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Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (Mentor)

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This book is precisely what the title states. It is an "introduction" and as such is the gateway to Rand's theory of knowledge by way of her theory of concepts. Human knowledge is conceptual knowledge and Rand validates the objectivity of concepts by explaining, from the ground up, the method by which they are formed in the mind. The points she makes which seem misguided and arbitrary are cleared up in subsequent re-readings as long as the reader keeps in mind that once she defines a term, she does not deviate from its meaning. For most of us who are generally unsure about specific definitions of terms and rely on our feelings to give meaning to the words we read, discipline is required. For those who start with an axe to grind based on their disagreements with Rand's political philosophy, deliberate mis-interpretations of terms generally abound (as can be seen in most of the on-line reviews.) One such example is the damning of Rand over her claim to have solved the problem of "universals". In this context, this problem refers to the issue of the relationship between concepts and their perceptual referents; the HISTORICAL problem of universals. It is unfortunately too common to find those who are willing to drop this necessary context and argue against the Objectivist claim based on various meanings of the term universal, few of which are relevant to the issue at hand.

It is amusing to read disagreements of the Objectivist theory of concepts which are addressed and cleared up in the appendix. The appendix of the second edition of I to OE really is amazing. It is simply transcripts of round table discussions of professors who had read the original text presenting their questions and objections on finer points of epistemology. Rand was, apparently, at her intellectual pinnacle at this point, and any potentially hazy points are clarified beyond question.

The criticism that this is not presented in as scholarly a way as an epistemological monograph should be has its merits. The preface clearly states that main work is a reprint of a series of articles in which Rand presented her theory of concept formation. I certainly would have preferred a more scholastic presentation and a deeper exploration of the background of certain ideas, but this was Rand's style. She did not "write down" to her readers and her writing requires objective truth seekers to do their own research. I have, on multiple occasions, encountered the criticism that a reader was left wondering what Bertrand Russell was attempting to "perpetrate" in his theory of numbers. After encountering this passage I went to a philosophy text and read a passage describing Russell's theory of numbers as an attempt to create a purely logical language which would allow one to understand numbers without relating them to their perceptual referents. Since Rand demonstrates that concepts are valid within the context of the totality of human consciousness, and that abstractions must be derived primarily from their perceptual referents (numbers, specifically, are covered) which form their fundamental context, the dismissal of Russell stands.

For those who are familiar with Rand only from Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, this is a fascinating opportunity to understand the underlying support of a novelist's reasoning process, rarely made this explicit.

This is the clearest exposition of the most important problem in epistemology: the problem of universals. Most philosophers have believed that the meaning of concepts are not derived from sense perception. The Platonists and religious philosophers such as Augustine believe that concepts come from pre-existing forms, which are revelations from the highest form God. The Sophists, nominalists, and other secular philosophers such as Kant believe concepts are inventions of the mind and do not correspond to reality. Rand argues persuasively that a concept (or universal) is not synonymous with its definition, but an organization of an entire class of existents, our defintion of it changing as we learn more about the similarities of this class. For instance, the concept of "atom" has changed a lot from the Ancient Greeks through Dalton to the present day; but this change in defintion was not arbitrary. The scientists were responding to their observations, and the more they learned about atoms, the more they were obliged to change the definition of atom in accordance with their new understanding. Rand recognizes her debt to Aristotle in epistemology, but also points out flaws in Aristotle's theory of universals, and how these flaws were relentlessly exposed by philosophers eager to attack reason and promote faith, brute feeling, and other forms of irrationality. Most philosophy in the modern period is very abstruse, obscure, and incoherent; this book, by contrast, presents the issue very clearly.

Philosophy has traditionally (since the nineteenth century) been the province of "intellectuals", religious Pooh-Bahs and the like who seem to derive some sort of perverse pleasure out of constructing riddles out of real-world moral and ethical questions. As Rand herself put it, "The men who are not interested in philosophy need it most urgently: they are most helplessly in its power. The men who are not interested in philosophy absorb its principles from the cultural atmosphere around them from schools, colleges, books, magazines, newspapers, movies, television, etc. Who sets the tone of a culture? A small handful of men: the philosophers. Others follow their lead, either by conviction or by default." This book explains the fundamentals of Objectivism it's shared roots (Aristotle's) and it's opposition (Mysticism, Kant, etc.). It's not an easy read, but the author doesn't talk down to the reader and it is readily understandable by someone with a high-school education. I wouldn't recommend this book for folks who are new to philosophy as it requires some background knowledge. For this I would recommend Rand's wonderful introduction (to philosophy in general and Objectivism specifically) entitled "Philosophy, Who Needs It?"

To defend the validity and objectivity of reason, one must defend the validity and objectivity of concepts (abstract ideas). To defend concepts, one must show how they are formed from perceived concretes and what they refer to in reality. Historically, this is known as the "problem of universals."
In this seminal work, Ayn Rand offers a new, mathematically based theory of how concepts are formed and what they refer to.
The essence of her theory is that "similarity is the relationship between two or more existents which possess the same characteristic(s), but in different measure or degree." The link between the mathematical concepts of "unit" and "measurement" is the framework for her definition of "concept": "A concept is a mental integration of two or more units possessing the same distinguishing characteristic(s), with their particular measurements omitted."
This new, expanded edition features a 200-page appendix which transcribes a fascinating dialogue between Ayn Rand and some 14 professors of philosophy and science questioning her on every aspect of her theory, plus an article by her associate, philosopher Leonard Peikoff, using her theory of a concept's meaning to blast the so-called "analytic"-"synthetic" distinction of modern philosophy.
Though written unusually clearly, this book is rather technical and is thus not intended as an introduction to Ayn Rand's philosophy, Objectivism. For that, one should read, first _Atlas Shrugged_ and then _The Virtue of Selfishness_ or _Philosophy: Who Needs It_.

So many of these reviews complain that 'Ms. Rand claims that she has solved the problem of universals, but universals are a problem
of metaphysics, not epistimology'

Imagine a group of doctors standing around a patient, trying to figure out what is wrong with the patients nose, because he has complained that he has a problem breathing. They've examined his nose, looked up inside it, probed it, tested it, but none of them can solve the problem.

Then some competent young doctor happens by the scene, observes the activity, and declares, 'This man has a problem with his lungs, which can be treated by a particular operation I know.'

The doctor performs the operation, and the patient says, 'Thank You!! I can breathe properly now!', to which the group of doctors replies, 'He didn't really solve anything. It was a problem of the nose.'

Of all Ayn Rand's own expository works that I've yet read, this is the most well-organized. As always, she treats the subject matter with a level of lucidity that I only came to fully appreciate after reading the works of other philosophers. The degree of precision -- and concision -- with which she treats every important topic is simply astounding. Her ability to isolate the essentials of any issue is displayed brilliantly in this book. Her theory of concepts, and her entire philosophy, is groundbreaking.

There are those who would detract from her towering achievement based on the questionable behavior of a few of her "followers"; however, the behavior of individuals has no bearing on the validity of her ideas. I highly recommend this book.

Some people tell you to think. Many more will you what to think. In this book, Ayn Rand discusses how to think (epistemology is the study of knowledge/thinking). This is an absolutely imperative question, because unlike the lungs or the heart, the mind does not function automatically. Fortunately, this book does a great job of explaining every aspect of thought from concept formation to the role of language to the need for abstractions. The book also describes three basic axioms (existence, identity, and consciousness) and shows how any attempt to disprove an axiom must in fact rely on that axiom, and thus is self-defeating.

My biggest question after reading this, was how was this not included in my (and everyone's) schooling? It's one thing for schools not to present Ayn Rand's epistemology, but no school (before college) I am aware of presents ANY epistemology. That more than any other statement shows the poor state of modern academia.

My main interest in philosophy has always been with epistemology, because many years ago, after some exposure to the physical sciences at the college level, I came to the conclusion that most of the difference between a great thinker and a mediocre one is not innate ability, but method. I ran into a volume of Descartes and while I immediately dismissed such famous works as the one in which he boldly unearths evidence for deities from the depths of his consciousness, I was interested in an earlier work, "Rules for the Application Of the Mind", which appeared to me to be an intriguing attempt to define a general problem solving method. When I actually tried to apply these ideas, however, they did not work, because while there were some interesting points (such as the discussion of the need to automatize logical connections), the fundamentals were all wrong. I did not find this out until I read what I now consider to be the greatest epistemological achievement of the last two thousand years.

Every sentence in Ayn Rand's "Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology" has the precision, economy, and practicality of a mathematical theorem. I have been reading it for years,
and yet I still find ideas that are unebelievably penetrating and important. I have learned how to introspect and examine the progress of my thoughts, how to condense increasingly large amounts of knowledge, and how to call upon them at will to solve problems, the importance of definitions for the end of organizing this knowledge, the step-by-step reduction of knowledge to sensory evidence thus guaranteeing certainty, and much more.

Now let me sweep aside that category of comments made by schoolboys who think that evaluating a philosopher consists of grafting her ideas onto their accepted premises and then condemning the result, as though one could blame a horse for not being able to run a race after its head has been planted on the body of a pig. It is unbelievable to me that someone would read this work, then criticize it by saying, in effect: "This does not solve the problem of the universals, because what we are looking for is something that either demonstrates that there is 'horseness' out there in reality, in horses, or something that shows that 'horseness' is arbitrarily made up". This amounts to treating philosophy as a 'ruler-and-compasses' sort of game, in which facts of reality are replaced by chess-like conventions. Geometers tried for centuries to "square the circle" using ruler and compasses, until it was proven that their basic assumption was wrong, and that such a thing could not be done.

Unanswerable objections have historically been posed to the main existing viewpoints on universals. He who says that "animality" and "planthood" exist in reality cannot say exactly where animality ends and planthood begins (consider some primitive organisms), and will also have trouble separating out "horseness" from the horses, since no two horses are exactly alike in any respect. The other that claims that "animality" is created by convenience, cannot account for why both the 19th-century Central African and the 17th-century Chinese arrive at and appear to *require* mostly the same concepts, if their "animal", "plant", and so on are just "groupings by convenience" (and let me leave aside the kind of intellectual chaos that will befall anyone tries to practice this viewpoint, as I did once).

Ayn Rand's "Introduction" is the first successful attempt at the problem because it does not begin by accepting any of these stale premises, but instead it begins by by taking *nothing* for granted, and then asking: what are the facts of the case? Step by step.

First there is the fact of "similarity". A light blue table and a dark blue television set are similar in one respect, in their being shades of blue. It is immediately clear that there is no single thing contained in both of them (after all one is light blue, and the other is dark blue), but a *relationship* that exists *between* them that does not exist between either and a yellow banana. Goodbye to the "no two horses are exactly alike" argument. Further, we find that the relationship is *closeness on a spectrum*, and that given the neccessity of *some* classification, we can choose within limits where light blue begins and dark blue ends, where indigo ends and blue begins, etc. Goodbye to the "animality ends and plant begins" problem.

But a similarity, by itself, is not a universal! They are only used to create universals, although some universals correspond directly to a single similarity, such as "blue". What if we used only these primitive universals? It is easy to see that you would not be able to understand much of the world from using only ideas such as "blue", "long", "wide", "many", "few", and so on (some of the ancients appear to have tried this, with ludicrous results). What we wish to understand are not *similarities*, but *things*, i.e. the entities between which these similarities exist, such as men, horses, solar systems, gravitational pulls, etc. By grouping men, horses, etc. based on a large number of similarities in shape, height, width, color, texture, number (e.g., of feet), we are able to apply all these similarities to each new man we meet without having to know it of him individually and directly. Imagine if a doctor had no concept of "man", and therefore, faced with a patient, could not apply a certain similarity that exists among all men, the posession of an organ within a certain range of shape, color, size, and periodic motion, within a certain range of position (the left side of the ribcage), i.e. a heart.

There is much more than even this in this book. And the above is one might almost say an oversimplification, and there is no substitute for approaching it more technically. But to summarize, it is quite a remarkable achievement.

Where does knowledge come from? How do I know what I know? How do I validate my conclusions? Do I acquire knowledge by reason, or by revelation? By observation of reality, or by faith? Can I be certain, or must I always be in perpetual doubt? How do I distinguish fact from fiction? How do I even know what knowing is? What is truth? And how do I know it? If you ever asked yourself any of these questions, you are by no means alone. Men (genderless usage) having been asking these questions for centuries--and depending on their answers, they have determined their own fate, and the course of civilization. Such questions are the branch of philosophy, known as epistemology, that studies the nature and means of human knowledge. If you are looking for the answers to these kinds of questions, I suggest you peruse this thought-provoking book, written with the stunning clarity and eloquence that Miss Rand is world-renowned and famous for--it is written for you.

At last the the seemingly un-tractable problem of the Universals was solved by Ayn Rand.Here in this book it was brilliantly elucidated how the concepts can be based on the observed facts or how the observed facts can be explained through concepts without any ambiguity.Concepts can be formed realistically i.e., with reference to ACTUAL referents and without any recourse to either mystical realm or the 'unknowble' trash .Ayn Rand with her monumental Philosophy of Objectivism performed a much needed and an expert psycho-therapy to Philosophy, in general, which is otherwise went out of contact with reality by basing its foundations in 'Unknowables','Subjectivism','Mysticism'. Ayn Rand forever will be accredited with making philosophy relevant to the life of a Man that is ONLY possible ' here on this earth'.Truly Objectivism is a philosophy for living on earth.Objectivism is a Great ,Brilliant,Incredible and Lasting breakthrough in the sphere of Philosophy.