Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

[Roger Bissell]

I couldn't disagree with you more about reason and mathematics (and natural language). An equation is just a proposition using quantities and proxies for quantities, and if you say "Add two of anything to two of anything else, and you have four things," that is precisely the same thing (in natural language) as saying "2 + 2 = 4" (in mathematical terms).

And this is not an issue of mere "definition." Someone else on OL the past day or two said something similar (Ellen S.?), but I agree that it states the matter correctly. Acknowledging that // added to // makes //// is not just an "analytic truth," but the recognition of a fact of reality, moreover a recognition that involves an act of reason: the integration and identification of the material provided by the senses.

2+2=4 is ALWAYS true in mathematics but 2 things and 2 things is NOT ALWAYS true in experience. 2 gallons of water and 2 gallons of alcohol will not give you 4 gallons of the mixture.

I am talking about ~collecting~ things, whether mentally or physically, NOT ~mixing~ or ~physically combining~ them. I can physically mix or combine 1 and 1 and get 11 or, if I mix them in a superpositional way, I get 1 (with the other 1 being behind or under it).

When I have 2 gallons of water in a bucket and 2 gallons of alcohol in a bucket side by side, I have 4 gallons of liquid. That is ~all~ that addition is. We are not talking about physically mixing or chemically combining -- nor "adding" a male and female sheep and getting 3 (or more) sheep. Or any more of the sophistical "counter-examples" you can dream up.

Please don't do this kindergarten crap.

REB

[tjohnson]

I am talking about ~collecting~ things, whether mentally or physically, NOT ~mixing~ or ~physically combining~ them. I can physically mix or combine 1 and 1 and get 11 or, if I mix them in a superpositional way, I get 1 (with the other 1 being behind or under it).

When I have 2 gallons of water in a bucket and 2 gallons of alcohol in a bucket side by side, I have 4 gallons of liquid. That is ~all~ that addition is. We are not talking about physically mixing or chemically combining -- nor "adding" a male and female sheep and getting 3 (or more) sheep. Or any more of the sophistical "counter-examples" you can dream up.

Please don't do this kindergarten crap.

Ouch!

So what exactly do you mean when you say "Add two of anything to two of anything else, and you have four things," ? What do you mean by "adding" because next you say you are going to leave them side by side in their buckets so you haven't 'added" them, they are just sitting there?? So 2 gallons of water and 2 gallons of alcohol = 2 gallons of water and 2 gallons of alcohol? OK, I agree with that.

[tjohnson]

Just for clarification; 'Add' means something in natural language, like whe we are baking we 'add' ingredients. In mathematics we don't 'add' numbers we associate a third number with the first 2. It may be different (1,2)=>3 or it may be the same (1,0)=>1. This is purely associative and nothing whatsoever to do with physical quantities.

[Dragonfly]

Michael, let me first state that you did a great job in creating this forum. It is the only Objectivist forum that I know where a civilized discussion between Objectivists or almost-Objectivists and people who are more critical with regard to Objectivism has been made possible. The result has been a great amount of good and enlightening discussions. You deserve praise for that. Compare it for example with the anemic RoR forum, where only people who belong to the club can discuss, or the SOLO forum (no comment necessary).

It is therefore regrettable that you are now slowly destroying what you have built up. I don’t know the reasons, whether your tooth problems, backstage pressure or other problems play a role in this. But I must say that you’re very unfair when you write:

...it seems that OL has attracted another kind of preacher—those who bash Rand with every other post and merely repeat negative opinions about Objectivist ideas prolifically without adding much by way of new information. The nonstop and voluminous negative repetition is starting to get tiring (often accompanied with denigrating remarks or indirect mocking). This is not critical thinking. It is preaching.

The worst part is that often it is preaching without even getting the Objectivist ideas right. And when one tries to explain, there are more mistakes with more voluminous preaching (and an awful lot of condescension—the snobbery gets so thick sometimes you could cut it with a knife). I love to be challenged to reexamine my premises, but frankly what has been unfolding is getting boring.

This is just one example of what you’re doing more and more lately: attacking people instead of arguments, making condescending snide remarks about other OL members, doing the equivalent to sighing and rolling your eyes about so much foolishness and stupidity, telling them that they can’t read, that they can’t think critically, that they don’t understand anything (“they don’t get the Objectivist ideas right”). There are already enough Objectivists who use that method and I think you can do better than that.

Now speaking about myself, if you check your own archives, you’ll see that in the course of time I have given an enormous amount of detailed arguments, that I have always been willing to discuss them, without becoming personal (I may have lost my patience once or twice when someone attacked me as a person).

You are not willing to give names. I think we may conclude that you are referring to anyone who has serious criticisms of Rand’s theories, like Daniel, Ellen, Bob or General Semanticist. Now I think these are very intelligent and knowledgeable people, most of whom also know the Canon very well, probably better than many of its defenders. I have also seen them give very good and thoughtful arguments. Perhaps you think that you’ve countered them effectively. Well in fact I have seen many flaws and errors in your arguments. I haven’t answered them as I just don’t have the time (and the others are competent enough to do that); I hardly can keep up with the posts in my “own” threads. I’m afraid that if you continue to dismiss the arguments of those critical people as “preaching” or “Rand-bashing” you’ll chase them away in the long run. Is that what you want? The result would be another RoR forum, for Objectivists who don’t want to be bothered with difficult questions. I think that is not the spirit in which this forum was created.

You tell people to use the principle of charity. Do you use it yourself? Really? If I may give you one advice: if you see a post with which you disagree, don’t give immediately a reaction; let it rest for awhile and think about it, it will improve the quality of your reply. I think you’re far too trigger-happy. If I read a post that I find annoying, I try to resist the urge to give a sharp reply, and wait in general a day or longer, as I know that the annoyance may trouble my perception, and that I can give a much better reply when I’ve taken the time to think about it and the emotion has calmed down (not that I always succeed in doing so, I’m human after all). In some cases I could compare my first draft for a reaction and the final reaction after taking my time: the latter was always much better. Irritation destroys good arguments.

Do you think it is worthwile to present the ideas of Objectivism to outsiders by using rational arguments? If so, how do you think you could succeed, when you succeed in alienating those people who are already sympathetic to some aspects of Objectivism, but who do have nevertheless serious criticisms? No doubt you can win temporary converts among young people by directing them to Atlas Shrugged, but if you want to convince the intellectuals, philosophers and scientists of the philosophical ideas, impatience and sarcasm is not the way to do it. In that regard Rand gave a very bad example. Think about it.

[tjohnson]

Almost all of the arguments on this list have their roots in a misunderstanding of the nature of mathematics - the difference between mathematical and natural language. I am only trying to help some understand I have nothing against Rand or anyone else but it's quite possible that Rand and others that followed did not recognize this difference and perhaps you could save alot of grief by coming to terms with it.

GS,

This is not a misunderstanding. It would help a lot if you learned the Objectivist concepts, then compared and criticized, instead of just repeating the GS ones without understanding the Objectivist ones.

Michael

Well I have read a large number of posts from people whom I assume to be quite knowledgeable about said concepts and I see this (alleged) confusion repeatedly. So either these people are not so knowledgeable or this view is actually part and parcel of O'ism. (how's that for 2-value logic Please feel free to come over to the GS list and debate with them;

http://www.learn-gs.org/cgi-bin/boards/discus.cgi?pg=topics

Edited September 18, 2007 by general semanticist

[BaalChatzaf]

2+2=4 is ALWAYS true in mathematics but 2 things and 2 things is NOT ALWAYS true in experience. 2 gallons of water and 2 gallons of alcohol will not give you 4 gallons of the mixture.

Mixing is not adding. In combinatorics addition is a kind of set formation. If you have sets A, B each with two distinct individuals and such that A and B are disjoint, then the union of A and B will have four elements.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[BaalChatzaf]

I couldn't disagree with you more about reason and mathematics (and natural language). An equation is just a proposition using quantities and proxies for quantities, and if you say "Add two of anything to two of anything else, and you have four things," that is precisely the same thing (in natural language) as saying "2 + 2 = 4" (in mathematical terms).

Not quite. Here are two sets {a, b} and {b, c} you will notice that they have an element b in common. Now if I take the union of the sets I get {a, b, c} which has three elements. So one must be careful of how one means "add". Set union in general is not addition. It is addition only if the sets involved are pairwise disjoint. In general addition of cardinalities works like this Card(A union B ) = Card(A ) + Card(B ) - Card(A intersection B ). Where Card is cardinal number or count and intersection is the set of elements two sets have in common (if an y). It is only when Car(A intersection B ) = 0 (meaning A and B are disjoint ) that combining sets of things is equivalent to arithmetic addition.

Ba'al Chatzaf.

Edited September 18, 2007 by BaalChatzaf

[tjohnson]

2+2=4 is ALWAYS true in mathematics but 2 things and 2 things is NOT ALWAYS true in experience. 2 gallons of water and 2 gallons of alcohol will not give you 4 gallons of the mixture.

Mixing is not adding. In combinatorics addition is a kind of set formation. If you have sets A, B each with two distinct individuals and such that A and B are disjoint, then the union of A and B will have four elements.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Very true, but the 'union' of 2 gallons of water and 2 'gallons' of alcohol will not result in 4 gallons. All you have done is switched 'added' with 'unionized' ??

[BaalChatzaf]

2+2=4 is ALWAYS true in mathematics but 2 things and 2 things is NOT ALWAYS true in experience. 2 gallons of water and 2 gallons of alcohol will not give you 4 gallons of the mixture.

Mixing is not adding. In combinatorics addition is a kind of set formation. If you have sets A, B each with two distinct individuals and such that A and B are disjoint, then the union of A and B will have four elements.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Very true, but the 'union' of 2 gallons of water and 2 'gallons' of alcohol will not result in 4 gallons. All you have done is switched 'added' with 'unionized' ??

It is not a set union. There are interactions going on between the water and alcohol molecules.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[BaalChatzaf]

I think that Rationalism is just as fallacious in mathematics as is Empiricism. Peikoff claims that mathematics is unlike the other sciences/disciplines in that it (supposedly) is not inductive, but deductive. Yet (and here is evidence that ARI is not a monolithic theoretical strait-jacket) another Objectivist has lectured at ARI summer seminars on mathematical topics, and she has argued persuasively that mathematics is fundamentally ~inductive~.

Two points. Mathematics, like science has two aspects: that of Discovery and that of Justification. Discovery is an art. It is not fully deductive. It has both inductive and abductive aspects. Justification (i.e. proof) in mathematics is strictly deductive. Enumeration of instances may give one a warm feeling that some general statement is true, but that is not a -proof-.

There are portions of mathematics that might be arrived at inductive (in the sense of discovering what the underlying principles are). But mathematics full bore in full generality complete with infinite sets cannot be inductive. There are no concrete examples of infinity in the real world. J.S. Mill was convinced that mathematical discovery was a purely inductive operation, but in general he was wrong.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Dragonfly,

A game is now being played and I will not be trapped into it.

Am I against Rand's ideas being criticized? No. I have stated this repeatedly.

Am I against high-volume contentless Rand bashing, or high-volume misrepresenting of her ideas ? Yes.

Agree or disagree with her, but the minimum one could expect is to get it right (or at least try), and hopefully say something about the ideas instead of engaging in a constant competition to see who is going to win an argument and put down the opponent. (What does such a person win anyway? Some kind of momentary jolly?)

Look at your own posts and see which category they fall into. If they have intelligent well-reasoned arguments and are informative, but conflict with Rand's views, I have no problem with that. We can disagree and still be friends. If they are preaching (mostly opinions) put up in rapid-fire volume simply to wear others down by repetition, then I do have a problem. Do you need me to categorize your posts for you? You are intelligent enough to do that on your own.

Do you really need to be coddled? For the upteenth time, you know the high regard I have of you.

The following is not your case, but some posters make really good posts one minute, then go on an anti-Rand preaching stint with rapid fire posts another. I am against the preaching stints, not against the poster. If you can get your head out of competing for a minute and see this from what I am actually saying, it should be clear.

I stand by what I wrote. I wrote very precisely. It would be worthwhile to examine what I actually wrote and not give ears to what some others claim I am doing.

And for your information, OL is growing. It is not being destroyed at all. That's more crap from the wings from the lonely and attention challenged. Believe it if you want to. Reality will not accommodate you. I assure you of that. All you have to do is watch.

Michael

[tjohnson]

It is not a set union. There are interactions going on between the water and alcohol molecules.

Ba'al Chatzaf

That is more or less my point! Even something as simple as 2+2=4 only works relatively well in applied math, but works perfectly in pure mathematics. This is entirely general.

[Roger Bissell]

I am talking about ~collecting~ things, whether mentally or physically, NOT ~mixing~ or ~physically combining~ them. I can physically mix or combine 1 and 1 and get 11 or, if I mix them in a superpositional way, I get 1 (with the other 1 being behind or under it).

When I have 2 gallons of water in a bucket and 2 gallons of alcohol in a bucket side by side, I have 4 gallons of liquid. That is ~all~ that addition is. We are not talking about physically mixing or chemically combining -- nor "adding" a male and female sheep and getting 3 (or more) sheep. Or any more of the sophistical "counter-examples" you can dream up.

Please don't do this kindergarten crap.

Ouch!

So what exactly do you mean when you say "Add two of anything to two of anything else, and you have four things," ? What do you mean by "adding" because next you say you are going to leave them side by side in their buckets so you haven't 'added" them, they are just sitting there?? So 2 gallons of water and 2 gallons of alcohol = 2 gallons of water and 2 gallons of alcohol? OK, I agree with that.

What did I just say? <sigh>

Since water is liquid and alcohol is liquid, 2 gallons of water and 2 gallons of alcohol is a total of 4 gallons of liquid.

By "adding" 2 gallons of alcohol to 2 gallons of water to get 4 gallons (of liquid), I mean: I start in my field of awareness with 2 gallons of water, then I introduce 2 gallons of alcohol to my field of awareness. I can do this with actual, physical containers of liquid, or I can do it by imagination. In either case, my field of awareness now "contains" 4 gallons of liquid.

You seem stuck with the notion that adding is strictly a physical process, as in cooking or mixing things. Oh, Kant rare!

If I focus on 3 pencils and "add" 5 pens to my focus, I am now focusing on 8 writing implements, or 8 man-made objects, or 8 physical entities, etc. Adding in the way we are discussing it -- as against the way you are (playfully? cluelessly? you tell me) distorting it -- is this kind of conceptual-mathematical process.

3 cows plus 5 horses = 8 mammals

3 roses plus 5 orchids = 8 flowers

3 cows plus 5 rose bushes = 8 living organisms

3 OL induction-deniers + 5 rocks = 8 physical entities

Now, do you see the generalization here? I could give a thousand examples, but I really hope that after the first 2 examples you already grasped the principle and saw that it is necessarily, universally true.

Oh, and I'd be a bit more careful if I were you about what you characterize as "applied math."

REB

[Roger Bissell]

I couldn't disagree with you more about reason and mathematics (and natural language). An equation is just a proposition using quantities and proxies for quantities, and if you say "Add two of anything to two of anything else, and you have four things," that is precisely the same thing (in natural language) as saying "2 + 2 = 4" (in mathematical terms).

Not quite. Here are two sets {a, b} and {b, c} you will notice that they have an element b in common. Now if I take the union of the sets I get {a, b, c} which has three elements. So one must be careful of how one means "add". Set union in general is not addition. It is addition only if the sets involved are pairwise disjoint. In general addition of cardinalities works like this Card(A union B ) = Card(A ) + Card(B ) - Card(A intersection B ). Where Card is cardinal number or count and intersection is the set of elements two sets have in common (if an y). It is only when Car(A intersection B ) = 0 (meaning A and B are disjoint ) that combining sets of things is equivalent to arithmetic addition.

Ba'al Chatzaf.

Point taken, thank you.

REB

[tjohnson]

Since water is liquid and alcohol is liquid, 2 gallons of water and 2 gallons of alcohol is a total of 4 gallons of liquid.

I think you are missing the point - you don't get 4 gallons, because of the interaction betwenn the molecules you get somewhat less than 4 gallons. So 2+2=4 doesn't apply here.

Well, I have had enough of this forum, thanks for listening as much as you did, but I can't seem to get through to anyone here so have a nice life!

Edited September 19, 2007 by general semanticist

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

GS,

It is not a matter of not getting through to the people. It is that there are already definitions in place with Objectivism. These are not going to change just because someone says, "That's not the way it is," and uses a different system of thought.

I have no doubt a comparison of GS ideas with Objectivist ones could be valuable, but it cannot be one-sided. I have been trying to encourage you to understand what the meanings are so you can have a basis for "speaking the same language" so to speak.

If I were on a GS forum, it would be incumbent on me to read the literature, then evaluate. I am sure that if, without understanding the GS system, I started telling everybody they were wrong in typical Objectivist terms, they would not be very sympathetic.

You are one of the good guys. Relax. There's plenty of time to learn on both ends.

Michael

[BaalChatzaf]

I have no doubt a comparison of GS ideas with Objectivist ones could be valuable, but it cannot be one-sided. I have been trying to encourage you to understand what the meanings are so you can have a basis for "speaking the same language" so to speak.

Here is the problem. Objectivists, particularly Rand, take a term which is in general use, for example "logic" and then attach their own meaning to it. This is not bad if the shift in meaning is made clear to all parties and they are willing to use it in a discussion. What is bad is insisting that the Objectivist meaning is The True Meaning of the term and a perverse and wicked world has distorted the true meaning of term. This is an example of what I would call Shi'ite Redefinition. Mohamed (PBUH) claimed he was restoring the true meaning of God's word which the Jews and the Christians distorted over the centuries. Similarly Rand claims her definition of logic (i.e. $logic, non-contradictory identification) is the True Meaning of the term which the wicked Rationalists and Altruists have distorted, especially the Evil Kant. Those misled fools who believe logic is the art/discipline of valid inference have made consciousness primary and Existence secondary, to those silly wicked people! Rand has come to restore purity to the terminology.

But there is no pure terminology. There is only common usage agreed upon by the participants. The Randian error is making definition Primary. Definitions only tell us how words are used in various contexts. They do not state Fundamental Truths of Existence. Definitions do not identify. The identifications have to be made in order for definitions to be meaningful and useful.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Edited September 19, 2007 by BaalChatzaf

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

What is bad is insisting that the Objectivist meaning is The True Meaning of the term and a perverse and wicked world has distorted the true meaning of term.

Bob,

I doubt you will find many around here who do that. What you will find is the opposite. (My preference is to find neither.)

But there is no pure terminology. There is only common usage agreed upon by the participants. The Randian error is making definition Primary. Definitions only tell us how words are used in various contexts. They do not state Fundamental Truths of Existence. Definitions do not identify. The identifications have to be made in order for definitions to be meaningful and useful.

There is so much misrepresented Objectivism here and so many package-deal concepts that I do not even know where to begin. That one would be a real challenge to unpack.

Michael

[Roger Bissell]

Since water is liquid and alcohol is liquid, 2 gallons of water and 2 gallons of alcohol is a total of 4 gallons of liquid.

I think you are missing the point - you don't get 4 gallons, because of the interaction betwenn the molecules you get somewhat less than 4 gallons. So 2+2=4 doesn't apply here.

Well, I have had enough of this forum, thanks for listening as much as you did, but I can't seem to get through to anyone here so have a nice life!

What interaction? I said (and you did not quote the entire context of my comments) that the water and alcohol were in separate buckets.

And I said that when we add two gallons of water and two gallons of alcohol, we are ~not~ performing a physical act of mixing them together, but simply juxtaposing them physically so that we can combine them mentally as units.

You should stay a while and learn to read better and quote more accurately, so that you don't drop context as much in your arguments.

Actually, I'm really not sure whether you're as consistently careless as you seem to be, or you are simply screwing around with us.

REB

P.S. -- Here is the full text of the post you butchered in an attempt to support your goofy notion of mixing liquids showing that "addition in the real world" is "not exact." Nice try for the parting shot of poor misunderstood GS. But hit and run only works if you don't leave any evidence behind.

[Roger Bissell]

GS,

You are one of the good guys. Relax. There's plenty of time to learn on both ends.

Michael

You've gotta be kidding. Learn to read and not to butcher-quote and context-drop maybe.

REB

[Dragonfly]

A game is now being played and I will not be trapped into it.

I'm not interested in playing games and setting traps. What happened to your principle of charity? Has it gone out of the window?

Am I against Rand's ideas being criticized? No. I have stated this repeatedly.

You have been paying lip-service to that notion. But in practice it means that criticisms of Rand ideas are OK if you agree with them (for example criticism of some of her ideas about art and music), but are "Rand-bashing" when you disagree with them (for example pointing out that she was ignorant in mathematics).

Am I against high-volume contentless Rand bashing, or high-volume misrepresenting of her ideas ? Yes.

Well, that's fine by me, but that hasn't happened on this forum. If you dispute that, you'll have to provide evidence. Or do you think that when someone disagrees with you about Rand, he must necessarily misrepresent her ideas, while you are of course always right?

Agree or disagree with her, but the minimum one could expect is to get it right (or at least try), and hopefully say something about the ideas instead of engaging in a constant competition to see who is going to win an argument and put down the opponent. (What does such a person win anyway? Some kind of momentary jolly?)

Matthew 7:3-5.

Do you really need to be coddled? For the upteenth time, you know the high regard I have of you.

I don't need to be coddled, but neither do I need to be insulted. Rational arguments will do.

I stand by what I wrote. I wrote very precisely. It would be worthwhile to examine what I actually wrote and not give ears to what some others claim I am doing.

You didn't write precisely at all. You poisoned the atmosphere with a lot of insinuations about people preaching and bashing Rand while they don't understand Objectivism. All vague and general without mentioning any concrete example. I don't know what other people claim that you're doing, but I do know what you claim that other people are doing.

And for your information, OL is growing. It is not being destroyed at all.

Do you really think I was talking about numbers? I was of course referring to the quality of the forum. Personally I'd prefer a forum with 50 members who have good and lively discussions than a forum with 1000 chatting yea-sayers. So far this forum still belongs to the first category, but I see a tendency to steer it to the second category, which would be a shame. There exist already enough forums of that kind.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Dragonfly,

Saying Rand was ignorant in math is one thing. Completely ignoring the extent to which she was knowledgeable (particularly when someone provides quotes), then making oodles of rapid-fire posts saying over and over and over "Rand was ignorant in math," "Rand was ignorant in math," "Rand was ignorant in math," "Rand was ignorant in math," "Rand was ignorant in math," is quite another. This overdose gets old pretty quickly. That is not the purpose of OL. Frankly, I think I have been extremely tolerant on this issue.

I prefer not to make a list of posts to prove this, but I will if this becomes a real problem. I suggest you merely skim some threads from the recent past and you will see them. What I complain about exists.

There is another point. If someone makes a repeated oversimplified affirmation like "Rand was ignorant in math" instead of something a bit more precise like "Rand was ignorant in advanced math," I have the right to disagree, especially if I can back it up. And I fully intend to do so when needed.

For your information, I am no hypocrite as in your Biblical reference and I resent that implication. That was totally uncalled for and obnoxious on your part. Shame on you. You dishonor your normal demeanor. You are better than that.

Your view of the direction of OL is false, so you can relax and not be so worried. The high quality will not suffer. On the contrary, by calling attention to the anti-Rand backwater revival and making a call to get back to the ideas, I am assuring it. That yea-sayer concern cuts both ways.

Michael