In Defense of the Layperson

My latest book was published on July 1. Its title is Epistemological Foundations of the Free Society: Ayn Rand’s Theory of Universals Applied to Science, Sigmund Freud’s Psychology, and Ludwig von Mises’s Economics.
 
As the title suggests, the book applies Ayn Rand’s theory of concepts to the correct understanding of science and illustrates the theory with the scientific work of Freud and Mises, concluding that, contrary to their critics, both are true scientists.
 
Out of curiosity, I recently searched my book for the word “layperson” and found that I used it twenty times! Hence, the title of this post.
 
Or, in other words, as I might also put it: I was an academic for thirty-six years, but please don’t accuse me of that! Or, again, figuratively speaking, I am a truck driver at heart (though I never drove trucks for any of my many part-time and summer jobs.)
 
The layperson—and I am including both skilled and unskilled workers, as well as anyone else working in a non-academic field—is usually a common sensical, practical, down-to-earth person trying to live life as best as he or she can.
 
The layperson in particular does not take seriously the minutia that many academics spend their time on and they certainly dismiss out of hand the philosopher’s claims, due especially to Immanuel Kant, that true reality can never be known.
 
What I emphasize in my book is that academics or scientists perform the same cognitive processes as any layperson, namely conceptualization, the formation of new concepts and application of known ones to identify concrete instances of those previously formed concepts, which in turn are used to guide our choices and actions.
 
Concepts are the ideas or abstractions that stand behind words. For example, the words kitty, minou, Kätzchen, gattino all symbolize the same abstraction. Concepts are mental units—“file folders,” as Ayn Rand calls them metaphorically—that children learn initially from their parents, later from teachers in school and reading. A concept once learned is then applied when we come upon new instances or concretes that constitute the content of the concept’s file folder.
 
Mental and physical skill, whether driving a truck, teaching or raising children, wiring a house or commercial building, or conducting a scientific experiment, requires, first, the accumulation of knowledge—concepts—relevant to the nature of the skill and its performance, then practice in applying that knowledge to accomplish the defined goal.
 
Kitty, ball, chair, table, and bed are concepts that we learn early in our lives and then apply them when we see a new furry thing that goes “meow,” or a flat thing that holds other objects. At first, we may confuse kitty with those other furry things that go “woof, woof,” but eventually we learn to differentiate the two as distinctly different animals.
 
After we have observed enough cats and dogs, or chairs, tables, and beds, we learn that these concepts, when put into a new file folder, can be called, respectively, animals and furniture, which often are our first abstractions from abstractions. Learning, subsequently, becomes a series of identifications—concept formations—of concrete objects and abstractions from abstractions.
 
Conceptualization is the process of generalization to form concepts and application of our formed concepts to recognize or identify the specifics of our daily lives and to guide our behavior.* Application is what most of us do, including scientists in their laboratories, most of the time in our lives.
 
The formation of concepts is an inductive process, application is deductive. Ayn Rand’s theory of concepts can readily be understood by the layperson, though it may take slow, concentrated reading and rereading.
 
Skilled and unskilled laborers, to bring back my laypersons, learn more concepts of concrete objects than college professors do, who work with broad abstractions, but laborers, too, learn broader and broader abstractions related to their professions.
 
Scientists, as I discuss in my book (and as identified by Francis Bacon, following Aristotle) focus on forming correct concepts that are universal, by defining their essential distinguishing characteristics. Citing an example I have used before, from science historian John McCaskey, Robert Koch identified the comma bacillus as the essence and cause of cholera, dispensing with the competing but correlational hypotheses of foul water or season of year.
 
The mental processes of generalization and application used by both scientists and truck drivers are the same.
 
For example, a plumber reportedly said to a professor, “You pay me for what I know, not what I do,” meaning the plumber and the professor were fellow professionals. “Like hell we are,” was the professorial response, which included a big laugh when I heard the story. But we do pay plumbers both for what they know, as well as what they do, just as we also pay professors for what they know and what they do in the classroom.
 
Mental and physical skill that is performed well, and that we pay for, can indeed be called professional, whether applied to a plumber or college professor. Unfortunately, there is no shortage of condescension toward laypersons among intellectual elites.
 
Conceptualization—valid concepts—is what keeps us in contact with “true” reality. After all, we live and act in true reality, and this reality includes our means of awareness, our consciousness. There is nothing “phenomenal” or “just appearance” about what we perceive.
 
This, of course, does not mean that we never make mistakes or cannot be deluded about reality. Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction is our guide to ensure that the in-here, the content of our consciousness, our concepts, correctly matches, corresponds to, or identifies the out-there, the world external to our minds. If not correct, we have a contradiction between the in-here and out-there.
 
Aristotle’s law also applies, in a more challenging manner, when we introspect to identify the contents and processes of consciousness, because we are using our mental processes to identify mental contents and processes.
 
Conceptualization, especially of broad abstractions, does take mental effort.
 
Perception gives us the data—entities and their attributes and motions. Concepts give us the cognitive expression (language broadly construed) of what we observe to give us bodies of knowledge and to guide us in the improvement of our lives.
 
Truck drivers, and laypersons in general, as well as scientists, perform the same mental processes. And I would add that I have met many a layperson who performs these processes better than some (many?) academics.
 
 
* Ayn Rand calls this process “conceptual identification” and does not include it in the concept of conceptualization. I believe application belongs in that “file folder.”