The Police vs. The Blacks

[Selene]

Here is what she wrote about "culture"...from the lexicon

Just as there is no such thing as a collective or racial mind, so there is no such thing as a collective or racial achievement. There are only individual minds and individual achievements—and a culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiated masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.

The Virtue of Selfishness

“Racism,”
The Virtue of Selfishness, 127

and

The acceptance of the achievements of an individual by other individuals does not represent “ethnicity”: it represents a cultural division of labor in a free market; it represents a conscious, individual choice on the part of all the men involved; the achievements may be scientific or technological or industrial or intellectual or esthetic—and the sum of such accepted achievements constitutes a free, civilized nation’s culture. Tradition has nothing to do with it; tradition is being challenged and blasted daily in a free, civilized society: its citizens accept ideas and products because they are true and/or good—not because they are old nor because their ancestors accepted them. In such a society, concretes change, but what remains immutable—by individual conviction, not by tradition—are those philosophical principles which correspond to reality, i.e., which are true.

The Voice of Reason

“Global Balkanization,”
The Voice of Reason, 119

[anthony]

Thanks for the material, fellas. Good note from Barbara. Ellen Moore on "universalizability" as a Kantian premise, is new to me. The principle of "collective subjectivity", makes much sense.

"The irrational" - "The real cause, the real root of evil on earth". The consequences of which are collectivism and altruism. Yesiree.

[Peter]

I like the concept of *the sum.* Is it logical to say you are part of a group? I think so, and you can still remain an individual. Logic is a deterministic system. By the laws of non-contradiction, you must agree that the conclusion is true (or true, that it is false).

Rand maintained that: Objectivism is a seamless robe, that Objectivism has no inner contradictions; and by "Objectivism" she meant . . . (the) . . . sum total of Ayn Rand's published works.
end quote

Yet, that does not take into the concept of *contextualism.* New facts can arise, invalidating past sums and chains of logic, however at the time they were formulated, they were logically true.

Notes.

Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, 28: The process of forming and applying concepts contains the essential pattern of two fundamental methods of cognition: induction and deduction. The process of observing the facts of reality and of integrating them into concepts is, in essence, a process of induction. The process of subsuming new instances under a known concept is, in essence, a process of deduction.
end quote

Roger Bissell in his “Problems with Putnam's Externalism” originally written in 1996 for David Kelley's cyber seminar in Objectivist epistemology wrote: . . . Rather than claiming that our minds are in the world rather than "in our heads," it seems more reasonable to me to say that our mind (as a capacity) is our "head's" (brain's) ability to cognitively grasp the world and (as an action) its act of cognitively grasping the world . . . Before we speculate about where the mind ~might~ be, it would help to clarify what category of existent the mind belongs to. Unless Putnam et al are advocating some form of substance dualism, the mind can't be an entity, other than the human organism or one of its parts (viz., the brain and nervous system). Granted, we (as organisms) -- who are the entities doing the knowing, after all -- are "in the world," but WE ARE ~WHERE~ WE ARE, not out somewhere else, where the thing is that we are knowing. And if mind is an attribute or an action, it has no location other than our organism that has the attribute or carries out the action. And if mind is a relation between our organism and the world, it must be located (if it can be said to have a location) where the causal/cognitive interaction between our organism and the world takes place. E.g., for perception, that would be in the sensory systems and the portions of the brain that integrate sensory data, which are certainly "in the head" (allowing that tactile perception is "in the body," also).”
end quote

Obviously, Roger. Just joking. Now here is a poser. Can there be a group of anarchists? If they resent you calling such individuals a collective, can they morally use retaliatory force and yell in your face, Stop it, you bully?
Peter