About Rationally Speaking


Rationally Speaking is a blog maintained by Prof. Massimo Pigliucci, a philosopher at the City University of New York. The blog reflects the Enlightenment figure Marquis de Condorcet's idea of what a public intellectual (yes, we know, that's such a bad word) ought to be: someone who devotes himself to "the tracking down of prejudices in the hiding places where priests, the schools, the government, and all long-established institutions had gathered and protected them." You're welcome. Please notice that the contents of this blog can be reprinted under the standard Creative Commons license.

Monday, November 08, 2010

About Objectivism, part II: Epistemology

By Massimo Pigliucci

[Part I of this series was on Objectivist metaphysics]

For a philosophy named Objectivism, epistemology is foundational, since the possibility of objective knowledge is an inherently epistemological question. In this regard, Rand and her followers are surprisingly ambiguous. For instance, conscious of the obvious fact that human beings continually make errors of judgment, observation and reasoning, they agree that one cannot actually be certain of any proposition one utters. Oh? From when, then, comes any claim of objective knowledge? Well, as Leonard Peikoff put it in his Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, any proposition is “certain” if the available evidence supports it, i.e., it is certain within a particular context.
But this is pretty close to wanting your cake and eating it too. Any sensible epistemologist would simply say that said proposition is made more or less probable by the available evidence, and that this judgment may change if the evidence (the “context”) changes. No claim of certainty is warranted. The problem, of course, is that rephrased this way the Objectivist idea becomes unsurprising while at the same time undercutting any broad claim to objective knowledge.
Rand spends a lot of time rejecting religious and mystical claims, on grounds very similar to that adopted by the (failed) previous school of logical positivism in mainstream philosophy. While I certainly agree with Rand that faith is not a short-cut to, but rather a short-circuit of knowledge, the idea that one can reject claims about the supernatural on grounds that “nothing has been said” is, again, reminiscent of the logical positivists’ verifiability criterion — which famously and ironically undermined logical positivism itself. (It works like this: “nothing that cannot be verified makes sense.” “All right, then, how do we verify the latter sentence?”) In the case of Objectivism, it seems fair to raise the “nothing has been said” objection to Objectivist utterances such as “consciousness is identification,” which is a cardinal point of Objectivist epistemology.
Rand and her colleagues also rejected the long-lasting distinction between analytic and synthetic statements in philosophy. An analytic statement is true by virtue of its meaning, like “A bachelor is an unmarried man,” or the less obvious “The sum of the angles of a triangle is 180 degrees” (the latter is analytic because it turns out that having a total of 180 degrees in angles is part and parcel of being a triangle). The truth of a synthetic statement, on the other hand, generally depends on external, empirical evidence. For instance, “All bachelors are unhappy (presumably because they are unmarried),” or All mammals have a four-chambered heart.”
While things got complicated once Kant got hold of the analytic/synthetic distinction, such distinction is similar to that previously made by Hume between a priori and a posteriori propositions, which according to him are the only two types of propositions that make any sense. Here is how he expressed what became known as Hume’s fork, in his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding:
“If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”
I must admit a lot of sympathy for this sentiment. But back to the analytic/synthetic distinction: as I said, Kant improved on it (no need to go into the details now, but you can get the run down here). Then, in a famous paper published in 1951, W.V. Quine claimed to have demonstrated that the notion of analytic propositions is untenable, and that therefore the distinction between the two types has to be rejected. This paper is much more widely cited than it is understood (again, a summary can be found here); still, while Quine’s basic argument is highly technical, it hinges on the idea that the concept of analytic statements is in turn based on the concept of synonymy (because, for instance, “bachelor” and “unmarried man” have to mean the same thing if the phrase “a bachelor is an unmarried man” is to be meaningful). Quine claims that we don’t have a sufficiently clear explanation of synonymy (according to his rather stringent and idiosyncratic criteria of “clear” and “sufficient”), so the whole house of cards crumbles. I have never been convinced by this argument, and like many philosophers I know, I acknowledge Quine and swiftly proceed to ignore him: to me “bachelor” and “unmarried man” are unproblematically synonymous, and the truthfulness of that sentence is known a priori because it depends only on meaning and not on facts about the world. Period.
Now, why do we care about any of the above in the context of Objectivism? Because it too rejects the analytic/synthetic distinction, since it wants to deny the possibility of a priori knowledge. I’m not sure why some people are so set against a priori knowledge, but logic and mathematics are darn good examples of it, and I for one wouldn’t want any epistemology that didn’t take logic and mathematics seriously and as distinct from the natural sciences.
Another positivistic sounding notion in Rand’s epistemology is the rejection of emotions as a type of cognition. Indeed, Peikoff went so far as to state that “emotionalism” is synonymous with irrationality (I wonder if he checked with Quine before claiming that something is synonymous with something else). This sort of attitude has been common in philosophy since Plato (read: nothing new in Objectivism), with the notable exception of Hume, who was one of the first philosophers to seriously play up emotions as both a source of certain kinds of knowledge (particularly moral judgment) and as actually guiding reason rather than being controlled by it. Modern philosophy of mind and cognitive science are producing a much more nuanced understanding of the necessary integration of emotional and cognitive functions in the brain, without which, human knowledge and in fact the human condition itself, would not be possible.
Perhaps the most curious part of Rand’s epistemology was her contention that sensory perception is valid in an axiomatic sense. Since perception is a physiological function, according to her it comes without error, which led Rand to bizarre statements such as that optical illusions are conceptual errors, not errors of sight — as if “sight” were somehow clearly distinct from the brain’s conceptualization of what we see. The reason perception had to be perfect is that Objectivism is a kind of empiricism, relying on the notion that all our knowledge is ultimately based on the senses, just like the classical British empiricists (Hume, Locke and Berkeley) had maintained (though Objectivists actually have a problem with Locke, and presumably Hume, since they acknowledge the imperfection of the senses).
But by the time Rand was writing, philosophers in general, and epistemologists in particular, had gone way past a simplistic distinction between empiricism and rationalism, acknowledging the existence of both empirical and non-empirical knowledge, as well as getting down to analyzing the many ways in which both sensorial perception and reasoning can go wrong (which means giving up the dream of purely objective knowledge). That work continues today, and bleeds into similar work in the cognitive sciences (see, for instance, this fascinating article on the philosophy and physiology of delusions), from what I can see with precisely zero contribution from Objectivism.
Next time: Objectivist ethics (oh boy).

42 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. Massimo, I'm one of the few people that I know who's read Rand's non-fiction, but never her fiction. (I'm not much of a fiction reader, so I figured that I'd cut past the drama and get right to an explicit presentation of her thinking, just to see what all the fuss was about.) Your critique here (even more so than the last one) reminds me of my own doubts about her philosophical efforts - but you do a much more professional job of explaining such doubts than I could. Thank you.

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  3. Your statement:

    or the less obvious “The sum of the angles of a triangle is 180 degrees” (the latter is analytic because it turns out that having a total of 180 degrees in angles is part and parcel of being a triangle).

    shows an astonishing oversight of non-euclidean geometries, in which the notion of triangle is well-defined and the sum of the angles can be more or less than 180 degrees.

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  4. Skorokhod,

    every time I use that example I can count on someone immediately accusing me of the astonishing oversight of ignoring non-Euclidean geometry. Apparently it doesn't occur to people like you that I might be aware of non-Euclidean geometry but that: a) it's a bit cumbersome to add the parenthetical remark (obviously this is true only within Euclidean geometry) every time one talks about geometry. I mean, when you do additions, do you add the qualification that the result is not valid in binary? b) Adding non-Euclidean geometry doesn't change the argument at all, since all the same conclusions I reach here are valid regardless of which particular geometrical, mathematical or logical system ones uses.

    Please, be careful before charging ahead and accusing others of ignorance, okay?

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  5. Massimo wrote:

    The truth of a synthetic statement, on the other hand, generally depends on external, empirical evidence. For instance, “All bachelors are unhappy (presumably because they are unmarried)" ...

    The parenthetical expression "(presumably because they are unmarried)" somewhat muddies the water. The claim that "all bachelors are unhappy" can in principle be verified by external, empirical evidence, but the causal claim is much trickier! If all bachelors are indeed unhappy, it may be that they are unmarried because they are unhappy (which makes them unattractive as marriage partners). Or it may be that poverty is the common cause of their unhappiness and their unmarriedness. I don't know if you've written about causality before, Massimo, but it's a fascinating and challenging topic!

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  6. Nick,

    yes, of course, that was a (I guess weak) attempt at humor...

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  7. Oops. Yes, I see that now! Still, I do think causality is interesting, and it does seem to be situated near the boundary (fuzzy though it is) between science and philosophy.

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  8. Two points:
    Just having read your post and without having a chance to reflect further on the issue, I wonder where in such analysis of Objectivist epistemology Rand's support for Locke's blank slate theory of mind plays in all this, as she quite clearly argued for in "The Virtue of Selfishness?" As I recall she did not even mention Locke in her argument, which is not surprising since she had a habit of "borrowing" or expanding upon ideas from earlier philosophers without credit.

    Second point slightly off topic but fyi regarding Hume on emotion and reason: by coincidence just this morning I read a review in The Economist at http://goo.gl/rpU69 (via Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance) of Philips Blooms "Wicked Company" on the Paris Salon of Enlightenment era France and how its radicalism has often been under-appreciated. The Salon's members included d'Holbach, Rousseau, and Diderot. Hume was also a frequent visitor.

    Anyway having been aware of Hume's position on the relations between emotion and reason, the following quote caught my eye:

    A philosophy grew up around the baron’s generously stocked table that denied religious revelation and shunned Christian morality, embracing instead the primal passions (the fundamental motives, said the philosophes, for human behaviour) and cool reason (which could direct the passions, but never stand against them).

    Which if true it naturally leads one to wonder if such discussions provided a source and/or inspiration for Hume on this subject, and perhaps did not originate with him solely, but came instead from “arguments among friends” as we see in your blog motto

    Food for thought in any case.

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  9. You should change these posts' title from "About Objectivism" to "Me Arguing Against Objectivism before I even explain it, and pretending that's an explanation of it."

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  10. omgobama,

    seriously? You found absolutely nothing useful in these two posts? Sorry to hear that.

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  11. This is unbelievable -- so Rand's philosophy is even more ludicrous than I thought...Thanks for performing what I thought was impossible and decreasing my esteem for Objectivism even further!

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  12. Oh no there's certainly useful information there. it's just that the deconstruction of the argument is being presented before the argument itself. Also, have you ever read Nathaniel Branden's 'Who Owns Objectivism?" it's true that some of the assertions that were initially made by Rand become ridiculous when modern neuroscience is brought to bare. but it is equally ridiculous to claim that Objectivism has ignored this as well.

    I feel like this article presents a view of a philosophy that has remained constant over the past half century since it's initial formation. My personal view is that Ayn Rand did two very wonderful things for Objectivism: first she created it, and second she died. I blame Peikoff and his kind (who wish to turn it into a religion rather than a philosophy) for the continued assertion that modern Objectivists still believe that senses are infallible.

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  13. omgobama,

    I don't think I blamed Rand for not anticipating modern neuroscience, but her brand of empiricism was out of the question already in the time of Hume.

    As for having read Branden, no I haven't. Frankly, there is only so much time I can bring myself to dedicate to Objectivism, and this series is simply aiming at presenting my thoughts on the standard / original version, it's not meant as a scholarly deconstruction of its latest trends.

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  14. Very helpful, thoughtful, provocative comments on objectivism; likewise for Part 1 and, I suspect, parts to come. But I do object to tossing around common misconceptions about Plato: "This sort of attitude [emotionalism = irrationality] has been common in philosophy since Plato." Yes, it's been common, but not likely that Plato started it. Eg. see Nussbaum's Plato chapters in "The Fragility of Goodness."

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  15. neokortex:

    Which if true it naturally leads one to wonder if such discussions provided a source and/or inspiration for Hume on this subject, and perhaps did not originate with him solely, but came instead from “arguments among friends” as we see in your blog motto

    Well, Hume published his Treatise about 1739-1740 I believe and d'Holbach's Salon was in gear from 1750 to 1780*. So, reverse causation if the Salon influenced Hume? Anyway, no man is an island, so when one person has an idea, it's because the time was ripe and someone was bound to think of it.

    *Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baron_d%27Holbach#D.27Holbach.27s_salon

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  16. Dr. Pigliucci;

    This is an excellent analysis (I'm enjoying the series), but I'd like to ask one small favour: could you link to all the parts in all the parts?

    I'd like to send these on to people (when you're finished), but thre doesn't seem to be an easy way to get from part I to part II (or back) right now.

    I realise that it's a bit of work on your part to re-edit the prior sections, but it would make the series (as a whole) far more accessible to a greater audience.

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  17. Brian,

    Good point, I'll go back tomorrow and add cross links, stay tuned.

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  18. Massimo, just curious what your motivation is for writing this series. Do you run into a lot of objectivists?

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  19. ian,

    yup, I keep running into objectivists and their close brothers, libertarians. Some close friends are within their ranks.

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  20. Massimo,

    This is tangential to your post, but isn't it ironic that the criticism of self-referential incoherence often leveled against the LP's verfiability criterion of meaning may also be applied to Hume's famous dictum? For it is neither a fact derived from experimental reasoning about existence nor from 'abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number' that one ought to consign to the flames all that is feigned to be knowledge that is not derived from (a) experimental reasoning concerning fact or existence or (b) abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number.

    I have always took Hume to be providing a general epistemic maxim, and not a truth functional proposition. In the same way, then, I think, the verifiability criterion of meaning can be interpreted. (However, problems remain for verificationism.)

    On another tangential note, the logical positivist program is not dead (indeed, to say there was one *program* is a misnomer). In fact, many still work on many aspects of the logical positivist / empiricist program. (See, for instance, the Institute Vienna Circle: http://www.univie.ac.at/ivc/index_e.htm .) In many respects, I view my work on Bayesian confirmation theory as an extension of the work of Hempel, Reichenbach, and Carnap.

    Lastly, one (for instance myself) can be a non-cognitivist about supernatural claims without depending upon an antiquated verifiability criterion of meaning. See, for instance, Kai Nielsen and Michael Martin, to name only two.

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  21. A,

    good points, except I actually do think that empirical evidence supports Hume's dictum: nothing outside the fork has ever provided us with reliable knowledge...

    As for logical positivism, I know there are neo-positivists, just like there are neo-Aristotelians and neo-Kantians, but my impression talking to colleagues is that the original program(s) is no more.

    What exactly is your non-cognitivist position about supernatural claims?

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  22. What is it then, that makes one an atheist?
    When it is neither falsification / verification nor analytic / synthetic, that enables us to recognize palpable nonsense?
    Clearly there must be something that makes fairies less plausible than natural laws?

    It must be the biologist in me, but I always believed that pointing to reality was enough. That truth is ‘correspondence to reality'. That not only the a-posteriori, but ultimately even the a-priori, is reality-based. Ultimately, even logic and mathematics ‘seem to be the case’, seem to be ‘the logic of things’. An automatic construction of our brains, based on experience and expectation.
    In my view then a-priori knowledge is ‘first’ knowledge, that is: the human (mammal?) child discovers this before it develops language. And it’s fallible, just like the senses. But it is empirical nonetheless. So in this way, the empiricists are right.
    But Hume and his Fork is darn right as well! There simply is more ‘a-posteriori’ than Hume was prepared to accept.

    I would say Massimo, the objectivist denial of our fallible minds is not even their biggest mistake. They really loose all sense of reality in their ethics.
    I can’t wait for the third part of the sequel...

    Huub

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  23. "Well, as Leonard Peikoff put it in his Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, any proposition is “certain” if the available evidence supports it, i.e., it is certain within a particular context.

    But this is pretty close to wanting your cake and eating it too. Any sensible epistemologist would simply say that said proposition is made more or less probable by the available evidence, and that this judgment may change if the evidence (the “context”) changes.
    "

    You conveniently ignored the word "supports." A proposition is "probable" when there is only enough evidence to show that it is likely to be true. That would be more evidence than that required to show that it's truth is "possible", but less evidence than what must be available to be certain of its truth. Whatever level of knowledge one derives within the context of available evidence cannot be overturned by future evidence. Rather it will just be augmented.

    ---------

    "While I certainly agree with Rand that faith is not a short-cut to, but rather a short-circuit of knowledge, the idea that one can reject claims about the supernatural on grounds that “nothing has been said” is, again, reminiscent of... "

    In addition to the impotence of faith, claims to know the supernatural exists are self-contradictory. To exist is to have a nature (identity). To be knowable the supernatural would have an identifiable nature. The supernatural, however, is, by definition, not of nature— outside of nature—without a nature (identity), which would make it inherently unknowable. A knowable existent cannot be supernatural.

    ---------

    "In the case of Objectivism, it seems fair to raise the “nothing has been said” objection to Objectivist utterances such as “consciousness is identification,” which is a cardinal point of Objectivist epistemology."

    Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification. These are statements at the most fundamental level; and at that level, if they are not these, what else?

    ---------

    "Perhaps the most curious part of Rand’s epistemology was her contention that sensory perception is valid in an axiomatic sense. Since perception is a physiological function, according to her it comes without error, which led Rand to bizarre statements such as that optical illusions are conceptual errors, not errors of sight — as if “sight” were somehow clearly distinct from the brain’s conceptualization of what we see."

    "Sight" is an automatic physical response to stimuli and central component of sense perception for those who possess it. "Conceptualization" is the volitional, mental act of differentiating and integrating such sense perceptions. Each is "clearly distinct" from the other.

    When Rand says that the senses are inherently valid, she is merely pointing out that they are one's only object of awareness—they are the given, regardless of whatever differences ("imperfections") might exist among them.

    Color blind people still stop at red lights, because the knowledge when to stop does not depend on the relative perfection of any sensation, but rather of the differentiation and integration of the sensation experienced in respect to all others. Rand's favored example was the alien being with the capacity of reason, but none of our senses. It experienced reality by other modes of perception, but was able by non-contradictory differentiation and integration of its percepts to arrive at the same conclusions we do from our senses about the nature of existence.

    And, of course, once again, as with the certainty issue broached in Part 1 of this series, any claim that sense perception is "imperfect" would itself be necessarily corrupted by the imperfect perceptions to which it is reducible.

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  24. Rand is not be the greatest philosopher ever. But she sure is the greatest philosopher most objectivists have ever read.

    Frankly, I'm amazed you have the energy to analyse the guff she produced. I guess running into it kind of forces you to, though. Having said that, thanks for the providing the evidently necessary social service.

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  25. Michael,

    > You conveniently ignored the word "supports." A proposition is "probable" when there is only enough evidence to show that it is likely to be true. <

    I did not ignore anything, my objection was to calling this "certainty" when it clearly isn't. It's one of many examples of Rand distortions of language that result in claim that appear to be stronger or more novel than they actually are.

    > Whatever level of knowledge one derives within the context of available evidence cannot be overturned by future evidence. <

    Really? Oh dear, and I thought we overturn our provisional knowledge all the time. Just this week I learned that my knowledge of the fact that multivitamins are good for me has been overturned by new evidence from medical research.

    > To exist is to have a nature (identity). ... The supernatural, however, is, by definition, not of nature— outside of nature—without a nature (identity), which would make it inherently unknowable. <

    Well, the supernatural, one could claim, simply has a different type of nature. Ontological claims can't be settled by fiat.

    > Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification. <

    And square is circle. If that's all she meant, why the different words? What was wrong with existence and consciousness? Oh, but had she used the common words it would have been clear that she wasn't saying anything new...

    > "Conceptualization" is the volitional, mental act of differentiating and integrating such sense perceptions <

    There is nothing volitional about it, as the process is not under the direct control of consciousness. There is no neurobiological clearcut distinction between sight and the conceptualization of what is being seen.

    > When Rand says that the senses are inherently valid, she is merely pointing out that they are one's only object of awareness <

    No kidding. Again where's the novel insight?

    > any claim that sense perception is "imperfect" would itself be necessarily corrupted by the imperfect perceptions to which it is reducible. <

    I have no idea what this means.

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  26. Massimo,

    Let us consider the statement (1) 'God is bodiless.' Insofar as (1) is used it means: there exists some thing such that that thing is 'God' and that thing does not possess a body. By itself, (1) is not problematic, rather the meaning is indeterminate, for, presumably, 'God' could denote an abstract object (a number, for instance) which of course 'is bodiless'. However, in conjunction with other statements, it becomes clear that those who assert (1) do are not predicating bodilessness to an abstract object.

    For instance, (2) 'God interacts with spatially-temporally objects' is often asserted in conjunction with (1), in which case those who assert (1) cannot by 'God' mean an abstract object.

    Perhaps those who assert (1) intend, by 'God,' to denote a particular physical object, which seems plausible given the meaning of (2). However, physical objects (e.g. bottles of wine, humans, tiger lillies, cricket balls, etc.) are physical bodies, in which case, given (1), 'God' cannot be a physical body.

    Perhaps, then, 'God' is used to denote a particle of mass (this would conform to (1) and (2) above). However, given other statements, it becomes clear 'God' is not being used to denote a particle of mass. For instance, the statement 'God is morally perfect' or 'God is boundless' seem to clearly exclude the identification of 'God' with a particle of mass.

    In nuce, since 'God' has yet to be given a clear meaning in the since worked out above, 'God'-talk seems incoherent, in which case ascriptions of truth and falsity cannot be applied (with the exception of contradictions, e.g., 'God is boundless' and 'God is *separate* from His creation').

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  27. Dr. Pigliucci,

    First off, I've been following your blog for a number of months now, and I have to say I've become quite the fan. I admire and appreciate what you've set up here (as well as at least one of your books, "Nonsense on Stilts").

    Secondly, I've got a question for you. Suppose one wanted to school themselves in philosophy without having the time or money to spend on getting a BA in the subject. What books might you recommend to that person to introduce them to logic, ethics, ontology, epistemolgy, et al, along with the history and development of the ideas in such fields?

    Thanks!

    -Michael

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  28. A,

    yes, much of what you say makes sense, though of course one doesn't need Objectivism for any of it. This is pretty standard metaphysical fare. It still doesn't follow that the concept of god is incoherent, however, because one could invoke ideas such as "supernatural causality." Difficult, yes, but I understand that there may be different types of causality out there, which makes such talk not prima facie incoherent.

    Michael,

    thanks for the kind words. As it turns out, I have compiled two Amazon lists about philosophy, which may be useful for what you are talking about:

    http://amzn.to/c6XE3B
    http://amzn.to/aoPGHC

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  29. @Michael

    I know you're asking Massimo, but he can intercept this comment if he has a serious disagreement with my suggestions here.

    My university recommends the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as a pretty reliable resource. Philosophy is usually taught using original texts, but without some guidance, they can be difficult if not near impossible - most philosophical works are written in a context of ongoing philosophical debate. Event the oldest philosophical works we have depend somewhat on what was said by earlier philosophers whose works we don't even have! The encyclopedia is a little more accessible.
    http://plato.stanford.edu/

    If you want to address the texts directly, the encyclopedia is still a great guide/resource, but you can watch some of the free online philosophy lectures available at Harvard and Berkley. These are REALLY good lectures with an emphasis on clarity. Do the same thing any student would do. Watch the lectures; read the readings.

    Bertrand Russell's "History of Western Philosophy" is a pretty popular overview that does a good job of shining a light on the major debates and walking through a who's who of philosophy.

    MIT has a bunch of courses online as well. They basically consist of a list of readings and lectures in PDF form. Here's a standard introductory course, much like what you would find at any university.
    http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/linguistics-and-philosophy/24-01-classics-in-western-philosophy-spring-2006/lecture-notes/

    It's great if you can convince a partner or friend to do this with you. Philosophy needs to be talked about.

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  30. I have an issue with this part of the post:

    "[...] logical positivists’ verifiability criterion — which famously and ironically undermined logical positivism itself. (It works like this: “nothing that cannot be verified makes sense.” “All right, then, how do we verify the latter sentence?”)"

    Ayer himself responded to this (in my opinion, very naive) criticism of his verifiability criterion by stating that the criterion is itself an analytic statement, but (obviously) is to be applied to synthetic statements.

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  31. Well, yes, that's the way Ayer responds, but the problem remains, and my experience is that that's the main reason logical positivism is seen as a failure among philosophers. The problem is that as an analytic statement the verifiability criterion has no leg to stand on, it's not like other analytic (e.g., mathematical or logical) truths, so it kind of begs the question.

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  32. Dr. Pigliucci,

    Thanks very much for the lists. Friday is payday, and new books are always the best excuse for wanton spending! :p

    James,

    Thank you as well for your recommendations. Do you happen to have the links to the free online lectures from Harvard and Berkely you mentioned?

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  33. Oops! I said Harvard when I should have said Yale. Here's Shelly Kagan's lecture series "Death." It's very good.
    http://oyc.yale.edu/philosophy/death/

    And here's a link to the Berkley lectures.
    http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses.php
    They have archived courses somewhere, but I can't remember where.

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  34. "> You conveniently ignored the word "supports." A proposition is "probable" when there is only enough evidence to show that it is likely to be true. <

    I did not ignore anything, my objection was to calling this "certainty" when it clearly isn't. It's one of many examples of Rand distortions of language that result in claim that appear to be stronger or more novel than they actually are.
    "

    It is bad enough that these two sentences are mere characterizations without a shred of content relevant to the idea in question (contextuality of knowledge), but worse is the fact that you have wholly misrepresented the idea you are attacking. No one has called probable propositions "certain." The probable proposition cannot be certain if any evidence necessary to support it is absent from the context of knowledge (all available evidence). That this can exist in no way precludes the condition in which all evidence necessary to support it is or could become available.

    -----------------

    "> Whatever level of knowledge one derives within the context of available evidence cannot be overturned by future evidence. <

    Really? Oh dear, and I thought we overturn our provisional knowledge all the time. Just this week I learned that my knowledge of the fact that multivitamins are good for me has been overturned by new evidence from medical research.
    "

    Not grasping the concept of contextual knowledge, it is to be expected that you would not be inclined to restrain your own judgments to the available evidence. And to the degree that you do not exercise that discipline, your conclusions would be more likely to be overturned by the arrival of new evidence.

    Whatever your experiences in that realm, merely citing them does not counter the fact that while possible propositions may be elevated to probable by future evidence, no later evidence can refute the original evaluation as "possible" if it was based on valid evidence on hand at that time and none of the random assumptions you are so fond of incorporating in your knowledge. Likewise from probable to certain, etc.

    -------------------

    "Well, the supernatural, one could claim, simply has a different type of nature. Ontological claims can't be settled by fiat."

    There is no such thing as "a different type of nature." The nature of an existent is the identity of whatever it is. The only possible alternative would be an identity of whatever it isn't, a nonsensical contradiction in terms.

    To exist is to have a nature, which is to be natural. To not be natural is to not have a nature, which is to not exist.

    Furthermore, what you posit is from the get-go precluded from being considered "possible" until and unless you provide evidence (which, unfortunately for you would have to be natural) of its possibility. I may consider that human life on some distant galaxy is possible only because there is abundant evidence that the conditions and events that could produce it could exist out there. I have no evidence that such is probable, however.

    And to showcase the absurdity of your no-certain-knowledge claim, I am 100% certain that I do not have sufficient evidence to be certain that that such life exists there.

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  35. "> Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification. <

    And square is circle. If that's all she meant, why the different words? What was wrong with existence and consciousness? Oh, but had she used the common words it would have been clear that she wasn't saying anything new...
    "

    You are the one who tried to make a grandstand play out of these, because it looked like an easy target to you. No Objectivist, from Rand on down, has ever give those statements the central role you allege. They do serve a purpose, however: to underscore the nature of each in the same way that the axiom "existence exists" underscores the axiomatic concept of existence, through the necessity of that repetition, since any other word would raise the statement to a level above the most fundamental.

    "Existence is identity" underscores the fact that the entirety of our awareness consists of the identified and identifiable—stimuli processed and processable by our capacity of identification that is "consciousness." I find this principle of underscoring fundamentals a valuable buttress against those like you and your colleagues who are so eager to morph existence into a floating abstraction.

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    "> "Conceptualization" is the volitional, mental act of differentiating and integrating such sense perceptions <

    There is nothing volitional about it, as the process is not under the direct control of consciousness.
    "

    You are a true master of self-refutation! This is determinist, and thus precluded from being offered as "true." In other words, why would you present an argument that conceptualization is not volitional to someone who, by that very argument, would have no control over whether to accept it or not?


    "There is no neurobiological clearcut distinction between sight and the conceptualization of what is being seen."

    Neurobiological science explains the interactions of our nerves with our eyes and brains from a particular aspect. Philosophy explains them from an entirely different aspect. They are not interchangeable.

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    "> When Rand says that the senses are inherently valid, she is merely pointing out that they are one's only object of awareness <

    No kidding. Again where's the novel insight?
    "

    Novel, at least to you, is the implication that, as the given, there are no competing alternative perceptions, and if there are no alternative possibilities, there is no standard for a comparative measure, so the word "imperfect" is inapplicable to sense perceptions. Whether sense perceptions are the same or differ among perceivers is without consequence to the validity of knowledge, which is the not a product of experiencing them per se, but rather of the process of differenting and integrating them without contradiction.

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    "> any claim that sense perception is "imperfect" would itself be necessarily corrupted by the imperfect perceptions to which it is reducible. <

    I have no idea what this means.
    "

    It means you can only assert the imperfection of the senses if you are willing to grant that all your knowledge based on them is therefore unreliable, including that assertion itself.

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  36. The Quine summary link is bad.

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  37. A disclaimer: please forgive my philosophical laymanship in advance.

    How can we have a priori knowledge? As I understand it, a priori knowledge is knowledge of something before experiencing it.

    Take the popular example of arithmetic, doesn't the number "3" refer to "this, this, and this (three baseballs, pretty girls, etc.)? In order to form the concept "3", don't I need to refer to things that exist? I am thinking of a child learning what three is. How do you teach it to them without referring to existing objects?

    To use the logic example, If A then B. Doesn't "A" and "B" refer to existent things? For example, bachelor once broken down refers to existing individual males with certain characteristics, etc.

    A final example, I can refer to a "flying spaghetti monster" but am I not simply just recombining what I know that exists in a unique way to come up with this monster? Can I really think of something that doesn't include something I know to exist like hands, feet, etc. Sure the monster may have three protrusions that look likes coming out of chest but isn't it just still eyes in some fashion?

    What am I missing? I don't see how using concepts proves that we can know things before experience.

    Sorry for being elementary but I need to understand this as it seems that it puts me in one direction as opposed to the other.

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  38. Tyler,

    that's the beauty of logic and math, numbers and letters don't actually have to stand for anything at all (although, of course, they can). So analytic truths are possible, and are a priori, precisely because they are logical truths that do not depend on empirical facts.

    The spaghetti monster is different. The question there is whether the human mind can think of truly novel things, not just recombine old concepts in new ways. I think it clearly can, since we have invented a hell of a lot of novel concepts that our ancestors could not think of. It's also somewhat of a moot point, because if pre-existing ideas are combined in completely novel ways, does the result not count as a novel idea?

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  39. "It's also somewhat of a moot point, because if pre-existing ideas are combined in completely novel ways, does the result not count as a novel idea?"

    Not if you're Ayn Rand. :p

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  40. Tyler,

    You are right. Massimo's statement that "numbers and letters don't actually have to stand for anything" is only valid for infants playing with blocks of wood with pretty designs on each side. At that level, concerns over math and logic are premature. But for an infant to escape his playpen and learn to live as a self-sufficient human being, he must sooner rather than later learn to exercise the capacity of his mind to grasp the concept, unit. Conceptualization, on which our life depends, is a process of unit-economy. It is a process of reducing vast quantities of perceptual information into units of a size and number we can retain in our mind and use—e.g. all supported surfaces for holding objects above the floor that ever were, are, or ever will be, are reduced to a single concept and retained by the symbol for it, "table." Likewise for the concept of "unit" itself to which we assign the symbol "1" and the word "one." Numbers then are symbols for integrations combining many units into a single one we can easily retain or use.

    Any attempt to divorce logical truth from perceivable reality is an attempt to destroy the meaning of the word "truth" itself. A logical truth that cannot be reduced to the information provided by our senses would be useless to the pursuit of life at best, and mind-crippling at worst.

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  41. Michael,

    I think any logician or mathematician would be astonished by the thought that in order to have logic or math one has to connect it to sensible experience. This isn't a question of which way human beings learn math, it's a question of whether mathematical truths depend on empirical facts. They absolutely don't.

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