wiki: talk: Ayn Rand was not a philosopher.

[jts]

Seems to me Ayn Rand should be included in this list but she is not, today March 18, 2013. Maybe in the future she will be included. Press ctrl F and type 'ayn'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_female_philosophers

Click 'talk' to see a discussion of why Ayn Rand was not included.

Rand is an interesting case. While the few books on women in philosophy that I have read have ignored Rand, it seems that this is a hotly contested issue. It is true that her work was influenced by several philosophers including Nietzsche and Marx. In addition, she did write philosophical essays as well as her novels. I think the real problem lies in the content of her philosophy which is controversial. Do we accept her as a philosopher and, thus, give credence to her views or do we ignore her contributions and, thus, downgrade the value of her work? I think I'll let other wikipedians hash this out but I do find it interesting. I'm curious about the outcome.Dyname42 (talk) 15:31, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

By any objective academic standard Rand was not a philosopher. Her followers give her credit for insights/concepts she plagiarised from Aristotle, Nietzsche, Adam Smith and others. And her original contributions are easily dismissed by anyone with a decent grounding in philosophy. She is an American cultural phenomenon just like L Ron Hubbard. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 118.90.5.231 (talk) 00:19, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

So Ayn Rand was not a philosopher??

[jts]

But Ayn Rand is in this list.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_philosophers_born_in_the_twentieth_century#R

[Jonathan]

It's interesting that George Eliot is considered a philosopher but Rand is not.

J

[Brant Gaede]

This is silly, as if what passes as philosophy in academia isn't mostly crap. No one has ever claimed Rand was an academic, certainly not she.

--Brant

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I'm just now reading Ayn Rand Explained by Ron Merrill and Marsh Enright. Here is a quote that is pertinent--not to the Wikipedia entry, which to me is not worth bothering about, but to understanding the difference between Rand's way of doing philosophy and the academic way (p. 127):

She [Rand] was not, nor did she aspire to be, a scholarly or academic philosopher. Yet neither was she a mere populizer, re-writing and simplifying the ideas of others. Rand fits into a different tradition, that line of active thinkers who have learned from life and speak clearly to any intelligent man or woman.

So long as I am reading this book and quoting from it, here is another paragraph that jumped out at me. The reason is that I once got into an argument with someone--I think it was with Daniel Barnes of ARCHN)--where he claimed logic was only deductive reasoning. As I had never studied formal logic, I looked it up. I was flabbergasted. Throughout my entire life, I had considered logic to be made up of deductive and inductive reasoning. Now here was this dude telling me the coin only had one side, the other side didn't exist--and from what I read on researching it, he was right. At least others, including Aristotle (if I remember correctly), said so.

Whatever.

The gist of the argument with Daniel, though, like all such arguments with him, was that Rand was wrong, Rand was deluded, Rand didn't know what the hell she was talking about, yada yada yada. But there was more. As he is a Popper dude, he holds very little value in induction for arriving at truth. His bud Greg Nyquist claims openly that inductive reasoning doesn't exist at all.

And this leads me to The Logical Leap by David Harriman, with the "Introduction" and blessing of Peikoff, These dudes do it the other way around, where truth is based fundamentally on induction, deduction being the poor cousin in reasoning. I have this book but I haven't read it yet. I have only followed the online controversy--and I did listen to them both in a lecture series Peikoff released to the public on his DIM hypothesis before he wrote his book on that. So I am pretty sure their position is as I said.

in other words, one side says the hubba-hubba is deduction and induction sucks, and the other side says the hubba-hubba is induction and deduction sucks. (I'm talking fundamentals here. ) They slug it out with strawmen like they are fighting duels.

Well, I have always felt that this contest was silly--especially the bickering over which is more important, philosophy or science. I've tried to discuss it seriously several times, but I always got bored. It's like asking which part of a can is more fundamental, the top or bottom;.In my world, you need both philosophy and science because one without the other doesn't work very well, if at all. This bleeds and leads into the controversy about which is more important, deductive or inductive reasoning.

(yawn...)

But there's good news.

Here is what Rand wrote about the reasoning modes in what, I believe, was one of her most profound philosophical observations (it comes at the end of Chapter 3 of ITOE):

... the process of forming and applying concepts contains the essential pattern of two fundamental methods of cognition: induction and deduction.

The process of observing the facts of reality and of integrating them into concepts is, in essence, a process of induction. The process of subsuming new instances under a known concept is, in essence, a process of deduction.

It's odd because Rand just threw that in out of nowhere, then said no more about it. It's a shame, too. To my knowledge, she didn't elaborate on it elsewhere, either. But I was gratified to find this paragraph in Ayn Rand Explained (p. 137):

Deductive reasoning, we're told, can prove nothing that is not already implicit in the postulates assumed; inductive reasoning is at best statistical inference and can never be certain in its predictions.

Objectivism simply rejects the dichotomy. Reasoning, for Rand, is a means of comprehending reality. Inductive reasoning derives concepts from observations of facts; deductive reasoning subsumes new instances under known concepts. Like the two blades of a pair of scissors, these modes of thinking do together what neither can do alone.

It's odd, but that is what I understood in the beginning when I first came across Rand, albeit just barely. I had no words of my own for it back then. I had not thought it through. But still, my impression was this is what she meant and I agreed with it. Reasoning methods are not either-or. They work together.

After a long, long detour, after arguing and bickering up a storm with many different people (most of them highly intelligent), I now know for certain that this is the way I do think about induction and deduction. You need both to connect the reasoning part of your mind to reality and be certain of your knowledge.

Michael

[BaalChatzaf]

Logic is deductive. Reason is deductive, inductive and abductive along with some inspired guess work and disciplined gut feel.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Abductive reasoning seems to me like a thing academics do--i.e., making up a term where none is necessary.

However, since you have to use both inductive and deductive reasoning to make an educated guess (an abduction) and conform to all those little algebraic symbols academic logicians use, abductive is probably closer to the spirit of what Rand meant by logic than the silly ongoing "induction is best" versus "deduction is best" duel.

I just thought of something. If, instead of tacking abduction onto the induction-deduction divide, which is how it came into being with Pierce (from what little I have read on this, with emphasis on "little"), you went the other way and made a system where you derived induction and deduction from abduction, making them each a component of abduction, the silly divide goes away. You can even have certainty with abduction that way, i.e., when both the induction and the deduction are at their best in a problem, the abduction is certain. If the deductive part or the inductive part shows gaps, you get an educated guess instead of certainty.

Here's a metaphorical way of looking at it. Instead of tacking a human onto an isolated body and an isolated brain and calling the human imperfect, you can start with the human, claim it can be perfect or imperfect depending on what is missing or mangled, then notice it has a body and a brain.

Michael

[merjet]

Wikipedia explains how induction, deduction, and abduction differ.

[Selene]

It is interesting that "analogy" is rarely considered as a form of "argument/reasoning:"

Analogy (from Greek ἀναλογία, analogia, "proportion"^[1][2]) is a cognitive process of transferring information or meaning from a particular subject (the analogue or source) to another particular subject (the target), and a linguistic expression corresponding to such a process. In a narrower sense, analogy is an inference or an argument from one particular to another particular, as opposed to deduction, induction, and abduction, where at least one of the premises or the conclusion is general. The word analogy can also refer to the relation between the source and the target themselves, which is often, though not necessarily, a similarity, as in the biological notion of analogy.

Niels Bohr's model of the atom made an analogy between the atom and the solar system.

Analogy plays a significant role in problem solving such as, decision making, perception, memory, creativity, emotion, explanation and communication. It lies behind basic tasks such as the identification of places, objects and people, for example, in face perception and facial recognition systems. It has been argued that analogy is "the core of cognition".^[3] Specific analogical language comprises exemplification, comparisons, metaphors, similes, allegories, and parables, but not metonymy. Phrases like and so on, and the like, as if, and the very word like also rely on an analogical understanding by the receiver of a message including them. Analogy is important not only in ordinary language and common sense (where proverbs and idioms give many examples of its application) but also in science, philosophy and the humanities. The concepts of association, comparison, correspondence, mathematical and morphological homology, homomorphism, iconicity, isomorphism, metaphor, resemblance, and similarity are closely related to analogy. In cognitive linguistics, the notion of conceptual metaphor may be equivalent to that of analogy.

Analogy has been studied and discussed since classical antiquity by philosophers, scientists and lawyers. The last few decades have shown a renewed interest in analogy, most notably in cognitive science.

A...

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Wikipedia explains how induction, deduction, and abduction differ.

Merlin,

Heh,

I thought of posting this link, but I kept thinking with an explanation like that, who needs a strategy to keep non-technical people from asking what this has to do with real life?

My point is that Rand's value is in tying philosophy to real life as opposed to the equivalent of mental chess.

Michael