New Developments re Harriman Induction book

[sjw]

Let's say in the morass of extant statism one has to pick his battles and also say you are right about patents: isn't this issue a matter of not being very high up on any Objectivist priority list as opposed to EVIL? Patents yes or no? is one question. If no, that probably ends the discussion. If yes, there is the problem of distinguishing between ideas and things. I sure don't think ideas should be patented, but other than that I've hardly given the overall patent issue much thought except that the patent office is both confused and horribly backed up with applications because of defunding and arbitrary law divorced from the original philosophy. Everybody seems to be suing everybody regarding patent use and misuse. I suggest a less promiscuous use of "evil" until after a debate reveals it as a rational consequence of its advocacy. It's only valuable in that it reveals your personal conclusion, but most people, including Objectivists, simply haven't got there yet if they ever will. If you feel this strongly about patents you really should start a thread on it.

--Brant

Brant the primary issue here isn't patents, it's burden of proof. Before I call on goons to go bust into your house and take your stuff, I've got the burden of proving that you deserve it. If I can't prove you deserve it, then me calling on goons is EVIL.

Anyone supporting patents is calling on goons to go attack the 2nd inventor and take his property. Rand's silliness in CUI is not in any sense a proof of anything, and by definition, no Objectivist has any argument that goes beyond Rand. Ergo, they who advocate for patents are advocating evil. The only small little thing their small little minds have to grasp is the burden of proof idea, but once they get that, and they keep advocating patents, then they are evil.

Shayne

[Brant Gaede]

Let's say in the morass of extant statism one has to pick his battles and also say you are right about patents: isn't this issue a matter of not being very high up on any Objectivist priority list as opposed to EVIL? Patents yes or no? is one question. If no, that probably ends the discussion. If yes, there is the problem of distinguishing between ideas and things. I sure don't think ideas should be patented, but other than that I've hardly given the overall patent issue much thought except that the patent office is both confused and horribly backed up with applications because of defunding and arbitrary law divorced from the original philosophy. Everybody seems to be suing everybody regarding patent use and misuse. I suggest a less promiscuous use of "evil" until after a debate reveals it as a rational consequence of its advocacy. It's only valuable in that it reveals your personal conclusion, but most people, including Objectivists, simply haven't got there yet if they ever will. If you feel this strongly about patents you really should start a thread on it.

--Brant

Brant the primary issue here isn't patents, it's burden of proof. Before I call on goons to go bust into your house and take your stuff, I've got the burden of proving that you deserve it. If I can't prove you deserve it, then me calling on goons is EVIL.

Anyone supporting patents is calling on goons to go attack the 2nd inventor and take his property. Rand's silliness in CUI is not in any sense a proof of anything, and by definition, no Objectivist has any argument that goes beyond Rand. Ergo, they who advocate for patents are advocating evil. The only small little thing their small little minds have to grasp is the burden of proof idea, but once they get that, and they keep advocating patents, then they are evil.

This isn't a helpful way to explain ideas. It's obvious enough for the war on drugs, but this patent business is another degree or two of separation. I'm negligent in reading your book for a lack of time, but I'll go see if I can find anything on this there in spite of lack of an index. You must understand that bandying moral judgments around tends to spike discussions of ideas before they even get started, which means you are in serious danger of simply bring ignored. I know you don't want that or you wouldn't have written a book on individual rights.

--Brant

edit: Okay, that was quick thanks to your detailed table of contents. I see you are differentiating between natural and artificial rights and that patent rights are the latter, but that your view of patents is more complicated than I thought. More later.

--Brant

Edited September 11, 2010 by Brant Gaede

[sjw]

Let's say in the morass of extant statism one has to pick his battles and also say you are right about patents: isn't this issue a matter of not being very high up on any Objectivist priority list as opposed to EVIL? Patents yes or no? is one question. If no, that probably ends the discussion. If yes, there is the problem of distinguishing between ideas and things. I sure don't think ideas should be patented, but other than that I've hardly given the overall patent issue much thought except that the patent office is both confused and horribly backed up with applications because of defunding and arbitrary law divorced from the original philosophy. Everybody seems to be suing everybody regarding patent use and misuse. I suggest a less promiscuous use of "evil" until after a debate reveals it as a rational consequence of its advocacy. It's only valuable in that it reveals your personal conclusion, but most people, including Objectivists, simply haven't got there yet if they ever will. If you feel this strongly about patents you really should start a thread on it.

--Brant

Brant the primary issue here isn't patents, it's burden of proof. Before I call on goons to go bust into your house and take your stuff, I've got the burden of proving that you deserve it. If I can't prove you deserve it, then me calling on goons is EVIL.

Anyone supporting patents is calling on goons to go attack the 2nd inventor and take his property. Rand's silliness in CUI is not in any sense a proof of anything, and by definition, no Objectivist has any argument that goes beyond Rand. Ergo, they who advocate for patents are advocating evil. The only small little thing their small little minds have to grasp is the burden of proof idea, but once they get that, and they keep advocating patents, then they are evil.

This isn't a helpful way to explain ideas. It's obvious enough for the war on drugs, but this patent business is another degree or two of separation. I'm negligent in reading your book for a lack of time, but I'll go see if I can find anything on this there in spite of lack of an index. You must understand that bandying moral judgments around tends to spike discussions of ideas before they even get started, which means you are in serious danger of simply bring ignored. I know you don't want that or you wouldn't have written a book on individual rights.

--Brant

edit: Okay, that was quick thanks to your detailed table of contents. I see you are differentiating between natural and artificial rights and that patent rights are the latter, but that your view of patents is more complicated than I thought. More later.

--Brant

Brant the fundamental pattern that I'm highlighting here doesn't take a book to cover. And that is that before I use the State to attack you, I bear the burden of proving that such an attack is justified. That's a very simple point, or should be for Objectivists to grasp. Which in this situation means that the Objectivist advocating for patents bears the burden of proving that they are justified. It is really not very complicated: don't advocate *for* State power against an individual unless you are *certain* that your advocation isn't usurpation of individual rights.

You say it's not helpful to call someone evil when they break down the doors of innocents or justify the breaking down of doors. Well what do you suggest? How should we treat irrationalism/thuggery? Put a flower in the barrel of their guns? Play Ghandi? Tell them how much we love them though they know not what they do?

Shayne

[sjw]

edit: Okay, that was quick thanks to your detailed table of contents. I see you are differentiating between natural and artificial rights and that patent rights are the latter, but that your view of patents is more complicated than I thought. More later.

--Brant

My view on patents/copyrights is complicated so I tend not to want to get pulled into debate about it as a side issue. Essentially though a rational view of property acquisition reveals that patents -- being only an intention -- cannot be property. If we both think "hey that apple looks dandy, I think I'll go pick it tomorrow", then someone else beats us to it, we cannot then beat him, whining that "but I thought of it first!" This is obviously very simplified but it is the essential issue.

Shayne

[Robert Campbell]

Beliefs can express our personal preferences and casual opinions about unimportant matters. But this is not always the case: a belief can also convey a knowledge claim, a judgment as to the truth of a proposition. If I say, for example, that I believe in the existence of God, I am also claiming that the proposition "God exists" is true -- that God does exist in fact.

Because this kind of belief has a cognitive content, because it embodies a claim to know on the part of the believer, I shall call it a cognitive belief. A cognitive belief is one in which the believer affirms the truth of a proposition. And since to affirm the truth of a proposition is to claim that one knows it to be true, a believer must be willing to justify his cognitive belief if he wishes others to take it (and him) seriously.

It is the assumption that a believer can justify his cognitive beliefs that commands the attention of other people. If I say that I believe in the existence of God, while making no effort to justify this belief, I have merely reported on my subjective state of mind; and this psychological report, though it may be of interest to me and my friends, has no cognitive value. It is like saying, "I feel lucky today." If this is how I feel, good for me, but this feeling alone can oblige no one else to think or act differently than they would otherwise.

George,

In this excerpt from Why Atheism, you draw a bright line between beliefs that have "cognitive content" and those that do not.

Do you consider the distinction between having cognitive content and not having any to be dialogical? It comes across that way in this passage. What seems to matter is whether another person should pay attention to your expression of your belief, or consider himself or herself obliged to respond to it.

Notice, however, that as psychologists (and, for that matter, most philosophers) use the term, beliefs in general are cognitive. Otherwise your notion that you look better in red than in green might be true or false, but it won't have any consequences or implications that might be true or false—not even that if you look better in red than in green, you will necessarily look better in crimson than in chartreuse. And since your belief about looking better in red has no "cognitive content," presumably my pretending not to believe that you look ghastly in that crimson ensemble doesn't in any way qualify as lying, dissembling, or dodging—whereas it would if I accepted some claim that does have "cognitive content," but pretended that I didn't.

Peikoff's doctrine is (partly) dialogical in nature.

What's more, he claims that arbitrary assertions are "emotional effusions" without cognitive content, that not even the slightest effort at cognition plays a role in their generation. But how does the human mind succeed in producing such emotional effusions completely lacking in cognitive content? Peikoff's answer, as I understand it, is that arbitrary assertions are pure, unmediated expressions of non-thinking—but I don't see you proposing that casual personal opinions are all direct products of unmitigated irrationality.

Robert Campbell

[Robert Campbell]

Yes, the Objectivist doctrine of the arbitrary is quite correct and useful.

If people want to insist that arbitrary statements do have meanings all that is necessary is to distinguish between denotation and connotation. An arbitrary statement may have a connotation, but it lacks a denotation. It may elicit unintegrated thoughts in your mind, but it corresponds to nothing (or if so, only by chance, like a broken clock) in reality.

Ted,

There is a doctrine of the arbitrary that has been spelled out in some detail. See OPAR, Chapter 5. As stated, this doctrine is self-contradictory; it also contradicts Peikoff's previously stated views (in Chapter 1) on claims about the supernatural.

If you mean something else by "the Objectivist doctrine of the arbitrary" you ought to tell us what you have in mind. (It's of secondary interest, to me at least, whether it qualifies as an Objectivist doctrine or not.)

The distinction between denotation and connotation doesn't appear to be helpful here. If Peikoff says, "Gödel's Incompleteness theorem pertains only to proofs with a finite number of steps," his gross ignorance of the theorem and its context doesn't prevent his statement from denoting anything.

I might not have fully integrated my thoughts about the logic of hypothesis testing with my thoughts about the use of inferential statistics in hypothesis testing. It doesn't follow that when I say "When group means are being compared, the null hypothesis is the hypothesis that all groups were actually sampled from the same population with the same population mean," I am therefore asserting this statement arbitrarily.

George's formulation centers on the insignificance of one's casual opinions to others. You seem to be following Peikoff more closely in treating every purportedly arbitrary assertion as a product of disordered thinking.

Robert Campbell

[Robert Campbell]

Apparently, recruiting people into "35-year-old personal feuds and succession struggles" is not acceptable. Doing so for the benefit of one's position in two-to-three-year-old feuds and struggles, though, seems to be allowed.

The psychologizing and ungermane character sniping that you decry at ARI, and rightly so, are nonetheless appropriate for use with your own personal opponents? Don't you see the irony, and the rhetorical "poison," in this?

Steve,

The persons to whom Ms. Stuttle was lately kissing up were collaborators, with Diana Hsieh, in the project of trashing Chris Sciabarra. Most of that trashing took place on Lindsay Perigo's site, with active contributions from its owner and Jim Valliant.

And Jim Valliant, a member of Leonard Peikoff's personal entourage, published an entire book whose purpose was to keep 35-year-old feuds alive and to raise up new generations on the moral perfection of Ayn Rand, the Satanicity of TheBrandens, and the Papacy of Leonard the First and Only. Most recently, he's kept the flame alive by reminding Randians of their purported moral obligation not to "friend" other Randians on Facebook.

I could hardly blame you if you chose not to follow Ms. Stuttle's posts over at SOLOP, including those in which she mounted gratuitous, sometimes frankly preposterous, defenses of Mr. Valliant's conduct, and those in which she curried the favor of Mr. Perigo (the same Mr. Perigo whom she had previously disdained as a boor and an ignoramus). Or those that likened me to Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, and to a headless warrior.

But Ms. Stuttle has returned to activity here after SOLOP failed to pan out for her (and she failed to acknowledge, at least in this forum, that it had failed to pan out). I take her comments about physics seriously. But when she reverts to the preening and oneupmanship for which she has become notorious, I may occasionally take note of them as well.

If you have reasons to question my judgment of Ms. Stuttle's character and motives, feel free to put them forward. Without specifics, the charge of "psychologizing" merely signals disapproval on the part of the person bringing the charge.

Robert Campbell

[kiaer.ts]

Yes, the Objectivist doctrine of the arbitrary is quite correct and useful.

If people want to insist that arbitrary statements do have meanings all that is necessary is to distinguish between denotation and connotation. An arbitrary statement may have a connotation, but it lacks a denotation. It may elicit unintegrated thoughts in your mind, but it corresponds to nothing (or if so, only by chance, like a broken clock) in reality.

Ted,

There is a doctrine of the arbitrary that has been spelled out in some detail. See OPAR, Chapter 5. As stated, this doctrine is self-contradictory; it also contradicts Peikoff's previously stated views (in Chapter 1) on claims about the supernatural.

If you mean something else by "the Objectivist doctrine of the arbitrary" you ought to tell us what you have in mind. (It's of secondary interest, to me at least, whether it qualifies as an Objectivist doctrine or not.)

The distinction between denotation and connotation doesn't appear to be helpful here. If Peikoff says, "Gödel's Incompleteness theorem pertains only to proofs with a finite number of steps," his gross ignorance of the theorem and its context doesn't prevent his statement from denoting anything.

I might not have fully integrated my thoughts about the logic of hypothesis testing with my thoughts about the use of inferential statistics in hypothesis testing. It doesn't follow that when I say "When group means are being compared, the null hypothesis is the hypothesis that all groups were actually sampled from the same population with the same population mean," I am therefore asserting this statement arbitrarily.

George's formulation centers on the insignificance of one's casual opinions to others. You seem to be following Peikoff more closely in treating every purportedly arbitrary assertion as a product of disordered thinking.

Robert Campbell

I have read much of your criticisms of the doctrine. I usually simply let the statements pass without comment. Yes, I have read OPAR, but I inscribed the subtitle "Rand's Last Laugh" on it and gave it to a friend who said he wanted it, so I cannot refer to it directly. Any disagreements I had with Peikoff's presentation of the essential ideas were quibbles.

As for Goedel, his "proof" requires one to treat the sentence "this sentence is false" as a claim with import. I categorically deny that it has import. First, the word "this" is ambiguous - its actual reference is not an independent fact of reality - it depends upon the intentional state of the person asserting or assenting to it - and the fact that people can assert contradictions says nothing interesting. In other words, the proper response to someone who asserts that "this" sentence is false is to ask, which sentence? Second, I agree with Peikoff above that for a claim to be false it has to make some statement about some pre-existing, external reality. Statements are not intrinsically true or false - they are true or false about something. In other words, the proper response to someone who says that this sentence is false is to require him to unpack the implied relation and say: "This sentence is false about what?" Since there is no "about", the statement is void.

I realize that this is not exactly the doctrine of the arbitrary, per se. But Goedel's proof relies on the hearer making the incorrect and essentially arbitrary mistake of assuming that the sentence refers to some statement with a truth value.

To repeat my earlier point, I do believe that arbitrary sentences can be ascribed meaning in the connotative sense. You are correct to say that otherwise we could not identify them as arbitrary, we would rather ask what the person had meant by his having said what he said. But there is no moral requirement for us to pretend that he has denoted anything - indeed, it amounts to intellectual altruism to pretend that a person's arbitrary statement has import.

You may recall the O J Simpson trial. I had not read OPAR when it was in progress. I screamed at the screen in disgust that the judge was allowing the defense to make arbitrary assertions that the evidence could have been tampered with or that there could have been some Colombian drug dealers involved without presenting any evidence to support their claims. There is no other way to criticize such claims except as arbitrary. Ito's allowing them was a miscarriage of justice and a betrayal of centuries of proper jurisprudence. Nothing is a more dramatic proof of the abomination of allowing such claims entrance in the realm of thought.

[kiaer.ts]

Most recently, he's kept the flame alive by reminding Randians of their purported moral obligation not to "friend" other Randians on Facebook.

LOL! Will blunders never cease? Can you please provide the link? I have to see this for myself.

[Brant Gaede]

Let's say in the morass of extant statism one has to pick his battles and also say you are right about patents: isn't this issue a matter of not being very high up on any Objectivist priority list as opposed to EVIL? Patents yes or no? is one question. If no, that probably ends the discussion. If yes, there is the problem of distinguishing between ideas and things. I sure don't think ideas should be patented, but other than that I've hardly given the overall patent issue much thought except that the patent office is both confused and horribly backed up with applications because of defunding and arbitrary law divorced from the original philosophy. Everybody seems to be suing everybody regarding patent use and misuse. I suggest a less promiscuous use of "evil" until after a debate reveals it as a rational consequence of its advocacy. It's only valuable in that it reveals your personal conclusion, but most people, including Objectivists, simply haven't got there yet if they ever will. If you feel this strongly about patents you really should start a thread on it.

--Brant

Brant the primary issue here isn't patents, it's burden of proof. Before I call on goons to go bust into your house and take your stuff, I've got the burden of proving that you deserve it. If I can't prove you deserve it, then me calling on goons is EVIL.

Anyone supporting patents is calling on goons to go attack the 2nd inventor and take his property. Rand's silliness in CUI is not in any sense a proof of anything, and by definition, no Objectivist has any argument that goes beyond Rand. Ergo, they who advocate for patents are advocating evil. The only small little thing their small little minds have to grasp is the burden of proof idea, but once they get that, and they keep advocating patents, then they are evil.

This isn't a helpful way to explain ideas. It's obvious enough for the war on drugs, but this patent business is another degree or two of separation. I'm negligent in reading your book for a lack of time, but I'll go see if I can find anything on this there in spite of lack of an index. You must understand that bandying moral judgments around tends to spike discussions of ideas before they even get started, which means you are in serious danger of simply bring ignored. I know you don't want that or you wouldn't have written a book on individual rights.

--Brant

edit: Okay, that was quick thanks to your detailed table of contents. I see you are differentiating between natural and artificial rights and that patent rights are the latter, but that your view of patents is more complicated than I thought. More later.

--Brant

Brant the fundamental pattern that I'm highlighting here doesn't take a book to cover. And that is that before I use the State to attack you, I bear the burden of proving that such an attack is justified. That's a very simple point, or should be for Objectivists to grasp. Which in this situation means that the Objectivist advocating for patents bears the burden of proving that they are justified. It is really not very complicated: don't advocate *for* State power against an individual unless you are *certain* that your advocation isn't usurpation of individual rights.

You say it's not helpful to call someone evil when they break down the doors of innocents or justify the breaking down of doors. Well what do you suggest? How should we treat irrationalism/thuggery? Put a flower in the barrel of their guns? Play Ghandi? Tell them how much we love them though they know not what they do?

I appreciate you are absolutely sure in your suppositions on this issue, but you seem to have wrapped up rights and morality into one tight ball of a fist to the exclusion of ethics and philosophy generally and are implicitly demanding an end to ratiocination of any dialogue before it even gets started. Who wants to talk with you on the premise his position is evil? One could, maybe speciously, argue that your position is property theft and therefore evil too. Evil vs evil. This isn't right or good or valuable. What really gets lost is the deeper and broader philosophical implications of your intellectual approach. Take your use of "goons," for example. If the law is legitimate you cannot then justify sending in goons anyway, but when you refer to goons you are arguing that goons is an argument against the law itself as if there were a proper use of them; there isn't, except maybe in some kind of arcane and not-to-me-imaginable emergency.

To say the Objectivist position is wrong or evil on patents doesn't establish the correctness of your own position and ideas about patents, certainly not by using the inertia of attenuated logic left-over from your primary argument.

--Brant

Edited September 11, 2010 by Brant Gaede

[sjw]

I appreciate you are absolutely sure in your suppositions on this issue, but you seem to have wrapped up rights and morality into one tight ball of a fist to the exclusion of ethics and philosophy generally and are implicitly demanding an end to ratiocination of any dialogue before it even gets started. Who wants to talk with you on the premise his position is evil? One could, maybe speciously, argue that your position is property theft and therefore evil too. Evil vs evil. This isn't right or good or valuable. What really gets lost is the deeper and broader philosophical implications of your intellectual approach. Take your use of "goons," for example. If the law is legitimate you cannot then justify sending in goons anyway, but when you refer to goons you are arguing that goons is an argument against the law itself as if there were a proper use of them; there isn't, except maybe in some kind of arcane and not-to-me-imaginable emergency.

--Brant

Fascinating. I wonder why you don't argue with my premise that the burden of proof lies with the person ostensively projecting force against another. Yes there's a philosophic issue here. There is the issue of prima facie evidence vs. something that must be proven. If I see somebody hitting somebody over the head, or taking their stuff, then the prima facie case is that somebody is unjustifiably initiating force *unless* there is proof that such force was justified. This also can be analyzed and justified with prior reasoning. But I also expect that someone like you would already be on board with such things. But even if you weren't, I'd expect you'd ask how I get from point A to point B in my reasoning, instead of jumping to this weird meta-level where there's nothing I can say in answer but WTF. You seem to think it's complicated but you're not really highlighting where, and it's not useful for you to wage war on my entire outlook.

The problem is that I can't read minds. I don't know where in my logic you are getting lost. You have to tell me where. It's not helpful for you to wage war on me personally.

Shayne

[Brant Gaede]

Don't miss the edit I made, Shayne.

--Brant

we aren't yet talking about the same thing, that's all; we will be

[Ellen Stuttle]

[....] Here is part of my discussion from Why Atheism (pp. 46f).

[....] I happen to believe [...] that cats make better pets than dogs[...].

I'm guessing that that one was falsifiable.

Ellen

[George H. Smith]

[....] Here is part of my discussion from Why Atheism (pp. 46f).

[....] I happen to believe [...] that cats make better pets than dogs[...].

I'm guessing that that one was falsifiable.

Ellen

No, I just changed my mind.

Ghs

[sjw]

Don't miss the edit I made, Shayne.

--Brant

we aren't yet talking about the same thing, that's all; we will be

Well, my main point is about burden of proof. At the point where physical force is involved, the person who is prima facie initiating it bears the burden of proving that such force is justified. In the case of patents, all we observe is one inventor doing something, and another inventor doing something similar. No one can see any force being initiated. There's just seemingly free trade. And yet the first one (who filed paperwork with a State agent) jumps and points to a piece of paper to a government bureaucrat, and then we see police beating down the 2nd inventor's door. This State action demands explanation and proof. The State (and those supporting it) bear the burden of proof in this situation -- namely proof that the 2nd inventor is a thief -- not the 2nd inventor.

And is this proof forthcoming? No. Rand's defense is clearly a farce.

Shayne

[sjw]

I appreciate you are absolutely sure in your suppositions on this issue, but you seem to have wrapped up rights and morality into one tight ball of a fist to the exclusion of ethics and philosophy generally

Stating a conclusion one reached from ethics and philosophy does not imply excluding ethics and philosophy. I reached a conclusion, I give you the general gist of how I reached it, and expect that if it makes no sense to you that you'd say why. I can't preemptively figure out how much detail you happen to need in order to grasp an argument, particularly when we probably agree on much already.

Shayne

[Brant Gaede]

Well, Shayne, I think you should use one less space between your name and your post even though I don't think you're evil in the way you do do it.

--Brant

(Rand seems to have never hesitated to have one of her lawyers send out threatening letters)

[Ellen Stuttle]

Or those that likened me to Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, and to a headless warrior.

The likening him to a headless warrior indeed was a comparison made by me. The other was made by someone else, I forget who, whether it was Linz or someone else who posted companion photos. Robert then asked if I agreed that he was "the spittin' image of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad," as the poster described him, and I said that there is a resemblance in the photos.

I take her comments about physics seriously.

Interesting, since George doesn't.

Ellen

[Robert Campbell]

It was Lindsay Perigo who posted pictures of Khalid Sheikh Muhammand and me side by side.

On multiple occasions.

And only those who are tight with Mr. Perigo, or kissing up to him, ever refer to him as "Linz."

Robert Campbell

PS. Ms. Stuttle hasn't been hanging around SOLOP for a while now. Why not?

[George H. Smith]

And only those who are tight with Mr. Perigo, or kissing up to him, ever refer to him as "Linz."

During my brief sojourn on SOLOP some years ago, I sometimes referred to Perigo as "Lint." Was this acceptable?

Ghs

[Robert Campbell]

I have read much of your criticisms of the doctrine. I usually simply let the statements pass without comment. Yes, I have read OPAR, but I inscribed the subtitle "Rand's Last Laugh" on it and gave it to a friend who said he wanted it, so I cannot refer to it directly. Any disagreements I had with Peikoff's presentation of the essential ideas were quibbles.

Ted,

You may want to get another copy of Peikoff's opus. At least unless your "quibbles" included pointing out the ways in which Peikoff was contradicting himself.

As for Goedel, his "proof" requires one to treat the sentence "this sentence is false" as a claim with import. I categorically deny that it has import.

Do you know what Gödel's theorem was actually about? Or how his proof of it proceeded?

Also, are you familiar with Peikoff's statements regarding the theorem? (One of them is published in The Ominous Parallels.) What does Peikoff appear to believe that the therorem is about?

You may recall the O J Simpson trial. I had not read OPAR when it was in progress. I screamed at the screen in disgust that the judge was allowing the defense to make arbitrary assertions that the evidence could have been tampered with or that there could have been some Colombian drug dealers involved without presenting any evidence to support their claims. There is no other way to criticize such claims except as arbitrary. Ito's allowing them was a miscarriage of justice and a betrayal of centuries of proper jurisprudence. Nothing is a more dramatic proof of the abomination of allowing such claims entrance in the realm of thought.

The onus of proof principle predates Peikoff's doctrine of the arbitrary by many centuries. And it doesn't require anything like a doctrine of the arbitrary, either to explicate it or shore it up. It is simply one of many ingredients in Peikoff's big dirty snowball—or, if you prefer Randian language, his package-deal.

Robert Campbell

[Robert Campbell]

During my brief sojourn on SOLOP some years ago, I sometimes referred to Perigo as "Lint." Was this acceptable?

If memory serves, George, you also told Mr. Perigo that he had a "room temperature IQ."

Robert Campbell

[George H. Smith]

Or those that

I take her comments about physics seriously.

Interesting, since George doesn't.

Ellen

You know more about physics than any other housewife I have ever known.

Is a smiley face really necessary here?

Ghs

[Robert Campbell]

LOL! Will blunders never cease? Can you please provide the link? I have to see this for myself.

Ted,

See Jeff Smith's "Open Letter to Objectivists on FB"

http://www.facebook.com/notes/jeff-smith/open-letter-to-objectivists-on-fb-/455436245428

and note the comments thereon by one James Stevens Valliant.

Robert Campbell

[George H. Smith]

During my brief sojourn on SOLOP some years ago, I sometimes referred to Perigo as "Lint." Was this acceptable?

If memory serves, George, you also told Mr. Perigo that he had a "room temperature IQ."

Robert Campbell

If so, I must have been in a charitable mood.

Early on, during a heated debate with Valliant, Perigo, and others, I said that I didn't know how "you people" get through the day without stabbing yourselves in the face with a fork. This was before it became evident that I wouldn't be impressed by PARC, so I was tolerated.

Ghs