Robert Campbell

John, Some dictionaries may indicate that "psychologize" has a neutral meaning, but I've never heard a psychologist refer to a psychological explanation that he or she deems credible as "psychologizing," or use "psychologize" as a verb for "provide a psychological explanation." In today's world, "moralize" is nearly always pejorative, and so is "rationalize." I've occasionally seen the word "rationalize" used in print to mean "organize according to some rational principle," but it has always come across as old-fashioned to me. I suppose clinical psychology has helped to give both words a negative connotation. All of this reminds me that my high school principal (who preferred Plato and Whitehead) used to say "Ayn Rand is a philosophizer, but not a philosopher." Robert

Kat, When did Rand make those remarks about chess (on p. 170 of AR Answers)? Larry Abrams told me that she asked him to teach her how to play chess--and he did. Robert

Ellen, Forgive me from chiming in so late, but I'm only gradually catching up with various threads here. Erich Veyhl was a Ph. D. student in Applied Math at Harvard and, for a time, the editor of Ergo, which is how I knew him. He usually seemed to have the Objectivist siege mentality that I so often recall from those days. I think he's been hunkered down somewhere in rural Maine for a couple of decades. Ray Knapp and I both lived in Leverett House and I got to know him pretty well. I was there when he and Shoshana Milgram were married in the Leverett House library. I haven't seen him since they were divorced. I'd heard of him years before, but I didn't actually meet Lee Pierson in 2003 at the Positive Psychology Summit in Washington--an event that some Randians have attended off and on. Those with an ARI orientation tend not to come back, though. I don't blame Julie one bit for giving Objectivism a miss after being lectured about Beethoven's "malevolent sense of life." I'm glad I never had a discussion with Ayn Rand about Ornette Coleman's music, or Sun Ra's, or Charles Mingus's, back then. If she couldn't stand Beethoven, what kind of epithets would she have applled to them? Robert

Mike H and Ellen, What constitutes information (for whom, or for what) is a topic of fundamental importance, in both psychology and epistemology. I've been reading Robert Wright's book Non-Zero, which I think has quite a few good points. But whenever he starts talking about information he equivocates all over the place, and it drives me buggy! It's not because Wright is a journalist, either; he is doing exactly the same thing that many professionals in phil and psych do. But I'll have to come back to this issue--it's not the kind of thing that can be resolved in one or two posts. Robert

Jenna, What makes Rand's citation of Jerry Bruner stand out is her practice of hardly ever citing anyone. I wish she had cited 10 of the cognitive psychologists of her day--come to think of it, 4 or 5 would have been nice. Her orthodox followers like to talk about the "crow epistemology" but have no idea that the crow story was a psychology professor's way of illustrating the ideas of George Miller. They don't know because she didn't bother to tell them. Although Rand got away with this kind of thing surprisingly often, she is a poor model to emulate. You are of course right that some of the cognitive psych that Rand did know about has become dated--she learned little about psychology after 1968, began declining intellectually in the mid-1970s, and died in 1982. In her day, though, she was actually ahead of the mainstream in cognitive psychology on some issues--for instance, she was promoting what came to be called "psychological essentialism" more than a decade before researchers like Frank Keil picked it up. Robert Campbell

L W, If Peikoff believes (and it looks to me as though he does) that Objectivism is not just a closed system, but an adequate, complete, and 100% correct closed system, he is treating Rand's writings as holy scripture. My response to the "closed system" invocation (which unfortunately has some basis in the claims that Rand made for her ideas and the demands she put on her followers) runs as follows: If Objectivism is a closed system, then it is demonstrably inadequate, incomplete, and less than 100% correct--as is generally characteristic of bodies of knowledge that are unable to grow. In which case, why should anyone be an Objectivist? Robert Campbell

Marsha, Good to "see" you, too. A few years ago, I asked David Kelley about his use of Gibson's theory of visual perception (and the raft of empirical studies that have been done to test it) in The Evidence of the Senses. Didn't all of this go to show how the philosophy of perception is dependent on the psychology of perception? David's response was quite Peikovian--he drew a distinction between extracting some high-level principles out of a psychological theory and getting involved with actual experiments or data collection. (The obvious problem with this demarcation: if the experiments turned out a different way, it might become necessary to modify or reject one or more of those high-level principles.) This of course may not be David's view today... In 2000, not long after we came out with the first issue of the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, Will Thomas reviewed it in the TOC Navigator. Will did not try to defend the Peikovian or latter-day Randian position; he was comfortable with two-way communication between science and philosophy. Robert PS. I discuss Rand's reference to sensory-deprivation studies in my article--she actually cited a chapter by pioneering cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner.

Jenna, Rand's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology owes some debts to early modern cognitive psychology (most notably, to George Miller's ideas about limited attentional capacity). But in her usual fashion, Rand wasn't explicit about her sources. See http://hubcap.clemson.edu/~campber/randcogrev.html. In addition, Robert Efron, a neuropsychologist, was associated with Rand for a few years and published in The Objectivist. But after her break with Nathaniel Branden, Rand retreated from psychology almost completely. More later... Robert Campbell

Marsha, There were some helpful discussions of Rand's retreat from psychology on SOLOHQ before it fractionated. Adam Reed made some excellent observations; unfortunately, we're unlikely to see him here because he dislikes Nathaniel Branden so much. To net them out, Rand retreated from psychology after she broke with NB in 1968 and Robert Efron (a neuropsychologist) subsequently left her circle. By 1971, when she conducted her epistemology workshops, she'd adopted the position that is familiar from Leonard Peikoff's 1970s lectures (and his present-day pronouncements). According to the 1990 expanded edition of the Intro to Objectivist Epistemology, she said: I agree with you that this is wrongheaded, and tried to point out why in a 1999 article on Rand and her debts to modern cognitive psychology. See http://hubcap.clemson.edu/~campber/randcogrev.html Robert

Ellen, I would definitely have to look up her definition of psychologizing. So I just did: "condemning or excusing specific individuals on the grounds of their psychological problems, real or invented, in the absence of or contrary to factual evidence." (The Objectivist, March 1971, p. 2) Ever since I first read it, I've thought that Rand's article on psychologzing was one of the worst things she ever wrote--a terrible muddle. Not least because she fails to lay down any criteria of evidence for psychological diagnoses. And the strictures that she lays down at the end of the article, about confining your judgments of other people to their conscious minds and conscious convictions only, cannot be consistently adhered to by human beings. Her real complaint seems targeted on the use of psychological diagnoses to excuse a person's behavior. She appears to have had far less trouble with imputations of non-obvious motives made in order to condemn a person's behavior--except when they emanated from persons hostile to herself or to her point of view. And now that Valliant's book has revealed the full extent of Rand's own "counseling" activities (not to mention her propensity to see major flaws in someone she admits not understanding), I can't read her paragraphs that light into "amateur psychologizers"--or her advice about not asking a friend to become a therapist--without groaning. Because I regard the article as so far below Rand's usual standard, I've always avoided using the word "psychologize," and am prone to object when I hear others using it. I'd go so far as to say that, by Rand's own standards, "psychologize" is an anti-concept. Robert

Jonathan, How quickly things change. Diana Hsieh's statement (from 2003) pre-dates her public denunciations of David Kelley and of Nathaniel and Barbara Branden, and her public alignment with the Ayn Rand Institute (all of which took place in 2004). Ms. Hsieh now insists that anyone who admires Rand as a novelist and a philosopher must also venerate her as a moral paragon--while anathematizing Nathaniel and Barbara Branden as "false Objectivists" and serpents in the Garden. Robert Campbell

Ellen, I wrote that piece on Rand and jealousy in November 2005, which already seems a long time ago. I'm inclined to agree that jealousy vs. insult is 6 of one vs. half-dozen of the other. Whatever you prefer to call her emotional reaction to Patrecia, I do think that it involved insecurity and a major ego threat. Michael, In November, I made that comment about Jim Valliant's motives out of charity. I already had serious doubts about what he was up to--and no illusions whatsoever about what his claque (Holly Valliant and Casey Fahy) was up to. But I didn't want to airbrush my essay... Since then, I've become as convinced as you are that Valliant wants people to worship Rand, not to understand and appreciate her philosophy. Robert

The March 22 entry on Diana Hsieh's blog (http://www.dianahsieh.com/blog/2006/03/my-...nd-barbara.html) expresses the Rand-worshipping mentality with considerable clarity. Of those who were active in IOS/TOC when she was there, Ms. Hsieh says: Robert

Michael and Ellen, I made a similar point when I was last active on bulletin boards (http://rebirthofreason.com/Articles/Campbe...d_Jealous.shtml). Now that I can type with two hands again, I'll try to contribute to these discussions occasionally...but not at anything approaching the pace of my posts to the old SOLOHQ. Robert

Ellen, Well, that settles it: Rand removed the reference to the "Stolen Concept" article from later printings of ITOE. I remember wondering, when I first read ITOE, how anyone who hadn't read Nathaniel Branden's 1963 article would have a clue what Rand meant in her Foreword, when she casually mentioned the fallacy of the stolen concept. Robert

Michael, The first paperback version of Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology was published by The Objectivist, Inc. in 1967 and remained in print until shortly before the Mentor edition came out. It was shaped like a copy of The Objectivist, except thicker, and had the green stripe that you recall. In the Meridian 1990 Expanded Second Edition, edited by Harry Binswanger and Leonard Peikoff, the same paragraph reads as follows: Note from Michael: This 1990 version of ITOE is the only one I have at present, but I will go on the presumption that this paragraph was given the same way in the 1979 First Mentor Printing. Also, in the early 70's, before I went to Brazil, I used to own a paperback printing of ITOE that was thin, but wider and taller than a typical paperback, with a cover that had a green stripe running down it. I don't know the date and lost that book in Brazil, but I seem to remember that it did not include the Peikoff essay, "The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy."... Does anybody else remember this original printing? I would be interested to see if it came out before the break and if the paragraph mentioning Nathaniel Branden was altered there also. In those days, before it was added to the 1979 edition, Peikoff's essay was for sale as a leaflet. I have a copy of ITOE from the 4th printing (1973) of the 1967 edition. In the Foreword Rand has already dropped the citation of Nathaniel Branden's 1963 article. I haven't seen a 1967 printing for a long time, but I don't recall any differences in the text. If so, this is one editorial change that Rand made to one of her articles that was not a reaction to the break. Robert