dan2100

This almost sounds like treating a person like a robot. I have doubts about an analysis that doesn't include emotional factors. No, I don't think it does, quite the contrary. It separates fact from speculation quite nicely. I think it's a very useful way of looking at human behaviour, emotional behaviour included. Dan is doing an excellent job of explaining this and I think this is an important idea. The idea here, and of course correct me if I'm wrong - it's been a little while since I've dug into this - is that we MUST limit ourselves to what we know - or at least our speculations cannot contradict what we know as fact. The motivations/ethics/psychology is still a black box, but the action is perfectly clear. We cannot take the alcoholic's word for it that he wants to stop drinking more than anything else when he cracks open another beer and chugs it. Regardless of what he says, it's his ACTION that tells us that he prefers to drink. See, this helps us understand on a more precise level that although he might VALUE sobriety and understands his destructive behaviour, he doesn't value sobriety enough to put up with the discomfort of getting there. In other words, the price is too high - at least right now. Now perhaps you can see the connection to Economics. Anyway, emotion or not is irrelevant, all we are doing is ordinally ranking a series of values as determined by ACTION, not words, not emotion, not psychology. Why the action was chosen is very deliberately NOT addressed. What it tells us is that A is valued over B if A was chosen, nothing more. Emotion, psychology, whatever can analyze further, but you cannot say that B is more valuable if when given the choice, you don't choose it. As Dan points out too, it's important to remember that choice indeed must be involved. We can't make a value judgment if there's no choice. There must be an A, B, C.... type of choice, or to act or not to act is also a choice. Bob Thanks Bob! I'm only relying on Mises and his Austrian commentators here. I think everyone should give his Human Action a go. I wanted to expand on costs. I think in Austrian economics the cost of any action is always what the actor imagines she or he is giving up -- not actually what's given up. In the case of our alcoholic friend, he's probably imagining the pain of not drinking, at the moment he decides to imbibe, is more than the pleasure he'll get from taking a drink. To expand on this a bit more, this also goes for actions we know for which they won't work at all. The alcoholic presumably succeeds in drinking -- even if that goes against his professed goal of sobriety and perhaps his long range plans of maybe maintaining his health and keeping his job or marriage. But what about purposive behavior we know won't actually work, such as -- borrowing an example often used in Austrian circles -- rain dances. Presumably, people do rain dances to bring on rain. It seems to be the case that rain dances have no actual causal relation to rain -- in other words, whether someone does a rain dance has no impact on whether it rains. Yet the rain dancer seem, obviously, to believe it causes rain. This explains why they do they dance and the economist can explain the rain dancer's actions in terms of the latter's preferences -- even if the former believes this will never work and is a total waste of time and effort; that it's, thereby, irrational in terms of how the world actually works. And the same economics applies to rain dancer as applies to investing money in weather forecasts or grain futures. In a sense, one might say, Mises and those of his school have managed to make a distinction that works in reality and, because of this, probably identifies a valid difference -- i.e., it cuts reality along lines that makes sense rather than merely imposing an arbitrary construct such as classical and neoclassical economists do with their models of human behavior.

In my opinion Objectivism's view on Emergency Situations is weak, but judge for yourself. I feel it'd be good starting place to evaluate whether Rand's view on the "ethics of emergencies" is really consistent with the rest of her views here -- rather than just accepting it as part of Objectivism. (And, in my mind, Objectivism is completely open to revision -- as is any philosophical system. Deciding whether the outcome of any revision is still Objectivism depends on what one means by the term. And all such systems and movements face issues of identity and integrity -- i.e., what alterations are possible that remain inside the pale and which ones push one definitely outside it. I don't have an easy formulaic answer for this... Of course, regardless, I think you'd want to know what the correct position to take on this -- rather than what's the Objectivist one, especially given your comments on this being a "weak" part of the system.)

This almost sounds like treating a person like a robot. I have doubts about an analysis that doesn't include emotional factors. I'd have to re-read Mises on this, but I don't think that was the idea -- to treat humans as robots. Rather, it was to isolate specific value considerations from economics -- to avoid economists judging ends or value and focus on describing the general features of human action. For instance, the law of supply and demand applies regardless of what values we plug in -- and regardless of what motivates people -- just as long as actors have values and much choose between values, the law applies. And, in my mind, this is a real gain -- or we end up with an economics constantly overlooking such laws because it's involved in lecturing people on their particular values. On this, see also Kirzner's The Economic Point of View. This title is available for perusal online at: http://all.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=304&Itemid=27

Very funny! I'll take that as a welcome to to the list.

I think one has to be careful about this. I agree that people often behave in ways that startle and surprise themselves. But in any situation this might be for many reasons -- and not just because they momentarily lost control. In fact, it might be that they selected an easier path or weren't aware of the correct course (or made earlier choices to avoid this -- as in people who don't look into something too deeply when they seem to know a conflict might arise). Also, altruism and self-sacrifice in Rand's terms would need a framework of specific objective values -- specifically, hierarchical ones -- to know when a sacrifice was being made. The problem here might be that what looks like a sacrifice to someone might not look like one to the supposed sacrificer. This doesn't mean it isn't, but one would have to verify this by looking into the aims and motives of the supposed sacrificer. You do mention this, but I just want to be clear that this might not be easy to do in many cases.

What about the effect of emotions in all this? I think in many cases one's emotional states are so overpowering that one can make choices that defy reason. We humans cannot separate reason from emotion completely and there are emotional factors in all our reasoning and our emotions are influenced by our reasoning. In example of the former is indicated in the saying "sleep on it" because why would sleeping on some idea help in the decision making process other than on an emotional level? Human action a la Mises would define action as purposive behavior without asking about what motivates that behavior. In this case, the only question would be whether a given behavior is purposive or not -- not whether it's ultimate motivation or goal defies reason in the everyday sense. For instance, imagine what's normally called an alcoholic. He says he doesn't want to drink and yet he drinks. In Misesean terms, he's got a goal inherent in his behavior -- that is, to drink. Hence, it's an action and even though it conflicts with his professed goals, it tells us something about his values -- that he values drinking over not drinking despite what he says to the contrary and even if he admits his value choice here doesn't make sense (e.g., it conflicts with both his other values and his professed goal of not drinking). Still, there might be states one is in where there's no choice involved whatsoever, but these tend to very rare and then I believe we're outside the scope of action: we're no longer talking purposive behavior but just plain old behavior. This is so when there are no imagined alternatives or when the actor literally has no control. (On the latter, thinking of the knee-jerk response.) Of course, in judging such behaviors, one might have to examine the wider context. Going back to the alcoholic example, it might that taking a single drink seems completely out of his choice, but the choice to go near a bar after he's stated he doesn't want to drink today seems to belie that. In fact, a thing people often do to control supposedly irresistable urges is to avoid situations where they'll arise. So, there's a meta-level action going on here: the person who might binge on potato chips doesn't keep them in her cupboard. She acts purposively to avoid putting herself in a situation where she might lose control.

Stephen's and my review of Kitcher's book is online at: http://objectivity-a...number6.html#55

Dan, You are right. I am moving it. btw - Welcome to OL. Michael Thanks for welcoming me and also for running an interesting site.

Dependent on context, it might or might not preclude it. I must also add that I don't believe Rand was completely consistent on this issue. This kind of harks back to the survivalist debate of the 1990s (viz., survival vs. flourishing). Sometimes she sounds like a survivalist (think of her more explicit statements on egoism and on using life as the standard of value) and sometimes she doesn't (think of her talk about the life of man as man and also her depictions of moral action in her novels and stories). That said, one must be careful here, especially in the context of discussions of Objectivism and Rand to be sure one explicitly states what one means by altruism and self-interest. This is no different were one to be discussing, say, "capitalism" amongst Marxists. In both cases, there are very definite views of the terms in play that'll likely trigger much more misunderstanding if one doesn't clearly define them up front. I'm sure you and most here agree.

I'm steppping into the middle of this discussion, but just reading this post, I think the difference is what one is defining a sacrifice in regards to. Rand's view, if I understand it correctly, is there are objective values and, what's more, there is a hierarchy of these objective values. So, a sacrifice in her terms would be giving up something of greater value for something of a lesser value (or, at the limit, of no value or negative value if such is imaginable) -- which is how Rand defined altruism too. Now, she doesn't posit that people automatically know these objective values, so from a Misesean approach -- i.e., looking at action without objective values -- one will see people simply acting -- i.e., pursuing their values and one might think an altruist act is not really a sacrifice. After all, someone is exchanging one situation for another -- and via the Mises view, the actor is always acting for a betterment. So, per Mises, it always looks like the actor is never sacrificing -- even if the end result either goes against objective values (per Rand and others who hold similar views of values) or later has regrets (in which case, the action was always directed toward betterment and so wasn't intended toward regret). (And Rand does define her concept of "value" neutrally as something which one acts to gain or keep. Thus, her concept of value doesn't presuppose her particular moral system. Instead, this is more a case of defining the term and her moral system would be a way of answering the question of what one should value. One can look at this as food for "rational reconstruction" -- as in one already has values and tries to rework them to make them more rational or objective.) And here one can and must distinguish, I think, between the Misesean economic point of view and the Randian moral point of view. In the former, I think sacrifice is literally defined out of existence -- or has no place. In the latter, it's a real thing but this in the context of an objective scale of values. (The fear some libertarians might have here is, of course, armed with an objective morality, some would want to enforce it. But that's another issue and a problem of overlooking the value of autonomy in action -- which, I believe, is an objective value.) Why is this topic under epistemology? I know it touches on it, but the core issue seems to fall more closely under ethics...

I have to go back to the book as I forget at this point. I started writing a review of it in 2006 and didn't complete that. What I've placed here is just culled from that. I also recommend Prinz's book on emotions, but that's a topic for another discussion -- one I hope we can have here soon. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I'm in midst of moving, so I had to retrieve my copy of Furnishing the Mind from my new library to more fully respond. Prinz does address the issue of logical connectives in chapter 7 "The Perceptual Basis." There he examines counterexamples, but it's more of a list of strategies for dealing with them -- concepts of logic (disjunction, etc.), mathematics, and other seemingly non-empirical ones -- than anything else. And, re-reading it very quickly this morning, he doesn't list a motor experience strategy. (A few years ago, I emailed Prinz regarding mathematical concepts -- specifically citing Kitcher's The Nature of Mathematical Knowledge and your and my review of that work, but I didn't get a substantive reply and he was unfamiliar with Kitcher's work.) He doesn't commit to any strategy in the end, but in this chapter is merely out to show that the counterexamples can be countered by some strategy rather than to settle on a particular one. I actually had some notes on his not using processes for his proxytype theory. I want to raise some of my criticisms later on this site, but three I think should be raised now is he doesn't deal explicitly with "abstractions from abstractions," he doesn't have perceptions of processes exactly down (which would give him the whole Kitcherian shebang, no?), and, at one point, he even goes so far to offer that "negation" might not be a concept (p183). This last seems like limiting scope -- one of his criteria -- to suit the theory.

The site to the Pledge states: "As a sovereign individual, I assert the exclusive right to my life, my liberty and my property, as guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution." This makes me believe the person who made up that site hasn't read or understood the U.S. Constitution. It's actually a means of limiting individual rights, particularly to life, liberty, and property.

Thank you, but don't you fear this praise might go to my head?

Thank you, though this is not so much an essay, so much as maybe the beginning of one -- of a review essay. I don't know how much further I'll get with this here. Also, I'm merely summarizing and commenting on Prinz's book -- not doing much intellectual heavy-lifting here. Regarding your "little nit," have you read Benacerraf's "What numbers could not be"? It seems to call into question set theoretic reductions -- despite the fact that they otherwise seem to work, are quite useful, and seem intuitively appealing. Regards, Dan

My understanding is conceptual empiricism -- under which proxytypes falls -- is a bit controversial in the field. I don't attend their conferences, so I'm only guessing this based on what I've read. Since some rivals to Prinz's theory can be empiricist, I don't think empiricism is completely out of fashion at this time. (Prinz's definition of concept empiricism is the view that "concepts are copies or combinations of perceptual representations." I don't think that would be controversial for Objectivists -- save for the use of "perceptual representations" which might make them think of representationalism a la Descartes.) The rivals I mean are things like prototype theory and exemplar theory. In prototype theory, concepts are formed from typical feature of members that fall under a concept. Think of a typical features of a dog -- such as having fur, barking, wagging its tail -- to build one's concept of "dog." You might gather where there's a problem with this view: what's typical to you might not be typical to me, yet it's likely both us use "dog" to mean the same thing. Exemplar theory is similar to prototype theory, but uses one or more examples of something to form the concept -- sort of like using your neighbor's dog to build your concept of dog. In this case, one might say, the examplars are literally stored in memory to use as the concept. Anyhow, rather than go into further detail, I think you can see these are both empiricist in outlook -- or that they mesh well with conceptual empiricism. And both these theories have their respective followings. Despite my starting this discussion off, I haven't mention what proxytypes are and how they differ from other views -- even the two I just mentioned. Let me save that for another post.

Thank you for your welcome. Regarding it being controversial, yes, I think it is, though Prinz does not appear to be influenced by the works or views of Deleuze. Instead, he seems to be harking back to the British empiricists, though updating their views in light of modern philosophy, linguistics, and science as well as the intervening period of criticism of those earlier views. He's not merely warming over, say, Locke and Hume. (I'm not a Deleuze scholar, but it seems to me like his epistemology is merely an afterthought to his ideology. Perhaps someone might correct me on this.)

Thanks Stephen! I hope my partial review makes sense.

What are concepts? Where do they come from? What do they do? How do they work and work together? Jesse J. Prinz’s Furnishing the Mind: Concepts and Their Perceptual Basis tries to answer these questions in light of modern epistemology, cognitive science, linguistics, psychology, and neuroscience. This broad approach to these problems challenges any reviewer coming to the task with less than an encyclopedic knowledge of these fields. Yet as Prinz seems to score highly both in defending his particular theory, proxytypes (it's unfortunate he uses "proxytype" as this will likely lead to some confusion with "prototype" – and prototype theory is a major rival to his proxytype theory), and concept empiricism in general, this reviewer, lacking such wide-ranging knowledge, will still make the attempt. The order of battle for Prinz starts with a set of criteria any viable theory of concepts would have to meet. Next, he measures other major theories against these criteria. After this, he presents his proxytype theory, evaluating in light of the criteria, prior theories, and evidence from many quarters. Let me just open this discussion by mentioning his six criteria – or "desiderata" as he calls them. They are a checklist a theory of concepts should pass. It’s possible no theory will close the field, but missing any of the six criteria, it seems, means a theory is not even in the running. The six are scope, intentional content, cognitive content, acquisition, categorization, compositionality, and publicity. Scope should be the easy one for the amateur philosopher: any theory of concepts should be able to handle all the various concepts posited. Of course, one way of special pleading for a theory is to redefine some alleged concepts as not the real McCoy. Prinz does do this and accepts the standard menu of concepts from "dog" to "electron" to "justice" to "disjunction." Any decent theory shouldn’t stumble on a concept like "virtue." (Later in the book, he backslides in one case. Cf. p183 where he states that "negation" might not be a concept. However, I see this as him stumbling and not his theory failing. Also, one might argue that a general theory of concepts has to meet this criterion, but a specialized one need not. While this seems a cogent reply, Prinz aims at a general theory of concepts and not one limited to, say, just concepts dealing directly with perception or with logical operations.) For concept empiricism, scope can be especially vexing. After all, beyond obviously "empirical" concepts, such as "dog" and "yellow," many concepts seem to have little empirical content, such as the aforementioned "disjunction" and "virtue" – not to mention "infinite," "transcendent," and "ghost." Philosophers like Ayn Rand might get away with "abstractions from abstractions," but different routes to different higher-level concepts make this harder to defend. (See Rand's ITOE 2/e, pp19-28.) Intentional content is a bit more technical. It is the notion that concept refers to something outside itself. In other words, the concept "dinosaur" refers to dinosaurs. (As one might guess, any form of concept empiricism will have at least some concepts that refer directly to experience, though wouldn't a non-empirical theory of concepts, e.g., Fodor's, do likewise?) Reference, though technical, seems easy compared to his criterion of cognitive content. Prinz relies on Gottlob Frege’s distinction between the sense and reference of a term. Simply put, Frege splits meaning into two components. One is what a term refers to – the thing picks out in the world. This is its reference. The other is what a term means as distinguished from other terms – for Prinz, what a concept’s content is that distinguishes it from other concepts. The archetypal example is having two terms for Venus – the Morning Star and the Evening Star. In Prinz’s view, this makes for differing cognitive content – different senses. Even though both terms mean Venus, they mean Venus in slightly different ways. Needless to say, for him, any theory of concepts would have to deal with this sort of cognitive content. (Here I must admit to being unconvinced by Prinz’s examples. I'm trying to work out my ideas on Frege's sense and reference, but that's a post for another time.) A decent theory must "ultimately support a plausible explanation of how concepts are acquired." (p8) Prinz thinks there are two parts to this criterion: one ontogenetic, the other phylogenic – one about how individual concepts are acquired, the other about how the conceptual faculty itself evolved. Some might stop with the ontogenetic side of the story – and, indeed, this seems to be where Rand stops. (In my view, Rand does not really present a phylogenic explanation of concepts, though she does offer that the conceptual faculty is humanity’s basic means of survival. This might seem to put her in the Darwinian camp, but she resists letting Darwinism intrude into philosophy.) One can heed the warning that wedding an epistemological theory too closely with specific evolutionary theories or findings could end in a faddish or simplistic explanation. As a purely practical matter, other might conflate this element of the theory with its essence and reject the whole theory if this element proves wrong. However, a theory of concepts should be able to either fit into the latest science or explain why it’s outside such science. (See Lionel Robbins' 1932 book An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science, chapter 5. Robbins argues that economics, like mathematics, should be above the particulars of empirical findings. See also Paul Benacerraf's 1965 paper "What numbers could not be" for why a set theoretic reduction of numbers doesn’t seem to actually reduce numbers to sets. In the same way, it appears other fields might be immune to such reductions. Whether this is a fatal blow to reductionism in general remains to be seen.) This aside, the ontogenetic part of the criterion seem uncontroversial: how an individual comes to acquire a concept needs to be explained. For Prinz, categorization encompasses "mechanisms for forming beliefs about what things fall under our concepts" and is, obviously, the "epistemic counterpart" to reference. (p9) Like acquisition, this has two different aspects: category identification and category production. The first refers to identifying the category to which something belongs – as in the choice: "True or false: canaries are birds." (p9) (This maps onto "extension" as usually understood. Simply put, a concept’s extension is "made up of all those entities… which fall under the concept." Flew A Dictionary of Philosophy, p117.) The second is "intension" – which properties make up a category, such as "having feathers" for birds. In other words, while identification is about whether something belongs to a category – whether a canary is a bird – production is about why it belongs – the things that make birds birds. Here Prinz mentions typicality – that more typical members of a category are easier to categorize. He also observes that mid-level concepts are "privileged" in many instances. He uses the example of classifying an object as a "dog" – rather than a "rottweiler" or a "mammal." (p10) (It seems this is the case because of context and unit economy – two key concepts from Rand. Most people would acquire “dog” earlier and use it more often because this usually and quickly identifies the object in everyday life. A dog will likely be among other pets or things, but not always other dogs. Thus, it’s economical to point to the neighbor’s dog – rather than the neighbor’s pet or the neighbor’s animal, or the neighbor’s rottweiler – in most circumstances. See also pp163-4.) Compositionality means the ability to combine concepts together. Hume’s "golden mountain" is the classic example. (Hume An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Prinz does not bring up the golden mountain example at this point, but does in the next chapter when discussing Hume’s "imagism.") A good theory of concepts should account for this capability – indeed for its "hyperfertility" as Prinz aptly puts it. Publicity is the ability for different people to share the same concepts. (Prinz also adds the ability for one person to hold the same concept across time – something he later elaborates on when discussing memory.) There’s room for much debate here, though his point seems valid: any decent theory would have to explain this feature of concepts. (A point of contention is deciding when two people actually share the same concept. If your concept of "fish" includes whales while mine doesn’t, are we really sharing the concept of fish? The same applies to deciding when one person actually has the same concept at different times. If you held a concept of "fish" that included whales yesterday, but today you’ve been enlightened so as to exclude whales, do you really have the same concept on both days? These examples might seem to be purely nit picking, but until two people do extensive note trading, how can they be sure that any of their concepts are really shared? The same goes for the single individual: How can she be sure any of her concepts are the same from one day to the next?) Prinz considers sharing along conceptual and intentional lines as well – and the use of sharing in explaining linguistic communication and behavior. I believe that's enough to chew on for now -- rather than extend this out to be a full length review. Comments?