Starbuckle

I'm confused. I thought Rand was a professional assassin.

I just noticed this post from MSK: "Starbuckle, I don't censor and I don't submit to intimidation--neither from Ms. Speicher nor from you..." When did I attempt to "intimidate" you?

Xray claims: "I was merely putting Rand's premises to the test and pointed out the surprising result. Much of what Rand wrote in ITOE, she did not think through enough." No, much of the misinterpretation of Rand is the unsurprising result of misreading of a very carefully written work. Rand recognized the possibilty of concepts of the imagination and false or badly formulated concepts. You ignore her whole discussion of how valid concepts are formed and then say "See? According to her there must be nonexistent mythological creatures." IOE is not a loosely written text but it is very condensed. See Rand's elaboration of her views in the transcript of a colloquium conducted about IOE that was appended to later editions of the book.

Robert Campbell wrote: "I'm not an Objectivist. More to the point, I've criticized Harriman's book on account of its incorporation of bad ideas that Leonard Peikoff has championed, such as the doctrine of the arbitrary assertion; the notion that philosophy speaks to science while science may never speak to philosophy; and the doctrine of contextual certainty. And the struggles with the implicit were Rand's, not Peikoff's. As was the incomplete rejection of cosmology, which Rand applied (with less than complete consistency) to physics, but never to psychology." Why are you not an Objectivist? Is it a rejection of orthodox doctrine or something about even a broader conception of Objectivism? What is your criticism of "contextual certainty"? When are we justified in being certain of our knowledge? (I read your long article on Peikoff and "the arbitrary," so if your view of Rand's contextualism is elaborated there it didn't sink in.) If Rand had had a better view of the "implicit," would that have contradicted her understanding of concept formation in any fundamental way? Thanks.

You guys...this is obviously a hoax. The guy went back in time and handed the "butch lady" his iPhone and instructed her to walk across the path of the camera talking while Chaplin was filming. Of course it's not HER iPhone. And yet people are pretending there's a genuine mystery here. The "maybe-she's-a-weirdo-just-talking-to-herself" explanation is even more of a stretch. All the socio-historical evidence is that weirdos did not emerge on the American scene until the late 1950s.

Ed Hudgins wrote: "Michael - Thanks for making the important distinction between informed, thoughtful opinion and lazy, uninformed opinion that does nothing to enlighten anyone about anything." All the evidence suggests that, unfortunately, Kimmler's main purpose on the board is to be obnoxious for the sake of being obnoxious.

Interesting. Fry has a point, but he seems to conflate pedantry with conscientious attention to clarity and precision in linguistic expression, and to conflate true errors of expression with false ones (i.e., the lament about ending a sentence on a preposition, which is often idiomatic and appropriate to do in English, notwithstanding the arbitrary counseling against it in some circles). I can't be as dismayed as Fry would presumbably be that the author of "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" pays an "excess" of "pedantic" attention to where the commas and apostrophes are going in road signs and letters to the editor. One will be cured of such aversion to detail if one spends any sustained amount of time copy-editing student papers, as I did for several months for an editorial service. The problem is that the details add up; it's not just a matter always of one suspected blunder in an otherwise fine and intelligible communication. Maybe there's a reasonable alternative to both dogmatic pedantry and let-the-commas-fall-where-they-may-ism.

What's interesting from a sociological perspective is that it took Peikoff's lunacy over the propriety of disagreeing about the intepretation of details in the history of science to get many of the orthodox remnant to admit that hey, maybe something is not quite right in the land of independence, individualism, and reason as the only absolute. Yet even in this blatant case, the hardest core of the hardest core will still contend that it is a "non sequitur" to infer from Peikoff's irrational behavior vis-a-vis McCaskey that his conduct clashes with the implications of a philosophy of reason for intellectual discourse. Such self-deceivers are self-consciously "rational" friends of reason, however. So they cannot downplay conduct that is irrational on its face without recourse to impressive or at least voluminous bulwarks of rationalization, written in the appropriately orthodox style and with the requisite code words and idiom. Hence, for example, the True Believers' urgent citation of Peikoff's "Fact and Value" to "prove" (without argument) how eminently rational is Peikoff's anti-substantive assault on McCaskey. Now, holes can be and have been poked in "Fact and Value," can be and have been poked in the even more incontinently blatherous Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics. In arriving at his judgments touching on his faith, though, the True Believer can diligently attend to and credit only approved doctrine and approved text--not any inconvenient facts, no matter how evident or accessible, that might disturb that faith. So it does make sense for those who feel it important to produce and control orthodox believers to produce these sacred texts, even if the texts are fatally disconnected from the facts on the ground.

I wonder what could falsify the notion that the earth revolves around the sun. It seems to me nonsense that we can have only "probabilistic" or not-yet-falsified knowledge of the world. If one counterexample torpedoes a theory about the world, Popper's been punctured plenty. I suppose we must differentiate between tests or research into small-bore psychological attributes for potentials and the nature of human psychology. This passage I just ran across, from an article by Myron Magnet in City Journal, seems apropos: "The social scientists have a mantra: 'The plural of anecdote is not data.' I think they are mistaken. An accumulation of accurate stories about how the human world works, stories that provide an account wrapped in an interpretation, adds up to knowledge, better knowledge than we can get elsewhere. Data are meaningless until we can articulate a story that makes sense out of them, and literature makes sense out of the data of human experience. "Can anyone think that there is more understanding to be gained about the human heart from Freud than from Shakespeare—that the studies of Dora or the Wolf Man approach anywhere near to the profundity of understanding embodied in Macbeth or Lear, with their unflinching elucidation of man’s (and woman’s) capacity for evil? Can anyone think that the studies of Margaret Mead or Alfred Kinsey tell us anything nearly as true as Ovid or Turgenev? Does the sociobiology of E. O. Wilson or Richard Dawkins tell us any more than we learn from Homer or Virgil?" http://www.city-journal.org/html/13_3_what_use.html Whether we think Branden, say, is right or wrong about social metaphysics would depend most importantly not on "studies" but our own study of ourselves and others. Is what he describes real? I'm not saying that lab work or accumulation of states is necessarily irrelevant (depending on what the work is, how it's interpreted, what it claims). But why would we discount the less formal but still close and thoughtful study of persons by a Branden or a Dostoevsky, or even Peter Parker's Aunt May (the Aunt May of Spider-mans I and II, not III)?

Wow. Andy Griffith as the creepy bad guy? Reminds me of Henry Fonda in "Once Upon a Time in the West." Never heard of "A Face in the Crowd." Looks interesting.

An Atlas Society announcement that tickets are now available for an evening with the "Atlas" movie people, December 7 in NYC, brings one to an eventbrite.com page at which one learns that the pleasure of that evening can be had for a mere $100 (and that's at the low end). Atlas members, $100; non-members, $250; ticket plus "VIP reception," $500. http://atlas-shrugged-movie.eventbrite.com/?ref=ebtn I think the pricing is not only a bad decision but a flagrantly bad decision. I mean, with $100, I can get two thirds of an Amazon Kindle. Producers and cast members also show up at comicons; there is a fee for the whole con and a smaller fee for attending only a single day. The four-day price for adult attendance at the 2011 Comic-Con is $105. I can't imagine anyone shelling out this kind of dough for just one evening at a con, even if they were really into Captain Kirk or whatever. Maybe the Atlas Society people know something I don't know, and they'll make a mint on this. For my part, although I had tentatively planned to attend, I am scratching this event from my to-do list.

I don't get it.

David Kelley's lectures on volition, part of the "Foundations of Knowledge" set, are the best explanations I have come across of this topic. However, I just checked the Atlas Society web site and its store doesn't appear to have the set. Kelley explores causality, why volition would have survival value and other interesting issues in his set of lectures. The notion of causality posited by the rude acquaintance seems to be one unrelated to the nature of the acting entity whose causal powers are at issue. A volitional act is indeed caused; one's act of choosing among alternatives is one of the causes of one's action (but not the only cause). One can have motives to act one way and another set of motives to act another way, and then by an act of will choose to allow certain motives to be determinative. Only a notion of causality that would ban an entity from having certain attributes (like a self-regulatory consciousness) could support the conclusion that an entity "can't" be volitional. That volition is a fact is what we start with. We know by introspection that we choose. We can observe ourselves choosing. That's not all there is to be said about it, but a theory is not auspicious which begins by denying the existence of a capacity in ourselves that we directly perceive, and that is evidently limited by our nature and nonmagical. The faculty of volition itself has (biological) causes, and the exercise of volition is a cause. A principle of ausality does not have the power to rewrite the nature of things. A principle of causality is confused and confounding unless it is accepted as an implication of the nature of things. Volition is a different kind of trait from texture, color or shape. But being different doesn't mean it doesn't exist, or that it "contradicts causality."

Interesting. Jerry's initial post didn't explain very much how he got the "window dressing" conclusion. But the background later about Schuler's evolution or devolution paints a more detailed and plausible picture. Engle's perception also rings true.

Adam wrote: "Yes, both he and Ms. Xray are limited to five (5) posts in a twenty-four (24) hour period." Give the kid a break. Everybody is 13 once.

MLK wrote: "I hate restricting people and would love to remove the one I just put you on." What is the antecedent of "one" here? Are you restricting Kimmler in some way?

One must distinguish between explication of the nature of art per se, principles of aesthetics, critical standards, and critical evaluation of a specific work of art. Response to art involves subjective preferences, values and memories as well as the objective elements of the work. One's own development, including attention to insightful criticism, can lead to a revision of one's view of a particular work. There need be nothing traumatic or self-repressive about this. I don't agree that a positive response to a work which Rand would have loathed for having a tragic or malevolent sense of life demonstrates that enjoying that work necessarily manifests said dire sense of life. Yet there is some connection to the values dramatized by a work of art and one's response to that work. Exactly what one is responding to is not always cut-and-dried, however. It may, for example, be a very well-evoked and admirable character, not the (also well-realized) dramatic argument that we're all inevitably trapped and doomed in this world. Some inspiring life-affirming movies thrill a particular viewer and other determinedly inspiring life-affirming movies repel the same viewer (me). Why? Because creative works don't all issue from some cookie-cutter metaphysical-value assembly line. A broad preference for Romanticism as defined by Rand or a broad aversion to dreary naturalism can only begin to either inform critical assessment of or explain individual response to particular works. I don't like Rand's pronouncements about what certain aesthetic responses allegedly must imply about one's own spirit. But Rand's "dogmatic" tone per se in her criticism doesn't bother me in the least. Ever read movie reviews by Harlan Ellison, Pauline Kael, or any film critic who is discerning, passionate and intelligent...and who doesn't strain to reassure his audience when beating the crap out of something he knows is respected or popular? The certainty of persons who are confident about their aesthetic values, integrity and critical intelligence--and who are in fact critically intelligent--can be off-putting at times. One can read these critics and conclude, "Well! Clearly there is a list of items I Am Supposed to Enjoy and another list of other items I Am Not Supposed to Enjoy, and I reveal my impoverished sensibility by preferring anything on the latter list." But so what? Better that than uninformed wishy-washiness. There's something to that line of Kafka's about the value of taking an axe to the frozen sea within us.

Shayne, I'm afraid I cannot let you serve on the board.

Ted Keer wrote: "I have to say I am surprised to read that an article which was never written qualifies as seminal." I think it was a condensed way of speaking, i.e., that George (and others who knew Roy) expected that such an article would at the least interesting and challenging, as well as dramatic given Roy's early history in the libertarian movement as an anarchist and how often libertarians had speculated about his change of mind.

I have evidence that one of the commenters in this thread is a Cylon.

David McK wrote: "Excellent idea..I was just looking for an online e-book version of Chris Sciabarra's book 'Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical' and couldn't find one. I would have been more than happy to pay a couple of books for an epub or pdf version of it." Well, with regard to the very low pricing I was referring primarily to public-domain books. I think Chris's book in ebook format could easily sell for $9.95 as an ebook, and Reisman's Capitalism probably for $20 or so as an ebook. Capitalism is available free at Mises.org and Reisman's own site, capitalism.net, as a pdf that is difficult to read on an ereader, and its footnotes get garbled a bit when the pdf format is translated into Kindle format. From what I can tell as a fairly recent ereader adopter who has been downloading scads of free public domain books, ebooks tend to be either free and old (although some new books are given away free at least temporarily as promotions) or else new or very recent. Books neither ancient nor newborn are often out of luck. Books published between the 1930s and 1990s, say, often lack an ebook version unless they are currently in print. Laissez Faire might be able to cut a deal with many of the rights holders to offer e-book editions of such books for $6.95, $8.95, etc. LFB also has the rights to several books that it has published itself under various imprints.

I just checked the LFB.org web site. Because of a move-induced delay in shipping, customers can get free shipping if they order before October 18. I hope Laissez Faire Books continues to survive in some form as a place where all kinds of books related to liberty and individualism are offered. It has been difficult ever since Amazon emerged in the 90s. LFB's free-shipping deal hints at the problem. Amazon is able to give free shipping on every order of $25 or more. So a visitor to the LFB can see three books he likes, flip to the Amazon site, order them there, and often get a better deal than is possible from LFB. Plenty of libertarian classics are in the public domain and have been scanned by Google Books into pdfs or formatted for Mobi/Kindle, ePub and other ereader software. But the formatting is often hit-and-miss. Even when the ebook versions are very readable, there are often small but recurring problems like missing paragraph indents and the like. If Laissez Faire could prepare cleanly formatted versions of many of these books--perhaps often with specially commissioned introductions by libertarian notables--I think customers would often be happy to pay a oouple bucks per volume instead of getting a free clunkier version. Many sets of books could also be combined into single-file downloads. With some sustained effort, LFB could massively expand its inventory of literature relevant to libertarian concerns. With no shipping cost for downloads, and with LFB's focus on the literature of liberty, there would be no particular reason to zip over to Amazon to download a book in the public domain that has been publicized at LFB.org. LFB could also make exclusive ebook deals with many contemporary libertarian writers and fellow travelers who might be eager to give LFB at least temporary exclusivity in exchange for 80% royalties.

Robert Campbell wrote: "But if you mean no reviews or criticisms will come from outside of Rand-land, you are obviously right. "No history or philosophy of science journal is likely to review Harriman's opus. I wonder whether his publisher has bothered to send the review copies. "David Harriman's book will draw no more attention outside of Rand-land than Jim Valliant's has." This may be so, but it's not as if there are only 47 books published per year. A great many books in or out of any movement have trouble getting any notice. I haven't read Harriman's book yet, but Valliant's is a glaringly sectarian screed that is painful to read more than four and a half words of at a time. From everything I've seen pro and con Harriman, his book is not in that category. Obviously The Logical Leap will get the most immediate attention from Objectivist circles, as is true of other books of most apparent interest to various ideological camps. But if Harriman's book survives, whether its arguments are right or wrong or mixed, it can have a long-term influence whether or not it is reviewed in journals, and perhaps even end up referenced in the works of philosophers of science. Would a non-Ob student writing a paper on induction never stumble across references to Harriman's book? In addition to which, in this age of the Internet and the e-book, no work of any value at all will so easily lapse into permanent obscurity as was once the case. If all the arguments about how the dissemination of ideas can these days readily take place outside of official academic venues are valid, notices in the journals are important but not determinative of the ultimate fate of Harriman's book. Granted, the partisan orthodoxy of Harriman and associates doesn't help, but let's not consign his volume to mainstream oblivion just yet.

James HN wrote: "No, Starbuckle. I doubt that any reviews or criticisms will come from without. In scientific venues when you don't seek out and utilize peer review, you are completely marginalized." What do you mean? There has already been critical discussion of Harriman's book by persons who were never in the ARI orbit.

Ellen Stuttle wrote: "But suppose there hadn't been informed criticism from within the ARIan-persuasion ranks...." Then it would have come (as it will anyway) from without the ranks. Part of the problem for the practice of an alleged philosophy of reason by those who specially credit ARI-approved views because they're ARI-approved (or putatively Rand-approved) is precisely the assumption that somehow being orthodox and official should be a balance-tipping consideration when determining what the appropriate assessments of various arguments and achievements might be. Even mastery of a body of powerful ideas (Rand's) to an extent not likely among most intellectuals doesn't really weigh in favor of some official-orthodox view when it comes to questions beyond the basics--inasmuch as the utility of that expertise has been so often perverted to derail (or try to derail) open discussion. As Tracinski argued, the complete bust-up of any official dispenser of Randian orthodoxy would be the best outcome of the latest fracas, though it seems unlikely in the near term. The retreat from orthodoxy by the Tracinskis, McCaskeys etc. is a good thing, and it should happen a lot faster. But there will probably always be a Remnant of Objectivist true believers, chronically wagging their fingers at the apostates. Maybe the number of people praying toward Irvine is something like 973 at present. If we can get it down to 107 or lower, nobody's going to be paying any mind to their latest crazed email memos. But beyond that, being reasonable in one's intellectual investigations isn't about being obedient to texts either (let alone the guardians of the texts), even the texts that have delivered the best insight.