Bill

In replying to Daniel Barnes, I wrote, Ellen Stuttle replied, There's more to it than that. The geocentric theory asserted that from a certain astronomical perspective, the sun actually revolved around the earth, when in fact, it did not. In any case, this is a side issue that is not relevant to the point that Daniel was making and to which I was responding. I was simply replying to his example of a newly discovered truth replacing a previously accepted falsehood. The falsehood is the idea that the sun revolves around the earth; the truth, that the earth revolves around the sun. He was arguing that it's always possible for newly discovered facts to overturn any theory that has supposedly been established as true. I was asking him if he really believed that new facts might disprove the theory that the earth revolves around the sun. Ellen replied, That depends on what is meant by "evidence." If all the swans I've seen are white, is that a case in which all the evidence supports the theory that all swans are white and none contradicts it? No, because the fact that all the swans I've seen are white is not evidence that all swans are white. It is simply evidence that all the swans I've seen are white. We cannot therefore prove that all swans are white simply from observing nothing but white swans, not because we cannot prove, but can only disprove, a universal affirmative, but because observing nothing but white swans is not evidence that all swans are white. (Of course, we know now that there are indeed black swans.) Consider the statement, "All swans have webbed feat and a long, slender neck." Here we have a universal statement for which we do have positive proof. It's not just that we are justified in claiming this statement as not disproved; we are justified in claiming it as proved, because an aquatic bird without these characteristics would not be a swan. Consider also the statement, "Some swans are blue." Are we justified in claiming this statement as true if all of the evidence supports it and none contradicts? Or are we only justified in claiming it as not disproven? What would it mean to "disprove" the statement, "Some swans are blue"? To disprove it, one would have to prove that no swans are blue. But how does one prove that no swans are blue? Of course, it's impossible to prove that no swans are blue, because the failure to observe a blue swan does not mean there aren't any. But it's easy to prove that "Some swans are blue." All that's necessary is to observe at least one blue swan. So in this case, as well, one can say that the statement is true if all of the evidence supports it and none contradicts. In other words, one can prove the statement true. What one cannot do is disprove it.

"Simultaneously" has little, if anything to do with the issue. All it means is you are not contradicting yourself outright. A contradiction is a contradiction, regardless of when you do it. The fact that you say something is "absolutely true" one day, and then its opposite is "absolutely true" the next shows how low the bar is set for your standards of both "truth" and "absoluteness." That this situation arises, as I have said before, is because the Randian theory is simply oxymoronic - that is self-contradictory - in the first place. The point I was making is that you can be justified in claiming something to be true, even if it is false, if you have no evidence that it's false. Later, when you discover evidence falsifying it, you are justified in claiming that it is false. Thus, you are justified initially in claiming it as true; then later, in claiming it as false. You are not contradicting yourself when you do this. You are simply correcting your initial judgment. For example, a jury can be justified in finding a defendant guilty, given the available evidence. Later, if new evidence is presented exonerating the defendant, they are justified in finding him not guilty. They are not contradicting themselves when they do this; they are simply correcting their previously mistaken judgment in light of new evidence. - Bill

Okay, Michael, I stand corrected on Rand's view of Greenspan. However, I don't think she would feel the same way today, given his most recent comments. Bill

Michael replied, Michael, I think what she meant is that when individuals form a government, they do so for the purpose of an orderly, legally defined enforcement and that it is during this process that they delegate their right of self-defense. That's not to say that every individual living under a government would make that delegation, but only that ideally he or she ought to. Rand is speaking of what a rational, politically enlightened person would do. That is to say, a rational, politically enlightened person chooses to delegate his or her right of self-defense to a government for the purpose of an orderly, legally defined enforcement. She would say that if you choose not to do so -- if you choose instead to take the law into your own hands, to form a lynch mob, and to become judge, jury and executioner -- then you are acting irrationally, and cannot justify such behavior. If every individual chose to enforce his own version of the law on anyone he thought to be violating it, every individual would become a de facto government with his or her own set of rules and would thus be in conflict with every other individual that had a different set of rules. The result would be a continual, ongoing state of civil war. It is for the purpose of avoiding this kind of chaos that the rational individual "delegates" his or her right of self-defense to a government. You're aware, of course, that Rand did not care for Greenspan as a person, and referred to him disparagingly as a "social climber," to which he replied that since everyone desires the approval of others [Hello!], everyone is, in a sense, a "social climber." How do you think Rand would have responded to that remark?! Greenspan has had the bully pulpit on a number of occasions and could have defended the Objectivist politics, but hasn't. Last week, I happened to catch the tail end of a segment on NPR in which he was being interviewed. Instead of defending capitalism, he said that resentment over income inequality under capitalism was a threat to the system and that although he wasn't comfortable with government redistributionist schemes, something needed to be done about this problem, if capitalism was to survive. What he should have done is stress that opposition to income inequality under capitalism rests on a false egalitarian premise that confuses equality of results with equality of rights. Under capitalism, people get what they earn, and if they earn more, they get more. Furthermore, because the productivity of labor is so much higher under capitalism, even those who are modestly productive can be very well off relative to what they would have been under socialism or welfare statism. Relative poverty should not be confused with absolute poverty, for under capitalism, as the rich get richer, the poor get richer. These are the kind of points that Greenspan should stressed instead of simply saying that "something" needed to be done about people's resentment over income inequality, but that he didn't think redistributionist schemes were the answer. In his book, he says that more education is needed to alleviate this kind of resentment, but he didn't come close to providing it in the NPR interview, when he had the opportunity. He simply soft-pedaled his opposition to government redistribution, saying that it was an undesirable solution and that he hoped others could be found. Instead, he should have come out strongly against it as a confiscation of people's wealth and a gross violation of their rights. If he's really serious about solving the problem through "education," then the education should start with him. He should be forthright in denouncing such schemes and explaining why they are wrong. There is, of course, a reason why Greenspan failed to give laissez-faire capitalism the defense it deserves. He no longer believes in it.

In his book The Age of Turbulence, Alan Greenspan talks of his association with Ayn Rand and her philosophy, Objectivism. He writes, “One contradiction I found particularly enlightening. According to objectivist precepts, taxation was immoral because it allowed for government appropriation of private property by force. Yet if taxation was wrong, how could you reliably finance the essential functions of government, including the protection of individual's rights through police power? The Randian answer, that those who rationally saw the need for government would contribute voluntarily was inadequate. People have free will; suppose they refused?" Greenspan neglects to mention that, during the very time he was associated with her (1964), Rand wrote an article entitled “Government Financing in a Free Society,” (reprinted in The Virtue of Selfishness) in which she proposed a voluntary system of fees for protection of contracts as a possible alternative to taxation. Under this proposal, people would have an incentive to contribute money to the government, if they wanted the courts to uphold their contracts. Other practical methods of voluntary financing have also been proposed, and Greenspan is well aware of them. Yet he has chosen to ignore them and to pretend that the only way to ensure government funding is to violate people’s property rights. And speaking of “contradictions,” how does one justify violating rights for the sake of protecting them? This is so obvious a contradiction that no one with Mr. Greenspan's intelligence and background could honestly plead ignorance of it. Moreover, taxation isn't wrong simply because it violates rights (although it does that), nor is it wrong simply because it contradicts the purpose for which the taxes are being levied (although it does that). It is wrong for a far more serious and fundamental reason. It is wrong because it betrays the very purpose for the government's existence in the first place! In that respect, it is even worse than the theft from which it claims to offer us protection. Quoting Thomas Jefferson in The Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable rights, that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . ." (Emphasis added) Governments are instituted to secure these rights, not to violate them! There might be some excuse for endorsing taxation if one had never been introduced to these ideas in the first place. There is none for a man of Greenspan’s knowledge and sophistication.

What do you mean by saying that “there is always the possibility new facts and events outside of our experience will disprove our theory?” Suppose that no new facts will disprove the theory that the earth revolves around the sun. In that case, is it still “possible” that new facts will disprove it? No, because in that case, it’s impossible. But then how can you say that there is always the possibility that new facts will disprove it? Clearly, you cannot. You can say it only if there is some reason to doubt the theory — some evidence to think that it might be false. I don’t think Rand would say that we can know P, but that P may be false. She would say that if there is some reason to doubt P — some reason to believe that P may be false — then we cannot claim to know P. Yes, it turned out to be false, but only in relation to our discovery that in fact the earth revolves around the sun. If we couldn’t say that our present theory were true, we couldn’t say that our previous theory is false. Yes, we are absolutely certain of it, because we have no reason to doubt it. Do you think there is some reason to doubt that the earth revolves around the sun? Not simultaneously. We are justified in claiming a theory as true, if all the evidence supports and none contradicts. But once there is evidence disproving it, we can no longer claim it as true. We can claim that we thought it was true and that we were justified (within the context of our knowledge) in thinking so, but we cannot claim that it was true. It was certainly false to say that the sun revolves around the earth, even though we were justified in saying so based on the evidence available to us at the time. But we are no longer justified in saying so, because we now have evidence disproving it. We are never justified in simultaneously claiming opposite theories as true. [Moderator's note: I used my handy-dandy editing powers to fix Bill's formatting so that the quotations showed up properly. Otherwise, his post is as he submitted it....reb, 9/24/07]

In replying to Dragonfly, I quoted Peikoff as follows: In one sense, no truths are "analytic." No proposition can be validated merely by "conceptual analysis"; the content of the concept--i.e., the characteristics of the existents it integrates--must be discovered and validated by observation, before any "analysis" is possible. In a post of February 1st, Dragonfly replied, That's just wrong. If you define ice as the solid form of water, it follows logically that ice is a solid, even if ice wouldn't exist at all in the real world. It is a logical truth that is independent of the real world, just as a mathematical statement is independent of the real world." A proposition is true if it corresponds to reality. This applies to mathematical statements as well. The proposition "2 + 2 = 4" is true, because it corresponds to the fact that any two units of a specific kind added to any other two units of that kind equal four units of that kind. In other words, it refers to the fact that || + || = ||||. A statement that says nothing about the world is neither true nor false; it is meaningless. Supposing, to take your example, that ice couldn't exist in the real world -- that water were incapable of freezing -- but that you had decided to call an imaginary form of solid water by the term "ice," then if you said, "Ice is a solid form of water," you'd be referring simply to the fact that the term "ice" is a name that you are using to symbolize an imaginary form of solid water. Your statement would then be true, only insofar as it is a fact that you have chosen the term "ice" to refer to such an imaginary entity. But you would have to have validated that by experience, for if you had not chosen the term "ice" to symbolize it -- if, instead, you had chosen the term "fire" -- your statement would be false. So you still have to refer to the real world -- to the fact that you have actually, in reality, chosen to use the term "ice" to symbolize that imaginary referent, because your choice of terminology is really what your statement refers to in this case. Continuing with Peikoff's quoted statement: In another sense, all truths are "analytic." When some characteristic of an entity has been discovered, the proposition ascribing it to the entity will be seen to be "logically true" (its opposite would contradict the meaning of the concept designating the entity). (IOE, 101) To which you replied: And there Peikoff is dead wrong, he just doesn't understand what logic means and he confuses a definition of the concept with the concept itself. On the contrary, it is your objection that fails to distinguish the definition of the concept from the concept itself. Peikoff does make that distinction, since according to Objectivism, a definition incorporates only an entity’s essential characteristics, whereas the concept itself incorporates all of the entity’s characteristics. In logic you have to define the elements of a proposition, before you can conclude whether the proposition is true or false. Now, if you include that characteristic in the definition of the concept, it will follow logically from that definition that the proposition "[that concept] does have that characteristic" is true. But you don't have to include it in the definition of the concept in order for it to be a logically necessary part of the concept. Once again, a definition of a concept names only the essential characteristics of the entity, not every characteristic. If something is a characteristic of the entity, then a proposition ascribing that characteristic to the entity will be logically true, because its opposite would contradict the meaning of the concept designating the entity. Peikoff tries to circumvent this by saying that the concept subsumes and includes all its characteristics, known and not-yet-known. But in that case the concept is unknowable as we never can be 100% certain that a certain characteristic will be part of that concept. To say that the concept includes all of its characteristics known and not-yet-known is not to say that the concept is unknowable. I don't have to know everything about the units of a concept in order to understand it. For example, I know what the concept "strawberry" means and refers to, namely, a certain red berry. The concept "strawberry" refers to that particular fruit, including all of its characteristics, even the ones I'm not familiar with. It won't do to say that the term "strawberry" refers only to those characteristics of the strawberry that I'm familiar with and not those that I'm unfamiliar with, for it refers to the fruit, and the fruit is all of its characteristics, even the ones I'm not aware of (like the ability, say, to reduce vascular inflammation). So one of the elements of that proposition is unknown, which means that you can't conclude logically that the proposition is true. I don't follow you. I can conclude that the proposition "Strawberries are red" is true, because I've seen what they look like. The fact that strawberries have properties that I'm not yet aware of does not alter the truth of that statement. I wrote, Are you serious? Ice is simply an example, and he's talking about normal ice, not very high density ice. Can't you see that?? You replied, No, I can't see that. Where does he say that he's only talking about "normal" ice? Do you really think that he was talking about high density ice that sinks in water? Seriously! :-) He's so sloppy in his argument that he even doesn't give a definition of ice. Does he have to? Do you really think that anyone besides yourself thought that he might be referring to high density ice? Do you think that Peikoff or the average reader is even aware of such a thing? I assume that (at least at the time he wrote that article) he would have agreed with the definition "ice is the solid form of water". Well, that definition includes all forms of solid water. There appear to be 13 different possible crystal structures for solid water. Some of them will be common, others rare, but as long as you don't explicitly state in your definition of "ice" which of these you'll call ice and which not, we can't assume that one of them is not ice. In discussing logical propositions you have to be exact in your definitions! What you're trying to do here is to smuggle an extra characteristic into the definition: "ice is a solid form of water that does not sink in water". As long as Peikoff hadn't known that some solid form of water would sink in water, he'd no doubt have had no objections against the general definition of ice as the solid form of water, as he would have thought that "not sinking in water" was an analytical truth about ice in general. But here you see clearly the difference between an analytical truth and a synthetic "truth". The latter represents tentative knowledge. What do you mean -- "tentative knowledge”? The knowledge that normal ice, which is what Peikoff is referring to, floats on water is not tentative; it's an observable fact. Peikoff may define this kind of ice as "solid water," because he's unfamiliar with high-density ice. But as soon as he becomes familliar with it, he will have to revise his definition of normal ice to "solid water that floats." But that doesn't alter the fact that his knowledge that normal ice floats on water is logically true insofar as its denial is self-contradictory. A child who sees flying birds might define them as "things that move through the air," in order to distinguish them from things that he is aware of on the ground. But once he discovers kites, he will have to revise his definition to "things that fly under their own power" in order to distinguish flying birds from kites. Does that mean that his knowledge that these creatures fly through the air is "tentative"? No, it is still logically true, because its denial is self-contradictory. And, of course, once he discovers airplanes, he will have to revise his definition even further to "a living entity that has wings and can fly" in order to distinguish birds from airplanes. But his knowledge that birds fly will still be logically true, because its denial is, again, self-contradictory. And once he discovers moths and other flying insects...well, you get the idea. The fact that there is no logical stopping point at which our definitions of a concept will no longer require revision does not mean that our knowledge of the concept is not logically true. Nor does it mean that in each of these succeeding stages of revision, our definition is not valid or appropriate for the state of our knowledge at the time. We may once have thought that all forms of solid water, which we call "ice", will float on water, but it has turned out not to be the case. Now you may try to repair this "anomaly" by changing the definition of ice, but that's what I've been saying all along. You can't replace an exact definition by an unknowable concept to conclude if a proposition is true or false. As we have seen, the child's definition of ‘flying bird' was exact at every stage, because it was sufficient to distinguish these creatures from the rest of his knowledge. The same can be said for our definition of normal ice, as it is revised from "solid water" to "solid water that floats." Both definitions are exact for their respective times and contexts of knowledge. We were entirely correct in thinking that normal ice floats on water. We did not think that all forms of ice (including high-density ice) float on water, because we were not aware of all forms of ice. We were aware only of normal ice, and were correct in thinking that all ice of that kind floats on water. - Bill

In his criticism of Piekoff's essay on the analytic-synthetic dichotomy, Cal writes: Peikoffs conclusion is then that it isn't possible to distinguish between analytical and synthetic statements, as any characteristic that is deemed a synthetic truth (like: "ice floats on water"), is already part of the concept itself, so it follows logically from the definition of ice. Peikoff's position is not that any characteristic of ice "follows logically from the definition of ice." It's that any characteristic of ice is part of the concept of ice, which I think is correct. Ice is whatever it is, and therefore includes whatever characteristics it has, even if we're not aware of them. This conclusion is fallacious, however. You may define concept to imply all the characteristics, known and yet-to-be-discovered, but a definition necessarily gives only a few essential characteristics. Peikoff silently assumes however that a limited definition of a concept automatically implies all the characteristics of that concept, even those that are still unknown. But a definition isn't the same as the concept, it's only a label on a box, it doesn't tell us what is in that box. If you want to equate the definition with the concept, you'll have to state all the properties of that concept explicitly in your definition. In that case you could say that any characteristic follows logically from the definition. But it is of course impossible to give such a complete definition, therefore the characteristics don't follow logically from that definition. You have to determine empirically what those characteristics are (get out of your armchair!).... This misrepresents Peikoff's view (See below). He would agree that a definition does not state all of the concept's characteristics, only the essential ones. Let us illustrate this with the ice example. Suppose you define ice as the solid form of water. A logical deduction from that definition would be "ice is a solid". But you can't logically deduce from that definition that ice floats on water. Who's talking about deducing from ice is a solid form of water that ice floats. Certainly not Peikoff! He writes, In one sense, no truths are "analytic." No proposition can be validated merely by "conceptual analysis"; the content of the concept--i.e., the characteristics of the existents it integrates--must be discovered and validated by observation, before any "analysis" is possible. In another sense, all truths are "analytic." When some characteristic of an entity has been discovered, the proposition ascribing it to the entity will be seen to be "logically true" (its opposite would contradict the meaning of the concept designating the entity). (IOE, 101) ...If that would be possible, one logical deduction would be that the statement "ice sinks in water" is wrong, right? Wrong! Ice can have 13 different types of crystal structure. One of them, very high density amorphous ice, in fact sinks in water. This shows the fallacy in Peikoff's reasoning... Are you serious? Ice is simply an example, and he's talking about normal ice, not very high density ice. Can't you see that?? If you want to refute Peikoff's article on the ASD, you're going to go do a lot better than this! - Bill