Ami will like this. Others might too. (political)

a simple question for roxanne.

Suppose i come across a number of people stating they have moral certainty about some issue-- let's say you, the Pope, Warren Jeffs, George Bush, Pat Roberston, Mr. Ahmadinejad, Ayatollah Ali Khameni---

By what procedure do I establish who in fact has the 'objective truth'?

Oblimo said:

As a reader of Hume, then, how do you reconcile objectivism's reliance on empiricism for rationality when Hume demonstrated that empiricism cannot be proven rationally?

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Simple - Hume was wrong.

Hi Obl

OL //As a reader of Hume, then, how do you reconcile objectivism's reliance on empiricism for rationality when Hume demonstrated that empiricism cannot be proven rationally?//

RA Simple - Hume was wrong.

My answer is the "objectivism" does have empirical elements but I would not say there is 'reliance on empiricism.' Objectivism has Aristotelian and Kantian elements as well.

As one proof that this is so, note that the skeptical conclusions of Hume, based on his empirical method, are NOT endorsed by Rand.
Further even the problems of corrigibility that Hume finds would not suit Rand.

Hume's morals as well are based in sympathy and feeling. He was tolerant, flexible, and historically minded. None of this would suit Ms. Rand, who wants black and white, "incribed in the Universe" morality. Hume famously said, "There is no objection based on reason to my preferring the destruction of the whole world to the harming of my own little finger."

Roxanne Appleby said:

Simple - Hume was wrong.

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No, he wasn't. You cannot prove empiricism empirically, just as the scientific method cannot be used to prove the veracity of science. This has been known and accepted by the scientific community for about two centuries now.

But it goes further than empricism, but to logic itself. Ever hear of a mathematician named Gödel? He was one of the smartest human beings in recorded history. (Another was Georg Cantor; where Gödel proved incompleteness, Georg Cantor proved that there are different infinites, each one larger than the next.) Anyway, back in 1931 (back before Rand started writing, so she really have ought to have known this), Gödel proved the Incompleteness Theorems:

Incompleteness Theorems 1 and 2 said:

For any consistent formal theory that proves basic arithmetical truths, it is possible to construct an arithmetical statement that is true but not provable in the theory. That is, any theory capable of expressing elementary arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete.

For any formal theory T including basic arithmetical truths and also certain truths about formal provability, T includes a statement of its own consistency if and only if T is inconsistent.

Click to expand...

In other words, the basic premise of formal objectivism ("reason is man's only absolute") is false and was known to be false by the entire scientific community long before Rand decided to craft a scientific philosophy of morality that was, at its core, unscientific.

So can we please stop talking about her now?

(Pure - Yes, for the sake of brevity, I am cheating a teeny bit and skipping over the questions of formalism.)

Oh, and I should say something positive. Although Rand's formulation of her concerns about the dangers of socialism, religiousity, and leftist politics were bankrupt from the start, her conerns themselves were perfectly legitimate. It just so happens that one of the biggest brains and best authors (in my opinion, of course) on the subject happens to be a female contemporary of Rand's: Hannah Arendt. If you are looking for a political theory of secular, conservative, libertarian principles, Arendt's your woman.

Pure said:

Objectivism has Aristotelian and Kantian elements as well.

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Smarty-pants.

But that still demonstrates Objectivism's internal inconsistency and irrationality, because both Aristotelian and Kantian thought are essentialist.

Most without your urging will cease discussing Ms. Rand at the drop of a hat, but I will not.

Over the years...and there have been quite a few years, I have observed many young, some not so young, brilliant minds disintegrate into intellectual mental masturbation with one 'theory' or another claiming that reason and rationality are not closed systems and thus cannot be used as useful truths in proving or disproving axiomatic or scientific observations.

Chaos Theory, more recently 'String Theory' and a hundred other assaults against reason so that the young minds, some less brilliant than others can smugly retire to the subjective world of relativism.

To reject reason and rationality and science in general because to pronounce 'absolute' truth would be to close the argument when the entire purpose of intellectual pursuit is to leave it open ended so that further discoveries can be included without destroying the integrity of the basic axioms and assumptions.

Even more juvenile and sophomoric is to apply that same lack of reason, rationality and logic to the world of metaphysics as if it were some detached study that did not have concrete conceptual ties to absolute reality; that is the intellectual cowards way to maintain a relativists smug superiority existentially and nihilistically, denying that any knowledge about anything is only transitory and besides that, man is fallable and functions according to the state of his gonads.

So, no, people in general will not stop discussing reason and rationality as a means to comprehend and function in the real world. It is only the intellectual snobs masturbating in the dark, growing their artificial ego's amd libido's without regard to reality. They exist in a dream world akin to religious fanaticism and were it not for tax supported colleges and universities, they would have to actually work for a living.

So Oblimo, et al, take your tarnished theories and put them gently where the sun don't shine, perhaps like mushrooms, it will be a fertile environment.

amicus...

(I always cook with honey and a dash fickleness)

Amicus, that's positively delphic; I have no clue what the Hell you are talking about. Are you seriously disputing the Incompleteness Theorem?

Originally Posted by Roxanne Appleby
Simple - Hume was wrong.

Oblimo said:

No, he wasn't. You cannot prove empiricism empirically, just as the scientific method cannot be used to prove the veracity of science. This has been known and accepted by the scientific community for about two centuries now.

But it goes further than empricism, but to logic itself. Ever hear of a mathematician named Gödel? He was one of the smartest human beings in recorded history. (Another was Georg Cantor; where Gödel proved incompleteness, Georg Cantor proved that there are different infinites, each one larger than the next.) Anyway, back in 1931 (back before Rand started writing, so she really have ought to have known this), Gödel proved the Incompleteness Theorems:

Originally Posted by Incompleteness Theorems 1 and 2
For any consistent formal theory that proves basic arithmetical truths, it is possible to construct an arithmetical statement that is true but not provable in the theory. That is, any theory capable of expressing elementary arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete.

For any formal theory T including basic arithmetical truths and also certain truths about formal provability, T includes a statement of its own consistency if and only if T is inconsistent.

Click to expand...

In other words, the basic premise of formal objectivism ("reason is man's only absolute") is false and was known to be false by the entire scientific community long before Rand decided to craft a scientific philosophy of morality that was, at its core, unscientific.

So can we please stop talking about her now?

(Pure - Yes, for the sake of brevity, I am cheating a teeny bit and skipping over the questions of formalism.)

Click to expand...

I had to check with my philo mentor on by bald assertion above, because this is really not my specialty or interest. Here's what she said:

Originally Posted by Oblimo: "As a reader of Hume, then, how do you reconcile objectivism's reliance on empiricism for rationality when Hume demonstrated that empiricism cannot be proven rationally?"

My mentor: "He probably means induction. Hume is an empiricist and in fact his trouble was being too much so, and not looking into our unique, super-perceptual ability to derive principles. It's true that you don't look at reality and find principles; as an extreme empiricist, Hume was led to conclude that generalized principles are invalid. Seeing something happen 10 times out of 10 all by itself doesn'tyield a principle, and something more is needed, which is not going to be more data or anything from the world. That something is a grasp of the underlying causality. Just because the sun's risen every day all your life doesn't in itself mean it will tomorrow-- but the fact that the Earth rotates and faces the sun it orbits every 24 hours does entail that."

tracinski said,

The real alternative to secular subjectivism is not religious faith, but observation of the natural world--the world that can be seen and understood through reason.

He is essentially putting Rand into his own terms.

As the above posts suggest, however, the issue of 'empiricism' is not an easy one for these Rand folks. At first blush, you'd think they'd be gung ho for it. (Of course Rand can be counted on to knock all philosophers after Aristotle, even those potentially 'friendly' to her position and to science.)

Yet one does NOT see lots of reference to scientific findings in Rand's discussions of human beings. One instead sees 'observations' about some of the big conflicts of good and evil in this century.

Partly, however, she is right to be wary of the empiricists, since they don't provide the rock-ribbed foundation she wants. Neither do the scientists. As Hume pointed out, along with Roxy's mentor, induction cannot be rationally justified-- that's an empiricist position that verges on a kind of skepticism at the core.

If you ask a scientist about induction, he can't say much of anything.
That's what he does. He observes regularities and ASSUMES the uniformity of nature (over time, for example). His predictions flow from the observations and from that assumption, which doesn't seem to bother him. He might even say of his method, including induction, "It works." Yet any philosophy student can see the fallacy of justifying 'the future resembles the past' by saying, 'i've found that it works to assume that the future resembles the past.'

This is an entirely unhappy position--lack of foundations and ultimate justifications-- for a seeker of 'objective truth,' including in the moral sphere. Hume himself felt the yawning chasm of skepticism. The seeming philosophical 'friends' betray them; (so Randists generally say that the the Empiricist philosophers are unsatisfactory).

The upshot is that this seeker of the 'objective truth' is going to have to cross to the other side-- to Kant, roughly; or to Aristotle or maybe to Plato: something about human reason and reasoning REFLECTS the [rational] order of things. That is the axiom. The universe is ordered so that there are patterns and one sees, for example, sun rising on Monday, sun rising on Tuesday, etc. And one see the continuance of that. The human mind *correspondingly* thinks, "If Monday, Tues, Wed, etc. then Friday also." IOW, the human mind makes the continuance the basis of her prediction.

IT's a very nice theory and makes the likes of Rand and her followers happy. They see what's there. Their reasoning corresponds to reality and real processes.

Lurking in the background, however is the Questioner: How does one *know* about this 'correspondence' or 'reflection.' From what standpoint is it observed or known. IOW, wouldn't you have to be a god, to look at the human mind's working principles and the universe's patterns and judge there to be a correspondence, reflection, or similarity?

Roxanne Appleby said:

Hume is an empiricist and in fact his trouble was being too much so, and not looking into our unique, super-perceptual ability to derive principles.

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I am intrigued by this "unqiue super-perceptual ability" your mentor mentions. It does not sound like the sort of generalization an Objectivist would be willing to accept -- since all valid concepts and propositions, according to Objectivism as I understand it, are built solely from perceptions and tautologies of identification derived from them. Hume argues that humans do have a unique super-perceptual ability, and that it is called "habit." In other words, I do not understand how the Objectivist can reconcile science's ability to only provide perdictive models with the definitions of knowledge and reasoning it puts forth, and (more importantly) how formal Objectivism handles the Incompleteness Theorem.

(This next bit is said tongue-in-cheek)

In terms of the Sun rising gag, I am not subborn enough to wish the Sun were to go nova overnight just to prove an Objectivist wrong.

Pure said:

The upshot is that this seeker of the 'objective truth' is going to have to cross to the other side-- to Kant, roughly; or to Aristotle or maybe to Plato: something about human reason and reasoning REFLECTS the [rational] order of things. That is the axiom. The universe is ordered so that there are patterns and one sees, for example, sun rising on Monday, sun rising on Tuesday, etc. And one see the continuance of that. The human mind *correspondingly* thinks, "If Monday, Tues, Wed, etc. then Friday also." IOW, the human mind makes the continuance the basis of her prediction.

IT's a very nice theory and makes the likes of Rand and her followers happy. They see what's there. Their reasoning corresponds to reality and real processes.

Lurking in the background, however is the Questioner: How does one *know* about this 'correspondence' or 'reflection.' From what standpoint is it observed or known. IOW, wouldn't you have to be a god, to look at the human mind's working principles and the universe's patterns and judge there to be a correspondence, reflection, or similarity?

Click to expand...

Damn, you're good at this.

Objectivism seems to hold the validity of perception as axiomatic, which puts the Objectivist on the horns of a dilemma: either the validity of perception is axiomatic a priori and Objectivism falls to its own fallacy of the stolen concept, or the validity of perception is axiomatic tautologically in which case Objectivism is formally inconsistent because it contains a truth-statement of its own consistency (edit: I should stress again that this does not apply to Objectivist political or ethical theory, only the formal logical system Rand attempted to construct in support of them).

(Note: I keep writing "Objectivism" with a capital "O" because I am specially talking about the objectivist theories presented in Rand's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Other "objectivist" thinkers, like, say, Gödel, do not encounter the same difficulties.)

"Unique, super-perceptual ability." ROFLMAO.

Roxanne's mentor on Hume: //not looking into our unique, super-perceptual ability to derive principles.//

This is the problem of the 'synthetic a priori' that Kant raised. Can we rigorously derive knowledge from limited input, such knowledge going beyond that input.. To use a famous example, how do we know that all extended things are colored? Is it from millions of observations? If so could the next instance DISprove the proposition. How about a ghostly entity whose location and contours were reasonably clear but which is utterly transparent--having no color of its own.


How do we 'abduce' a principle from data? or come up with a hypothesis? If you've ever read about Kepler, he was trying to account for planetary data that disproved the 'circular orbit' theory. He experimented with ovals etc., and eventually hit upon ellipses, which are a pretty good approximation.

One wants to say this is an 'objective' finding. The orbits really are ellipses. Kepler, so to say, discovered what's there.

Yet if anyone has experimented fitting curves (or lines) to points on a graph, there are elements of *construction* and *arbitrariness* in these exercizes. We try for 'best fit' among several constructions.

It's a rational process, but not exactly 'rigorous reasoning' only. It is not easy, and maybe impossible to write a computer program that gives the 'best' curve or line for some data. A program has to make an assumption, e.g. we want the *line* which best fits. Look at the debate over global warming, and whether certain points on a graph reflect an upward trend or not.

Here is a simple problem: A sequence of numbers begins 1,2,3,4.
What are the next two? To simplify with two choices, are the next numbers 5 and 6? or 6 and 11?
What kind of rational justification is there for one answer over the other?

Here is a problem from biology: How is it that animals [including us] so often *guess* correctly? Is the universe somehow 'friendly' to guesses? (There is something 'out there' and objective which supports--reflects the accuracy of-- many guesses?)

Unfortunately Ayn Rand knows where she wants to go--towards man as conqueror and lord of the universe because of productive energy and reason. So clearly such a man must be an 'objective knower'; must see things as they are. However she was not knowledgeable of the basics of philsophy of science; indeed she wasn't versed in any science. She wasn't able, as a layperson, simply to leapfrog over, dissolve, or solve some of the classic problems about justifying scientific method. Rhetoric--"The other folks are collectivists who want to enslave man's mind, rob him of his powers" --just doesn't cut it.

I am passing substantive responses on the Hume thing to my mentor, who has intermittent access, many other intellectual committments, and for complex reasons is unable to visit this site. I will post mentor's responses, if any are received.

Same deal on the Demo thread. I'm not diving in myself because I just can't afford the time suck it would certainly turn into, in a specific realm that is not my primary interest, with little or nothing to show at the end for all the time spent.