Scientific Certainty?

[Davy]

As Bob Kolker has well explained, there isn't a reduction of the first-named theories to the second. For instance, in the case of Einstein's theory of gravitation versus Newton's, although the mathematical results are the same within narrow boundary conditions, the theories can't both be right. Einstein's theory disagrees with Newton's in major ways. It isn't an extension of Newton's.

Well, that's just nit-picking as far as I'm concerned:

As well as obeying local energy-momentum conservation, the EFE reduce to Newton's law of gravitation where the gravitational field is weak and velocities are much less than the speed of light.^[3]

http://en.wikipedia....field_equations

Insofar as the equations ARE the theory (which, strangely enough, is what Ba'al was maintaining in a recent related thread, but now he seems to have changed his mind. ;-) ), then one theory does indeed reduce to the other.

Why can't they both be right? one theory is valid given certain assumptions, the other isn't.

If you think of scientific theories as mathematical models, then the question arises as to the limitations of the scope of the model - what situations is the model applicable to?

Newton made his measurements without advanced equipment, so he couldn't measure properties of particles travelling at speeds close to the speed of light. Likewise, he did not measure the movements of molecules and other small particles, but macro particles only. It's hardly surprising, then, that his model does not extrapolate well into these domains, even though it's quite sufficient for ordinary life physics.

But there's no law that says a complex model can't incorporate more than one theory. The theories aren't contradictory, because they apply to different domains.

[Xray]

What do you think is the reason for the minuscule number [of Objectvists]?

That’s a question that would require a lengthy essay to answer, but I would say this goes a long way toward explaining it. . .

. . .The coda for the Objectivist mass movement would be played when Rand demanded that her followers denounce her second-in-command for reasons she refused to divulge. Ironically, followers of a creed of selfishness were asked to sacrifice their own judgment in favor of blind faith in the judgment of one woman. Many did.

Intellectual Morons by Daniel J. Flynn (p. 198)

Flynn's argumentation is quite convincing.

It looks like the Objectivist mass movement never recovered from the severe blow it suffered due to the split between Rand and N. Branden; not because there was a parting of their intellectual ways, but because of the real reason that led to the split. A reason that Rand wanted to conceal from the public.

But as the truth emerged, many Objectivists probably felt betrayed that Rand had "faked reality" to them, and in doing so, had gone against something she had so fervently advocated in her philosophy: never to fake reality.

[BaalChatzaf]

Insofar as the equations ARE the theory (which, strangely enough, is what Ba'al was maintaining in a recent related thread, but now he seems to have changed his mind. ;-) ), then one theory does indeed reduce to the other.

There are two ways a looking at a theory. If one looks at just the numbers ground out by the theory, one could say that the older theory is close and the newer theory only provides a minor adjustment to account for later facts, a mere tweak or numerical adjustment. Then there is the view of the theory gotten by "looking under the hood". The nuts and bolts of the Theory of General Relativity are completely at odds with Newton's theory. The understanding of space and time (actually space-time) is totally different. In this last sense, one can say the equations are the theory.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Philip Coates]

"[Rand] demanded that her followers denounce her second-in-command for reasons she refused to divulge" - D. Flynn. [Post 148]

Hang on a minute:

I don't have her essay in front of me, but didn't she offer reasons that would seem plausible to readers - pattern of deception, financial irregularities, loss of committment to Oism? Is my recollection incorrect?

And did she demand everyone break with him, or was that Peikoff regarding those who bought NB's tapes not being admitted in his courses?

[Peter]

Ellen mentioned George Soros. George Soros is one of the traitors funding the Occupy Wall Street Movement. Fox is reporting that OWS is going to disrupt the Iowa Caucuses. Local conservative talk shows are saying Obama has no intention of running and losing in 2012. Because of the “emergency” caused by his “Community Activists” the election will be “postponed.” Camps are being set up on nearly deserted Army Bases in New York, Georgia and elsewhere, to handle the dissidents.

Peter

[BaalChatzaf]

Ellen mentioned George Soros. George Soros is one of the traitors funding the Occupy Wall Street Movement. Fox is reporting that OWS is going to disrupt the Iowa Caucuses. Local conservative talk shows are saying Obama has no intention of running and losing in 2012. Because of the “emergency” caused by his “Community Activists” the election will be “postponed.” Camps are being set up on nearly deserted Army Bases in New York, Georgia and elsewhere, to handle the dissidents.

Peter

Keep your eye peeled for the Black Helicopters.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Xray]

Bob K., I think your answer about the tree frog (post #92) illustrates why the scientific world actually does have something to learn from (the good stuff in) Rand's theory of concepts. What is a tree frog? What is a human being? Don't you have some definitive characteristics whereby you'd assign a creature to one versus the other category? You definitively say that Einstein's and Newton's theories are different theories. Yet you allow that you might be wrong that you aren't a tree frog. On what basis do you think you could be wrong?

I think Bob made it quite clear in his post that his statement: "If it turns out that I'm wrong, I will change my belief" is meant to be interpreted as pure rhetorical irony, given the context.

For Rand's theory of concepts is about something fairly simple: it is about categorizing. Categories are formed via grouping by similarities. Bob as a human being can therefore be 100 per cent certain not to fit into the category 'tree frog', since he does not share the similarites by which these entities are grouped together.

I believe with all my heart that I am not a tree frog. I tried hopping and I failed and I am unable to croak.

If it turns out that I am wrong, I will change my belief.

Is that definite enough for you?

Ba'a' Chatzaf

[BaalChatzaf]

Well, that's just nit-picking as far as I'm concerned:

Newton was wrong about time and space. Time is not absolute and space is not euclidean. That is not a nit. Einstein's view of space-time is totally in line with electrodynamics which is Lorentz Invariant. Without Einstein's more correct view and space and time quantum electrodynamics could not have been formulated. Einstein produced a revolution, not a picked nit.

Keep that in mind the next time you use a GPS device. Or a computer.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Peter]

Ba'al Chatzaf wrote:

Keep your eye peeled for the Black Helicopters.

end quote

Oh, I will Ba’al. Just remember the evidence, the facts, and science united with your reason is your correct path as you yourself have said. A politician’s political philosophy past words, associates, and current actions can predict a possible future. Obama thinks the Constitution needs a re-write to address a redistribution of wealth. From each according to his abilities - to each according to how I dole it out could be his motto.

I am not a conspiracy buff but I think wariness and vigilance is necessary, especially now.

Semper cogitans fidele,

Peter Taylor

[Peter]

Paleontologist Jack Horner has always been a bit of an iconoclast. In the 1970s, Horner, the curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Mont., and his friend Bob Makela discovered a Maiasaura nesting site, painting the first picture of dinosaurs as doting moms and dads. He's also been at the forefront of research suggesting that dinosaurs were fast growing and warm-blooded.

But Horner's newest idea takes iconoclasm to a new level. He wants, in short, to hatch a dinosaur.

Or something very much like one, at least. Horner, who served as a technical advisor for the "Jurassic Park" movies, has no illusions that the technique in that movie — extracting dino DNA from mosquitoes in amber — would work. DNA degrades too quickly, for one thing.

Dinosaur DNA has proved impossible to extract from actual dinosaur bones, never mind blood-sucking insects.

"If you actually had a piece of amber and it had an insect in it, and you drilled into it, and you got something out of that insect and you cloned it, and you did it over and over and over again, you'd have a room full of mosquitoes," Horner said in a February 2011 TED Talk in Long Beach, Calif. TED, or Technology, Entertainment and Design, is a nonprofit focusing on "ideas worth spreading."

So Horner has another idea: Use the living dinosaurs among usto recreate creatures dead for millions of years. Anyone who's seen "Jurassic Park" knows that birds are dinosaurs, part of the evolutionary line containing those toothy Velociraptors. What's less known is that organisms carry their evolutionary history with them. Human embryos, for example, have temporary tails, which are absorbed by the body during development. Rarely, babies are born with vestigial tails, the result of scrambled genetic processes that prevent the tail from getting re-absorbed. These evolutionary remnants are called atavisms.

Enough atavisms have been discovered in birds to make the idea of "reverse-engineering" a dinosaur out of, say, a chicken possible, Horner says. You wouldn't be adding anything to the bird to make it more dinosaurlike; all the ingredients are in its DNA. Horner's goal is to figure out how to wake up those ingredients.

LiveScience talked with Horner about his "chickenosaurus" plan and what sort of dinosaur he'd like to keep as a pet.

LiveScience: What was the genesis of this chickenosaurus idea?

Horner: Knowing that birds descended from dinosaurs and knowing the changes that occur from dinosaurs to birds, we know that the changes that did occur occurred because of genetics.

A friend of mine, Hans Larsson at McGill University, was studying some of these changes and looking into how it was that dinosaurs lost their tails in the transformation from dinosaurs to birds. They also transformed their arms from a hand and an arm to a wing. I got to thinking, if he discovered the genes that were responsible for both of those transformations, we could just simply reverse evolutionand reactivate the tail, and possibly make a hand back out of the wing.

And then what we would have by doing those two things, you'd actually take a bird and turn it into an animal that looked a lot like one of the meat-eating dinosaurs. It seemed like a good idea.

LiveScience: What kind of animal would chickenosaurus be?

Horner: It's still a chicken. It's a modified chicken. You'd really have to mess with the DNA to make it something different.

The most important thing is that you cannot activate an ancestral characteristic unless the animal has ancestors. So if we can do this, it definitely shows that evolution works.

LiveScience: You've mentioned in the past that you see this dino-chicken as a teaching tool to help people understand evolution. Do you see that working?

Horner: Of course. You bet. There are people who are misinformed, and there are people who are uninformed [about the validity of evolution]. If people are uninformed, this will probably get through to them. If they've been misinformed and don't mind being misinformed, then they probably will continue to be misinformed.

LiveScience: Either way, it'd be a pretty awesome thing to take into a classroom.

Horner: Yes, it would. Exactly.

LiveScience: Starting with a chicken, how close could we really get to what a dinosaur looked like?

Horner: We're working with an animal that has all the right stuff. It's more about subtle changes, adding a tail or fixing a hand or possibly adding teeth, what we would think of as being relatively simple changes rather than messing with physiology or something like that.

A bird is really a dinosaur, so we're pretty sure that the breathing apparatus of a bird evolved from the breathing apparatus of a dinosaur, and is therefore completely different than a mammal. The physiology of a bird is evolved from a dinosaur and not from a mammal, so it's not like we're trying to take a mammal and turn it into a dinosaur.

LiveScience: Would chickenosaurus teach us anything about dinosaurs we can't learn from fossils?

Horner: It's not really about understanding dinosaurs at all. Once we learn what certain genes do and how to turn them on and turn them off, then we have great potential of solving some medical mysteries. There are a lot of ways to think about this, but it's not really about dinosaurs other than solving Hans Larsson's problem of figuring out how birds lost their tails.

LiveScience: What do you see as the biggest challenge of making chickenosaurus happen?

Horner: The biggest challenge, first off, is to find the genes. We know that in the development of a tail, there are a variety of things that have to happen, so there are a couple of ways to possibly go about this.

One, as we know, when a chicken embryo is developing in the egg, just like basically all animals, the embryo actually for a time has a tail and then the trail re-absorbs. So if we could find the gene that re-absorbs the tail and not allow that gene to turn on then we could potentially hatch a chicken with a tail.

The other method would be simply to go in and discover what Hox genes [the genes that determine the structure of an organism] might be responsible for actually adding tail vertebrae, and then to see if we could add some, either by manipulating the Hox genes or by using temperature. There have been some experiments done showing that adding heat will add a vertebra here or there.

LiveScience: Where are you in this process now?

Horner: Right now, mostly I'm looking for a postdoctoral researcher. An adventurous postdoc who knows a lot about developmental biology and a little bit about birds and has done some work about chickens to work in our lab here in Bozeman.

Me, I just go through the literature, looking for anything that might give me a clue as to what genes might be responsible for tail absorption or tail growth or something that might help me with hands.

LiveScience: The comparisons to "Jurassic Park" are easy to make, but have you ever seen the movie "The Birds?" Do we really want chickens with extra teeth and claws running around?

Horner: You can't really compare it to either movie. First off, you can go out in the Serengeti and there are all kinds of animals that will eat you, but if you're driving around in your Jeep, you're just fine. The lions and cheetahs and leopards are not going to try to get into your Jeep when there are plenty of plant-eaters out there to eat that aren't inside of a metal cage.

That's the funny thing about "Jurassic Park," right? All these dinosaurs want to eat people no matter how hard they are to get.

So we don't have to worry about "Jurassic Park," because that's just fiction. Animals don't act that way. They're not vengeful. And birds aren't vengeful either.

LiveScience: So if you could bring a dinosaur back — the real thing, not a modified chicken— what species would you choose?

Horner: A little one. A little plant-eater.

LiveScience: No T. rex for you?

Horner: Would you make something that would turn around and eat you? Sixth-graders would do that, but I'd just as soon make something that wouldn't eat me. And you could have it as a pet without worrying about it eating the rest of your pets.

[Davy]

Well, that's just nit-picking as far as I'm concerned:

Newton was wrong about time and space. Time is not absolute and space is not euclidean. That is not a nit. Einstein's view of space-time is totally in line with electrodynamics which is Lorentz Invariant. Without Einstein's more correct view and space and time quantum electrodynamics could not have been formulated. Einstein produced a revolution, not a picked nit.

Keep that in mind the next time you use a GPS device. Or a computer.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Oh boy, whatever...

Einstein didn't work in a vacuum, his ideas were built on those of Newton and others such as Maxwell, whose theories were in turn built on those who came before them. The whole discussion of who was 'right' and 'wrong' is pointless and absurd, and quite insulting to these great men.

[Dennis Hardin]

What do you think is the reason for the minuscule number [of Objectvists]?

That’s a question that would require a lengthy essay to answer, but I would say this goes a long way toward explaining it. . .

. . .The coda for the Objectivist mass movement would be played when Rand demanded that her followers denounce her second-in-command for reasons she refused to divulge. Ironically, followers of a creed of selfishness were asked to sacrifice their own judgment in favor of blind faith in the judgment of one woman. Many did.

Intellectual Morons by Daniel J. Flynn (p. 198)

Flynn's argumentation is quite convincing.

It looks like the Objectivist mass movement never recovered from the severe blow it suffered due to the split between Rand and N.Branden; not because there was a parting of their intellectual ways, but because of the real reason that led to the split. A reason that Rand wanted to conceal from the public.

But as the truth emerged, many Objectivists probably felt betrayed that Rand had "faked reality" to them, and in doing so, had gone against something she had so fervently advocated in her philosophy: never to fake reality.

I think you stated it very well. "To Whom It May Concern" may have been the worst essay Rand ever wrote. She offered multiple reasons for condeming Branden, but nothing she said explained how he could suddenly go from being her equal to being so utterly contemptible. She had observed a disturbing intellectual decline in him for the past three years and he had given her a written statement that was very "irrational" two months prior, yet her readers were never given a clue that her opinion of him had changed? Then a single act of deception--a "breach of morality"--required that he be banished forever?

That's it? That's the final word on the matter? "Deception" about his private life could mean anything. Maybe he wanted to conceal from her the fact that he had friends who were Christian because he thought she might disapprove. How were we to know what his "ugly, irrational actions" were? Why didn't she spell out what he was doing that was so disgusting?

A month or so later, when NB stated in his response that romantic rejection was the topic of that 'written statement' she had mentioned, her refusal to clarify the full nature of his "moral breach" became an even more glaring concern. The essays written by NB and Barbara "In Answer to Ayn Rand" rang true in a way that Rand's did not. That was the final nail in the coffin of the Objectivist movement, I think. It started to look very much as though Ayn Rand was equally guilty of deceiving her readers. And, of course, years later, our worst fears were realized.

At the end of Atlas Shrugged, in the section titled "About the Author," Ayn Rand says:

"My personal life has been a postscript to my novels. It consists of the sentence: And I mean it."

In the years following "To Whom It May Concern," nobody believed it. And since then, fewer and fewer people have taken the details of her philosophy seriously.

[Dennis Hardin]

"[Rand] demanded that her followers denounce her second-in-command for reasons she refused to divulge" - D. Flynn. [Post 148]

Hang on a minute:

I don't have her essay in front of me, but didn't she offer reasons that would seem plausible to readers - pattern of deception, financial irregularities, loss of committment to Oism? Is my recollection incorrect?

Of course,she offered reasons, but she refused to divulge the nature of Branden's "ugly, irrational behavior" about which he had deceived her--i.e., his love affair with a much younger woman. She also refused to divulge why this was such a big deal to her--i.e., the fact that he was rejecting her and that she wanted him for herself. A lot of people think that was kind of relevant.

And did she demand everyone break with him, or was that Peikoff regarding those who bought NB's tapes not being admitted in his courses?

Following her essay in The Objectivist ("To Whom It May Concern"), several former NBI lecturers (Peikoff, Greenspan, Blumenthal, Sures) signed a statement under the heading: "For The Record." The statement said that they "condemned and repudiated" the Brandens "irrevocably" and "terminated all association with them."

Do you suppose Ayn Rand had anything to do with that?

[anthony]

Following her essay in The Objectivist ("To Whom It May Concern"), several former NBI lecturers (Peikoff, Greenspan, Blumenthal, Sures) signed a statement under the heading: "For The Record." The statement said that they "condemned and repudiated" the Brandens "irrevocably" and "terminated all association with them." Do you suppose Ayn Rand had anything to do with that?

Dennis,

That's a rhetorical and ironic question, right? AR put pressure on LP et al, I assume.

Also, as far as I know, Barbara was blameless in the matter. It seems shameful that she was lumped together as "the Brandens."

For once and all, I'd like to settle whether Nathaniel at all 'used', or deceived Rand (apart from the obvious - his affair).

Every so often I still read condemnatory reports about him, usually by young-ish Objectivists. Though less often now, which is interesting.

The most easily refutable one is that NB - who aided her in her formulation of the philosophy, was energetic in its dissemination, and very quickly went on to his own career - cynically rode on her coat-tails for his own advancement.

But I'd like to put to rest my last, lingering doubts about his so-called 'betrayal' of her.

The conservativist moralizing involved was, and is, distasteful, in the least.

Older, and wiser, we know that when it comes to a man and a woman, we can all be vulnerable and human - no matter our intellects.

Is it actually as simple as it seems: that Rand attempted a radical experiment, which blew up on her (as it had to, in reality) - and she couldn't handle the fall-out?

Tony

[BaalChatzaf]

Well, that's just nit-picking as far as I'm concerned:

Newton was wrong about time and space. Time is not absolute and space is not euclidean. That is not a nit. Einstein's view of space-time is totally in line with electrodynamics which is Lorentz Invariant. Without Einstein's more correct view and space and time quantum electrodynamics could not have been formulated. Einstein produced a revolution, not a picked nit.

Keep that in mind the next time you use a GPS device. Or a computer.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Oh boy, whatever...

Einstein didn't work in a vacuum, his ideas were built on those of Newton and others such as Maxwell, whose theories were in turn built on those who came before them. The whole discussion of who was 'right' and 'wrong' is pointless and absurd, and quite insulting to these great men.

Reardan didn't invent that metal all by himself, did he? ---- almost every "bad" guy in Atlas Shrugged

Newton was not only the first great mathematical physicist, he was the last Great Alchemist. Newton brought the thinking of the Middle Ages to it zenith of perfection. He purged theology of its Trinitarian corruptions.

Einstein was Mr. Modern. In addition to inventing in a totally revolutionary fashion the first totally covariant physical theory (The General Theory of Relativity), he put quantum theory on the map with its correct theory of the the photoelectric effect. He showed ALL radiation was quantized. In his paper on Brownian motion, Einstein proved once and for all that atoms were real and not a merely hypothetical construct.

It was for his work on the photoelectric effect and the quantization of radiation that he won his Nobel Prize for, not the theory of relativity. It is somewhat ironic that he later disowned the theory that he put into play. Max Planck came up with the idea of the energy quantum but Einstein showed how to deploy it. Einstein was doubly revolutionary in his physics thinking.

Of course Einstein stood on the shoulders of giants too. And he never said otherwise. I. Bernard Cohen interviewed Einstein two weeks before he died. Here is a snippet concerning Einsteins feelings about and toward Isaac Newton and his work:

".....Einstein was actually more interested in the Principia and in Newton's views on hypotheses. He greatly esteemed the Opticks, but primarily for the analysis of color and the magnificent experiments. Of this book he had written that "it alone can afford us the enjoyment of a look at the personal activity of this unique man." Looking back over all of Newton's ideas, Einstein said, he thought that Newton's greatest achievement was his recognition of the role of privileged systems. He repeated this statement several times and with great emphasis. This is rather puzzling, I thought to myself, because today we believe that there are no privileged systems, only inertial systems; there is no privileged frame – not even our solar system – which we can say is privileged in the sense of being fixed in space, or having special physical properties not possible in other systems. Due to Einstein's own work we no longer believe (as Newton did) in concepts of absolute space and absolute time, nor in a privileged system at rest or in motion with respect to absolute space. Newton's solution appeared to Einstein ingenious and necessary in his day. I was reminded of Einstein's statement: "Newton, . . . you found the only way which, in your age, was just about possible for a man of highest thought and creative power."...."

(I bolded the text)

You might find the entire interview interesting: See.

http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/OTHE00009

Newton will stand forever as the man who invented mathematical physics as we know it. His theories had flaws in some details but he invented the field of mathematical physics. It came out of his intellect. Newton invented the field of endeavor in which Einstein achieved (and rightly so) his fame.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Philip Coates]

> Following her essay in The Objectivist ("To Whom It May Concern"), several former NBI lecturers (Peikoff, Greenspan, Blumenthal, Sures) signed a statement under the heading: "For The Record." The statement said that they "condemned and repudiated" the Brandens "irrevocably" and "terminated all association with them." Do you suppose Ayn Rand had anything to do with that? [Dennis]

I don't know and probably neither do you.

[Xray]

> Following her essay in The Objectivist ("To Whom It May Concern"), several former NBI lecturers (Peikoff, Greenspan, Blumenthal, Sures) signed a statement under the heading: "For The Record." The statement said that they "condemned and repudiated" the Brandens "irrevocably" and "terminated all association with them." Do you suppose Ayn Rand had anything to do with that? [Dennis]

I don't know and probably neither do you.

Phil,

But one can rationally assess what is more likely, given the context.

The signed statement is clearly the result of the break between Rand and NB. That is, had there been no break, no such statement would have been written.

So there exist two possibilities:

1) The undersigned mirrored Rand's stance on the issue.

2) The undersigned had come to their conclusions independent of Ayn Rand's influence.

In case you assume 2) to be the case, you will have to ask yourself how likely it is for such loyal disciples like Peikoff & Co, back then, ever to have done anything connected to Ayn Rand without being influenced by her?

So how likely is that? Extremely unlikely, I'm sure you will agree.

[Xray]

Bob K., I think your answer about the tree frog (post #92) illustrates why the scientific world actually does have something to learn from (the good stuff in) Rand's theory of concepts.

As I pointed out upthread, (#157), Rand's theory of concepts is almost exclusively about categorizing/classifying. It is about placing objective referents into the class they belong to by using the terms provided as a label by one's language.

So when five-year-old Susie sees e. g. a Golden Retriever and tells her mom, "Look, what a nice dog!", she is doing just that: allocating an objective referent to a specific category/class.

The respective class had already been presented to Susie by the time she started to speak: "Look Susie, a dog!" she had been told her caregivers many times.

Learning to apply the accurate term referring to a concept/class is by no means a complicated mental feat and is accomplished quite effortlessly by humans, at least with the concepts we frequently have to do with in our daily lives.

Whereas testing scientific theories goes a lot deeper than subsuming objective referents under a class.

Here the issue is about testing the concepts themselves in terms of whether they (still) conform to reality, given the standard of knowledge that has been reached.

[BaalChatzaf]

Whereas testing scientific theories goes a lot deeper than subsuming objective referents under a class.

Here the issue is about testing the concepts themselves in terms of whether they (still) conform to reality, given the standard of knowledge that has been reached.

that is right. Natural science is more about -facts- than about definitions. Definitions are for convenience. Then enable us to shorten up long phrases and descriptions. Definitions, at most, describe the world or help to do so. They do not by themselves reveal any deep truth about the world.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[anthony]

that is right. Natural science is more about -facts- than about definitions. Definitions are for convenience. Then enable us to shorten up long phrases and descriptions. Definitions, at most, describe the world or help to do so. They do not by themselves reveal any deep truth about the world. Ba'al Chatzaf

"Philosophers came to be divided into two camps: those who claim that man obtained his

knowledge of the world by deducing it from concepts, which come from inside his head

and are not derived from the perception of physical facts. (The Rationalists)

-And those who claim that man obtained his knowledge from experience, which was held

to mean: by direct perception of immediate facts with no recourse to concepts. (The Empiricists)

To put it more simply: those who joined the mystics by abandoning reality -

and those who clung to reality by abandoning their mind."

A. Rand

Empiricism is half the story, Ba'al.

[BaalChatzaf]

Empiricism is half the story, Ba'al.

The better half. At least it is the half based on reality.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[anthony]

Empiricism is half the story, Ba'al.

The better half. At least it is the half based on reality. Ba'al Chatzaf

And concepts cannot be? it is one whole, not one or the other half.

[BaalChatzaf]

Empiricism is half the story, Ba'al.

The better half. At least it is the half based on reality. Ba'al Chatzaf

And concepts cannot be? it is one whole, not one or the other half.

At some point concepts have to be checked against the real reality. In the last act, facts must prevail.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[anthony]

Empiricism is half the story, Ba'al.

The better half. At least it is the half based on reality. Ba'al Chatzaf

And concepts cannot be? it is one whole, not one or the other half.

At some point concepts have to be checked against the real reality. In the last act, facts must prevail. Ba'al Chatzaf

Back to front, and circular - concepts grow from verified facts, and "real reality".

One thousand disconnected facts mean nothing and can't be grasped.

[BaalChatzaf]

Back to front, and circular - concepts grow from verified facts, and "real reality".

One thousand disconnected facts mean nothing and can't be grasped.

One thousand unverified or uncorroborated generalities are hot air.

In the last act, facts must decide principles.

Ba'al Chatzaf