humanities.philosophy.objectivism

Malrassic Park wrote:

[...]

>Classifying, or class-formation, is part of Rand's theory and it
>precedes concept-formation.

She says in the very first sentence of ITOE that conciousness is a
process of differentiating and integrating, i.e. classifying
existents. On page 54 or thereabouts, she describes concepts as a
cognitive method of classification. And in Chapter 7, she describes
concepts and language as a method for classifying existents. So yes,
classifying existents by regarding them as units is part of Rand's
theory.

>What was the result of Rand merely taking classification for granted
>and not looking further into the means by which the mind classifies
>things? She left the door open for someone like me to critique her
>very method by which she thought to form concepts.

But she merely didn't take classification for granted. She spent the
first four chapters descriging how the mind classifies existents as
part of concept-formation.

>First of all, notice that Rand agrees with me on what she calls the
>criterion of classification: "one may classify things according to
>their shape or color or weight or size or atomic structure."

In other words, according to characteristics that exist in reality.
This is why concept-formation (properly performed) is objective, not
subjective. The mind plays a role in producing concepts, but their
content is dictated by reality.

>Here's the point that Rand amazingly overlooked: we do not simply
>classify things by means of their shape or color.

Rand doesn't deny this. She covers this point in Chapter 3.

>We must first abstract these attributes, these critieria, into properties,
>in order
>to grant them meaning for the class of existents. A property, as a
>class concept, is an attribute that holds true for every entity in the
>class. An example of such a property, like the criterion of color she
>mentioned in the quote, would be "redness."

Right. And we do this by means of measurement-omission. We observe
that two or more units possess the same distinguishing
characteristics, but in different measure or degree. So, we omit the
measurements and integrate the units possessing these characteristics
into a concept.

Note again that in this process our minds play a part, but reality
also plays a part. We can do this only becuase the units being
conceptualized ARE the same in a certain respect (their distinguishing
characteristics). But the process itself is something we do
ourselves. It is a volitional, methodical way of organizing
perceptual material into concepts, propositions, etc.

>Conceptualization is a method of classification. A concept is a class
>of units (or alternately, members of a class of existents) defined
>according to those properties regarded essential to forming the
>concept.

To be precise, a concept is a mental integration of units, but yes.
Concepts (and language) are human methods for classifying the material
that they see, hear, taste, touch, or smell.

[...]

>>Not so. There simply needs to be a single existent (although more
>>than one will do nicely as well).

>Then rather than saying "regarded," Rand should have said "pretended."

The correct concept here is "regarded." "Pretended" implies that you
know that there is only one such existent, but disregard this fact.
"Regarded" means that there may be more than one (which actually is
the case with the vast majority of existents).

>What's interesting is that every unit you formed in your explanation
>is already a concept and so you can take it for granted. The example
>of the pink elephant, however, is more revealing, in that even if one
>wanted to form a concept of the only pink elephant in the world, it
>would not be necessary to "regard" it as a group of two or more pink
>elephants, but only as a subset of the class "animal," a subset (or
>class) containing only one member identifiable according to those
>properties which render it unique.

It would be necessary to regard it as a member of a group of two more
units if (1) you want to distinguish this pink elephant from other
animals and (2) you want to refer to (or classify) any other similar
creatures you might or might not come across in the future as a pink
elephant. Nature doesn't automatically tell you when there is only
one of a particular type of thing in the entire universe.

[...]

>I can't identify with the rest of the Rand statement quoted there
>because she sloppily contradicts herself: units do not exist, what
>exists are things, but units are things...

Whoa, nellie! She didn't say "units do not exist." She said that
units do not exist QUA UNITS. The difference is huge. If humans
ceased to exist, the remaining existents would still exist. The human
perspective that regards them as units (as opposed to merely
individual concretes) would be gone.

[...]

>And besides, to employ my own saying against me, you're preaching to
>the converted regarding the role of both mind and matter in producing
>these thoughts, because I have said this already many times.

In other words, your complaint was that she wasn't sufficiently
Objectivist enough, but a Aristotelian lamb in Objectivist sheep's
clothing. But your complaint is still wrong. Again, I refer you to
pages 52-54, where she differentiates her approach from Plato,
Aristotle (as she understood him), and the modern nominalists. The
summation on page 54 is how she actually chose the name "Objectivism."
That summation is important. Conceptual knowledge is not merely
revealed to you. You must choose to work for it and then do the work
yourself. Nor do you make the whole thing up as you go along. To the
contrary, you form and use concepts in accordance with the facts of
reality. Your mind plays an essential role and reality plays an
esential rule. Both are indispensible to the process.

>And I
>have never said that concepts of qualities such as "rationality" are
>given purely by the mind. I am saying that qualities are not to be
>confused with attributes which are existents.

But qualities ARE existents. To be more precise, qualities are types
(or subdivisions) of attributes.

[...]

>Another problem is the fact that Rand never bothered to explain how
>the concepts "manness" or "redness" are formed.

Did you read the first two chapters of ITOE? If you missed it, you
better read it again. The explanation there is crystal clear.

>As for the rest of that paragraph, I don't think you'll ever except
>the idea that the color 'red' doesn't exist externally to the mind, it
>is a product of perception acting upon light-waves.

You are correct: I would not accept this idea because it is simply
wrong. The object has a certain attribute or quality that we humans
call "redness." We call it that because when we perceive it, we
perceive it as being red, i.e. as being within the red range of color.
But that quality would exist in the object regardless of whether we
humans would be around to perceive it as red (or if everyone somehow
became color-blind).

>Otherwise, we
>would not need rods and cones in the eye. They only sense that which
>the brain interprets as color. But this is not known directly, it is a
>scientific, conceptual discovery.

Sure. That's a different point, and one that I think Rand herself
made somewhere in ITOE.

[...]

>Rand stated in ITOE that a concept is a universal or an abstraction.
>However, she did not state what knowledge is, or she would tend to
>conflate that term with "concept."

Yes she did. She defined knowledge as "a mental grasp of a fact of
reality, reached either by perceptual observation or by a process of
reason based on perceptual observation." See page 35.

But I would agree that ITOE does not fully explore what this
definition actually means. The book is her theory of how we can
validly hold knowledge in conceptual fom. Such a theory is an
essential element of any valid theory of knowledge, but not yet
sufficient. This is because on the conceputal level, human knowledge
is actually in the form of true propositions (both explicit and
implicit). Thus, you need to know how to show that a proposition
corresponds to the actual facts of reality. You need logic as well
(not to mention grammar, which is about how properly to organize words
into sentences). And even more fundamentally, you need to have the
right theory of truth. Unmitigated disasters result when you accept
the wrong theory (i.e. the coherence theory, as opposed to the
correspondence theory).

>Pages 5 and 6 only take knowledge for granted, and then delve into the
>basis for concept-formation. Where does the implicit concept come
>from? Reality? Rand does not tell us. What does it mean for the
>concept of an existent to be "implicit in every percept"? Blank-out

She does explain all this. Perhaps not to your satisfaction, but I'm
fine with it based on my own introspection of how I do it as well as
observing the same process in infants.

Remember that the concept is not the word symbolizing the concept. We
form concepts long before we learn to speak. The ability to form
concepts is a natural human capacity. Even Kantians can do it. :) We
begin doing it within the first few months of being on the planet.
Later on, we learn how to organize these implicit concepts into words
that symbolize or denote these concepts, i.e. we eventually learn how
to speak and think in a particular language. The tricky part is how
to do it correctly and, later, how to organize them into true
propositions about reality. But if you don't even have the implicit
concepts to begin with, you will never learn language.

>The latter question is important, because it means that *one can have
>conceptual knowledge before any method of forming concepts has been
>employed.*

Of course you can. You just don't know yet how to express it. That's
where language comes in. Again, learning a language is simply
learning a visual-auditory code that denotes the concepts that you
have already formed implicitly.

[...]

>Here is the difference between "property" and "attribute." An
>attribute is any quality of an object which you can pick out of
>perception. A property, on the other hand, is any quality of an object
>which you can pick out of perception *and then use for the purpose of
>forming a class.*

As far as I can tell, this is a distinction without a difference.

>And which I quoted already, but I could add that I am aware of a
>certain conflict in the Objectivist realm of thinking concerning what
>exactly Rand meant by "existing relationships." Consider this. You
>must first methodologically *regard* entities as being in relationship
>to one another before you can form them into units, and so this
>relating is also methodological, the relationship held in regard is
>not ontological.

Not purely ontological, but that's different. Reality plays a crucial
role here. You don't just make up the distinguishing characteristics
for purposes of regarding existents as units. These distinguishing
characteristics exist in all of the units being conceptualized, albeit
in different measure or degree. This is a fact about the units
themselves and would continue to exist even if human beings were no
longer around to regard them as units.

>Do you see where I'm coming from with this? Let's take for example
>the infant from page 5 whose sensory experience is chaotic. It is
>chaotic in the sense that the infant has yet no awareness of
>relationships, and so this experience is entirely subjective, it
>relates to nothing outside of a rudimentary sense of "something"
>which is in its consciousness, there is no distinction being made
>between internal and external. Relationships form in the mind:
>primarily the relationship between self and object, and secondarily,
>the relationships which hold between objects. And it is only upon
>this mental basis that the mental idea of a unit can be formed.

Relationships between or among existents are grasped, not formed or
invented in the mind. For example, the sun would be larger and have a
greater mass than the earth even if ther was no one around to grasp
these relationships between the two.

[...]