7: "Contextual Absolute"

"Contextual absolute" = Oxymoron. Not in fact an 'absolute' at all. If you consider this sort of thing an epochal contribution to philosophy, you might also be interested in this large bridge in Brooklyn that I have for sale at an excellent price.

Understanding Objectivist Jargon Pt 6: "A is A"

"A is A" =
i) Shorthand for the Law of Identity
ii) Buzzphrase, the mere invocation of which is believed to validate any argument, or invalidate any opposing argument.

Example usage:
"Those who oppose the war in Iraq inherently deny that 'A is A'"
and
"Those who support the war in Iraq inherently deny that 'A is A'"

JARS: Degutis' "Deconstructing Postmodern Xenophelia"

The title of Degutis' essay is a mouthful, to be sure, but it is an excellent piece -- quite the best in the entire issue Fall 2006 issue of JARS. Degultis' is a Lithuanian classical liberal who understands all too well the threat posed by leftist sentiments to Western Civilization. He argues that "the agenda [of leftism] is counterproductive, it's 'progressive' goals are retrogressive, and its implementation would result in the destruction of the West." Degultis proceeds with a subtle, nuanced analysis of the main ideas of leftist thought -- an analysis that is devastating precisely because it avoids the sort of self-serving, facile distortions and crude hyperbole that are the stock and trade of the denizens of ARI. The only question one might have about Degutis' essay is, What does it have to do with Rand? It never mentions Rand, nor does it avail itself of any of Rand's singular conceptual devices. So how should we account for its inclusion in JARS? Perhaps it is there because it expresses opposition to the radical left, which Rand also vehemently -- though, unfortunately, not as intelligently -- opposed as well.

Whatever may be the reason, I doubt that Rand herself would have approved of it, because it makes distinctions which would have horrified her objectivist proprieties. Hence, we find Degutis distinguishing between Christian altruism, which confines itself to the sphere of voluntary relations, with secular altruism, which "is open and limitless, subsuming under its cover all the wretched of the earth." I cannot imagine Rand would have been pleased by the suggestion that some forms of altruism may not after all be evil.

Heal Thyself!

Amusingly in light of the embarrassing standards of debate Objectivists regularly demonstrate here, Greg Perkins over at Noodlefood enlightens us as to what he considers the "ground rules for rational discussion."

Sample quote:
"Thinking over the common ways things go off the rails while talking with non-Objectivists, I put together the following to try to set expectations, keep things on the rails longer, encourage more seriousness and intellectual honesty, scare away the unworthy, and so on."

Some of the comments are priceless too.

Anti-ARCHN Quote of the Week 14/2/07

"It's not that I can't respond to your challenge to show the fallacy in your book, it's that I decline to respond."
- Objectivist commenter John Donohue

ARCHN Quote of the Week 13/2/07

"For Objectivists, the term reason is a sort of mystical entity whose purpose is to assure them that they are right."
- Greg Nyquist, ARCHN, p153

Hoisted from Comments: Nyquist Replies to a Critic

...even though that critic, one Mr John Donohue, has point-blank refused to read "Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature"! Only in Objectivism...;-) Still, we're used to that by now. Extract from this thread.

Nyquist:
Mr. Donohue has objected to the following description of Rand's metaphysics, which he regards as a twisted misstatement of Rand's position:

"Although acknowledging that realism cannot be proved, she (Rand) did believe it could be validated through the use of several axioms."

I'm rather surprised that Mr. Donahue should object to this. The distinction between proof and validation in regards to the Objectivist axioms is taken straight from Peikoff. In Objectivism, these axioms don't prove anything, but are regarded as the basis of proof. But they are said to validate certain notions, such as causality and "contradictions don't exist in reality."

Mr. Donahue: "You claim that Objectivists deduce facts of reality from the axioms (wrong) and claim the axioms as being 'mere tautology.'"

Well of course Rand does deduce facts of reality from her axioms. Causality and the view that "contradictions don't exist in reality" are both assertions about matters of fact that are deduced from the axioms. As for the claim of tautology, I don't see how that one can be evaded either, since a tautology is defined as a statement that's true no matter what the actual truth values of the predicate and subject are: in other words, its truth-value is independent of the way things are. "A is A" and "Existence exists" are clearly tautological statements.

Mr. Donahue: "Deluded that you have gotten her in the corner, you simply assert that Rand has rationalized her system around her personal 'mess' and that explains everything."

No, this is a mischaracterization of why I have charged Rand with rationalization. This is an important point that bears greater scrutiny. My charge of rationalization is not made lightly. It is based on three very well supported premises:

1. Rand's view of man, particularly her conceptualization of her so-called ideal man, is largely based on notions about man and the human condition that don't square with reality.

2. From evidence compiled from Rand's letters, journals, and life, she appears to have been relunctant to face up to the empirical challenges to her ideal man theory--so much so that it would not be exaggeration to claim that she evaded important facts about human nature.

3. It is obvious from Rand's life that she was a very brilliant woman who could have easily understood the important facts about human nature which she refused to accept.

Now the only way I can see my way to explaining these three premises is by assuming that Rand was guilty of rationalization. The only other possible explanation is that Rand was lying, and don't regard that as very plausible.

To sum up: if those three premises (and they're well supported by the facts) then Rand's theory of human nature is almost certainly the product of rationalization.

Understanding Objectivist Jargon Pt 5: "Social Metaphysician"

"Social Metaphysician" = someone who cares what non-Objectivists think about them.

Understanding Objectivist Jargon Pt.4: 'Second-hander'

"Second-hander" =
i) someone who thinks the opinions of others* has some value
ii) someone who thinks the 250,000 years of human culture, learning, customs and institutions prior to Objectivism has some value.

*There is one important exclusion: adopting the opinions of Ayn Rand or Leonard Peikoff in their entirety does not mean you are a 'second-hander'. It means you are an uncompromising individualist.

Understanding Objectivist Jargon Pt 3: "Floating Abstraction"

An occasional series that translates Objectivist jargon into plain language.

"Floating abstraction" = Buzz-phrase applied to any theoretical objection to Randian doctrine.

Understanding Objectivist Jargon Pt 2: "Concrete-bound"

An occasional series that translates Objectivist jargon into plain language.

"Concrete-bound" = Buzz-phrase applied to any practical or empirical objection to Randian doctrine.

ARCHN Quote of the Week 8/2/07

"Now that Rand has passed from the scene, it will be interesting to observe whether any artists of genuine distinction ever emerge from the Objectivist movement. To the extent that Rand's influence still persists, I would regard the prospects for Objectivist-inspired art as extremely slim. For it was not merely Rand's aesthetic prejudices which subverted any effort on the part of her followers to develop a viable artistic movement; the principles she devised to justify her prejudices also played a part in this subversion. An Objectivist artistic movement, to the extent it actually tries to follow Objectivist aesthetic principles, would be a veritable contradiction in terms." - Greg Nyquist, ARCHN, p344

JARS: Seddon's "Rand and Rescher on Truth"

Fred Seddon once again reinterprets Rand in light of philosophers Rand wouldn't have approved of. The philosopher this time is Nicholas Rescher, often regarded as kind of "pragmatic idealist." Rescher wrote about what he regarded as the four major theories of truth: correspondence, coherence, intuitionistic and pragmatic. Correspondence means agreement with facts; coherence means logical agreement where the truthfulness of a proposition is judged by its implicit coherence with other (presumably true) propositions; intuitionistic truths are either those given in consciousness (i.e., "primative" datum) or primative inferences from these datum (Seddon equates them with Rand's self-evident truths); and pragmatic means that a theory has acceptable practical consequences. Seddon's thesis is that "Rand's theory of truth incorporates all four aspects of Rescher's"

Commentary: Seddon is rights about Rand, but some of the examples he gives are wrong. For example, placing Rand's self-evident truths under the intutitionistic category (I would argue that they go under the coherence category). Of course, the reason for Seddon's mistake here is that what he describes as the intuitionistic theory is a false theory: primitative datum cannot be regarded as making up a theory of truth, if for no other reason than that no primative datum can ever be regarded as knowledge. A primitative datum, stripped of all the presuppositions of intelligence, would provide us with little more than the solipsism of the present moment. For it is these presuppositions that give meaning to the primitative datum in the first place; which leads to my second criticism: namely, that claims of truth involve elements of both correspondence and coherence, and also of a tacit intuitive component (different from Rescher's primitive-datum intuitive), and finally of a pragmatic (or rather experimental) aspect. Does Rand accept the four components of truth of this revised theory? Up to a point, she does: she obviously supports the correspondence, coherence and pragmatic components (for the reasons Seddon gives, among others); and she also supports, implicitly at least, a tacit-knowledge intuitionist component of sorts (i.e., her "automatic knowledge), though her version of the theory is completely inadequate, as she is holds a very deep prejudice against both tacit knowledge and what is commonly refered to as "intuition." What Rand doesn't accept is that truth claims must inevitably use all four of these elements, especially the intuitionist. She would claim that truth doesn't require the tacit-intuitionist element, that tacit presuppositions and tacit conjectures are not necessary to arrive at truth.

ARCHN Quote Of The Week 29/1/07

"...Objectivism is largely a rationalization of (Rand's) own preconceived, pet ideas. She nearly confesses as much in an interview with Alvin Toffler. In response to the question "Do you regard philosophy as the primary purpose of your writing?" Rand replied, "No. My primary purpose is the projection of an ideal man, of man 'as he might be and ought to be.' Philosophy is a necessary means to that end." To admit, as Rand does here, that one's philosophy is merely a means to some end other than discovering the truth is tantamount to admitting that one's philosophy consists merely of an attempt to rationalize one's own personal convictions."
- Greg Nyquist, ARCHN, p4

JARS: Peirce's & Rand's Metaphysics

The Fall issue of JARS features a curious article entitled "Some Convergences and Divergences in the Realism of Charles Peirce and Ayn Rand." Peirce is the greatest of all American born philosophers: an extraordinarily subtle and penetrating philosopher whose complex cerebrations often take a visionary turn. Rand, who, along with William James, is the most widely read American philosopher, is also a "vision" philosopher, though her genius manifests itself in the ability to put across a vision and make it live in the hearts of her sympathetic readers rather than in creating a convincing philosophic system. The JARS article, by Marc Champagne, is a bit too subtle to get into here. Summarizing it in my own philosophic language, I would say that the greatest common denominator between Peirce and Rand is they both involved in a revolt against epistemological dualism: that is, neither of them are very comfortable with the notion that our knowledge of the world is mediated through the veil of ideas, or that it is useful to distinguish between essence and existence, between World 1 (physical reality) and World 3 (platonic Ideas or essences) objects. Where they differ, is in their strategies for evading the dualistic implications of realism. Rand's approach is largely verbal: she keeps insisting on the objectivity of concepts (as if such matters could be settled by mere assertion!) and drops hints about the horrors of Cartesian representationalism, particularly as it manifests itself in Kant's confused separation of phenomena and noumena. Peirce, a much more intellectually responsible philosopher, attempts to advance some very sophisticated metaphysical arguments to extricate himself from epistemological dualism. In the end, however, having denied the fundamental difference between reality and an individual's experience of reality, he winds up adopting something very close to idealism: he even goes so far as to suggest that "all is signs"--i.e., only World 3 objects exist.

Why are both these philosophers so down on epistemological dualism? I suspect that it derives from the fact that both Rand and Peirce believe in speculative metaphysics--i.e., they both hold that matters of fact can be determined by logical constructions. But once thoughts are distinguished from the existents in reality, speculative metaphysics, particularly of the rigorously logical variety, becomes a far less plausible undertaking. The world of Ideas (Popper's World 3 and Santayana's realm of essence) is infinite; and therefore, the number of logical combinations (or arguments) is also infinite. But only a small fraction of those infinite combinations will likely ever be found to describe something manifested in the world of matter (Popper's World 1), which means such manifestations are fortutious: there is nothing necessary about them. To find out whether a given logical combination corresponds with reality, one must look to the facts of the matter.

"A Person" Writes...

Over at Amazon I've been parsing the 'review' of ARCHN by one "A Person." Interesting only as an example of the lengths some Randians will go to to misrepresent their critics, and of their cheerful rejection of such basic standards as providing evidence for assertions, keeping quotes in some semblance of context, or even reading the book in question. Not a pretty picture.

Update:
I've inserted some additional points into my initial Amazon comment to save casual readers the tedium of wading through the rest of the thread, which consists mostly of me extracting a couple of foggy retractions from a highly reluctant A Person. I reproduce my points here, however, because ultimately the exchange strongly reinforces Greg's basic thesis about Objectivism's avoidance of "empirical responsibility."

Let's start with AP's opening comment:

"...each of my observations is an obvious logical conclusion of Mr. Nyquist's statements."

If only this were so! Let's look at the first of his "obvious logical conclusions" . AP quotes Nyquist saying "What I seek is not for my readers to agree with me--that would be an immense bore--but that they understand and criticize me intelligently." From this, AP concludes that ARCHN is "more of a hypothetical stab against Objectivism than an organized argument, and its author's stated purpose is not to provide a convincing refutation of Objectivism". But this is a non-sequitur - it does not follow that ARCHN is therefore not an organised and convincing argument. While AP found himself unable to muster the intellectual stamina to make it past the book's intro, in order to make it even there he must have encountered the Table of Contents, which sets out Nyquist's comprehensive critique of the 7 main branches of Rand's philosophy. (Reader Alexander Fürstenberg in his 4 star Amazon review gives a handy overview of the book's structure in detail). Further, from the fact that philosophical systems cannot be *finally* refuted ( and this is true; for metaphysical statements are often unfalsifiable in form - think "A is A" for example - and also 'true believers' of particular philosophic systems can always simply *refuse to accept* any refutation offered, much like the priest who refused to look through Galileo's telescope) it does not follow that ARCHN does not set out to be strongly convincing. It does, and judging from the reviews of readers who are not already Randian "true believers", it is.

Of course, basic logical fallacies aside, we should not expect much factual information either from a 'reviewer' who reads no further than the introduction. It is little wonder then that AP makes any number of inane, fact free claims. For example, he says Nyquist views philosophical systems "as collections of isolated facts rather than integrated wholes that stand on foundational principles." But this is simply wrong - following Karl Popper, Nyquist *does* view philosophies as integrated wholes, which can nonetheless be criticised and successfully refuted (although not to "true believers" of course) by searching for counter-examples in empirical fact. Thus ARCHN is chock-a-block full of *factual* refutations of Objectivist dogmas, 360 or so pages of them starting with Rand's theory of human nature, moving through history, epistemology, metaphysics, ethics etc. These factual refutations are in turn logically devastating to the fundamental principles of Objectivism.

Thus AP's claims that Nyquist does not address Rand's "actual doctrines" and that he "does not intend to offer specific refutations of Miss Rand's factual assertions" are completely laughable - a perfect example of a 'true believer' simply refusing to look through the telescope.

One wonders: why isn't AP embarrassed by making such obviously fake statements in public? Why would one attempt such a lengthy and transparent folly as reviewing a book without reading it in the first place? Well, Greg Nyquist has written elsewhere (in the upcoming Journal of Ayn Rand Studies) that despite their rhetoric about "facts of reality", in practice the followers of Ayn Rand seem to believe that by adopting her dogmas they are somehow relieved of "empirical responsibility"; of the basic responsibility studying the facts. This is the essence of Nyquist's critique of Objectivism - that it is, despite its claims to the contrary, a philosophy that goes out of its way to evade reality. This 'review' gives us a nutshell case of this tendency, as AP does not trouble himself to study the fact of the book itself, and considers all it is necessary to do is trim a few quotes from the introduction into suitable cues to commence reciting his Objectivist catechism. Thus, as he has not read ARCHN, AP's 'review' *can only be* his own imaginary rendering of its actual content mixed with generic Randian boilerplate and some typically inept attempts at logical deduction; which in turn can hardly make it worth examining in any more detail, other than as a textbook example of the Randian method of "bluff, buttressed by abuse" in action, and, as I also write at the end of (the Amazon discussion) thread, of how *not* to conduct a good-faith intellectual discussion.

JARS: "Demystifying Emotion"

The Fall 2006 Journal of Ayn Rand Studies commences with an article entitled "Demystifying Emotion: Introducing the Affect Theory of Silvan Tomkins to Objectivists" by Steven Shmurak. The article begins by acknowledging that Rand's view of emotions "fails to make sense o fthe totality of our emotional lives." Shmurak then introduces Tomkins' theory as possible alternative. Although he doesn't say so outright, Shmurak appears to be suggesting that if we were to "update" Rand's theory of emotions by replacing it with Tomkins' that would serve to strengthen the Objectivist position. But this suggestion assumes that the primary aim of Rand's theory is to provide a realistic explanation of human emotions. What if this assumption is false? What if the primary aim of Rand's theory is simply to prove that emotions can be entirely subjected to "reason"? After all, Rand's political, social, and psychological ideals would all be seriously jeopardized if emotions could not be entirely controlled by "reason." Hence my suspicion that Rand's theory of emotion is a little more than a formalized rationalization of a much deeper pathology in Rand--namely, her desire to subject every aspect of human existence to conscious "reasoned" thought, so that nothing is ever left to chance and the human being can be regarded as responsible for everything about himself.

This viewpoint, which Rand clung to with passionate obstinacy, is the fountainhead of nearly everything that is wrong with Rand's philosophy. It amounts to a kind of idealism. Just as ordinary idealists believe that their minds create and populate the natural world, so Rand, in effect, believes that the mind creates the psychological world--man's very self--out of its own ideas (or "basic premises").