Dr. Richard Paul's "Logic as Theory of Validation"


CSpeciale

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Dr. Richard Paul is the Director of Research and Professional Development at the Center for Critical Thinking and Chair of the National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking. On the main website for the center, http://www.criticalthinking.org/ he offers a comprehensive library of topics, lessons and courses on how to think critically and how to teach students how to think critically. The website has impressed me with its objective of defining critical thinking as an intellectual means of integrating information and thinking about one's own thinking process. Additionally, one of the biggest speakers at the Center, Linda Elder, has delivered a short paper on how horrible the Common Core system is.

I was interested in how well Dr. Paul's methodology of defining and developing a conceptual level of critical thinking matches up with Ayn Rand's theory of concept-formation and her general philosophy Objectivism. I found Dr. Paul's dissertation: "Logic as Theory of Validation: An Essay in Philosophical Logic." It is extraordinarily impressive. While it does not directly address the analytic-synthetic dichotomy of logic that Peikoff wrote about in ITOE, he holds the Aristotelian position that there is no conflict between matter and form, and that individual substances are made up of both (hylomorphism). He criticizes many logicians in history for failing to address crucial questions that are necessary to defining a method of logic, and seeks to answer them himself, taking many examples from Lionel Ruby's textbook Logic: An Introduction.

From my own evaluation, his contribution to logic is gold. If anyone here is interested, I'd like to hear your opinion on it.

-Chris Speciale

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Well, they do tout Ralph Nader for being the Bertrand Russell Scholar of the Moment at their 34th annual conference. That is a tough sell among Objectivists. Not to dismiss it all without fair consideration, though, I did look for Richard Paul's books in the UT Library and did not find one, but did find over 90 books on critical thinking. Most were in Philosophy (B and BF) but others in the Ps for literary criticism and the RTs for clinical practice. If you want to make a special case for these, that is fine, but to what do you compare them, and by what standard? (I did download his doctoral dissertation for reading later. I am always interested in new ideas -- even from Ralph Nader...)

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Christopher, best wishes with your writing and with the other aim too. Thank you for bringing the 1968 dissertation* of Richard Paul to our attention.

The second thesis of Dr. Paul’s dissertation is “that the concept of validation-conditions for assertions and settlement-conditions for questions will do as a means of accounting for the subject matter of logic.” I shall be interested to learn his theory. As you likely know, the concept of validity is an essential concept in elementary logic* and on into higher levels of logic.* Then too, there is a related concept of validation in Objectivist epistemology. This is discussed especially in Peikoff’s Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (see index for Proof); in Branden’s Basic Principles of Objectivism lectures, which are transcribed in The Vision of Ayn Rand (chaps. 3, 4); and in Binswanger’s How We Know (chap. 8). I should like to compare Paul’s concept of validation-conditions for assertions with the Objectivist concept of validation.

Between False, Invalid, and Meaningless
. . .
Validity within propositional and predicate logic is generally taken to mean: that merit of argument in which the conclusion cannot be false if the premises are true.* We speak also of validity in property titles and in contracts. Kant had much work for a sense of validity in epistemology joining those two senses. He announces in the Preface to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason that a central component of that work “refers to the objects of pure understanding and is intended to make comprehensible the objective validity of understanding’s a priori concepts” (xvi; see Pippin 1982, 154–58).

That general epistemological sense of objective validity in concepts is useful in application to concepts and propositions in philosophical systems besides Kant’s. In his mature, pragmatic philosophy, Dewey writes: “According to experimental inquiry, the validity of the object of thought depends upon the consequences of the operations which define the object of thought” (1929, 103). Speaking of experiment, Dewey refers to the process “by which the conclusion is reached that such and such a judgment of an object is valid” (ibid., 230). Logical positivist Ayer writes: “In saying that we propose to show ‘how propositions are validated’, we do not of course mean to suggest that all propositions are validated in the same way. On the contrary we lay stress on the fact that the criterion by which we determine the validity of an a priori or analytic proposition is not sufficient to determine the validity of an empirical or synthetic proposition. For it is characteristic of empirical propositions that their validity is not purely formal” (Ayer 1952, 90). For Ayer one can validate a proposition either by finding it to be analytic or by finding it to be empirically verified.

In Rand’s philosophy, Peikoff takes validation to be “any process of establishing an idea’s relationship to reality, whether deductive reasoning, inductive reasoning, or perceptual self-evidence” (1991, 8).* As Peikoff had expressed it in his 1976 lecture series The Philosophy of Objectivism,validation, in the broad sense includes any process of relating mental contents to the facts of reality. Direct perception . . . is one such process. Proof designates another type of validation. Proof is the process of deriving a conclusion logically from antecedent knowledge” (see further, Peikoff 1991, 118–20, 137–38).
. . .

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  • 3 weeks later...

to what do you compare them, and by what standard?

Well, I was hoping I could compare it and standardize it to Ayn Rand's concept of objectivity as volitional adherence to reality by a method of logic, and by her objective logic and critical thinking ... except that I was too hasty in sharing the essay to see that this was never fully spelled-out by Ayn Rand or by Peikoff; neither went into great depth in discussion on this subject... and I've only recently become intrigued by it.

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