Democracy. Democracy. We’re All for Democracy!

Communists, socialists, and fascists, as well as the usual American political suspects, Democrats and Republicans, have all advocated, and today still advocate, democracy.
 
The notion of a “soviet,” let me point out, was a locally elected communist council or committee, common in the USSR. Similar “elections” occurred in Maoist China. In World War II, the German people were “advised” to vote for the Nazi Party. And elections were also held in Mussolini’s Italy.*
 
Then, there are the “democratic socialists,” who seek to vote socialism into power. The problem with these “democrats,” as F. A. Hayek pointed out in 1944 (chap. 10), is that coercion, sometimes severe coercion, is required to implement the democrats’ policies, and lacking the will to coerce its unwilling citizens, ruthless dictators step in to put the Garden of Eden called socialism into practice.
 
The amount of blather today spoken and written about democracy approaches infinity. The word “blather,” according to the unabridged dictionary, means “to talk [or write] foolishly or nonsensically.” Somehow that word doesn’t seem accurate, and perhaps it is too kind. How about BS? Which means to talk or write in a way that sounds good to others, while not knowing or caring about the facts. You know, “Facts don’t matter, so I’ll just BS my way through.”
 
In today’s political context, BS is Goebbelsian propaganda. Say it loud and say it a lot, said Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda chief. After a while, even though there may be no factual basis for the blather—I mean, BS—uncritical readers and listeners will begin to believe it.**
 
I could go on but probably should stop here to talk about the real (accurate, objective) meaning of democracy.
 
Fundamentally, democracy means unlimited majority rule, and entails voting that the king’s subjects in the days of monarchy were not allowed to do. The empowerment that voting gave citizens was a significant appeal to the classical liberals.
 
In ancient Greece and Rome, there was voting, but no concept of rights. Citizens, meaning adult males, did possess certain legal protections. So, in 399 BC, Socrates, as an adult male citizen of Athens, was entitled to a trial after being accused of impiety and corruption of the youth. Conviction and condemnation to death was by majority vote.
 
Women, children, slaves, and resident aliens possessed no such protections.
 
The Greeks and Romans, as well as the founding fathers of the United States, viewed democracy as a form of tyranny—dictatorship of the many, as opposed to a dictatorship of the one or few. The many, as the founding fathers also believed, quickly degenerates into factions vying for power.
 
“Direct democracy,” a term bandied about sometimes today, means everyone votes on every issue and delegate in the government, which is impossible in any sizeable country, though the state of California attempts it every election with its nearly infinite list of propositions that clutter the ballot.
 
The original US form of government was a constitutional republic, a considerably limited authority constrained by a Bill of Rights. The House of Representatives, one from each district, was and still is elected by the citizens of those districts, but the Senate was elected or chosen by the respective state legislatures. This provided a balance of power between the national government and the states.
 
The Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution, approved in 1913 at the insistence of the early progressives, established the election of senators by statewide plebiscite, making most of the federal government popularly elected. Only the election of president, via the electoral college, retains a small semblance of the original balance of powers.
 
The Bill of Rights prohibits the government (and criminals) from taking certain actions. Most importantly, it prevents the majority from voting away our rights. The problem today is that blather, or rather BS, reigns supreme in discussions of rights. Does anyone in public life know what the concept means? No, they don’t care. They only say what sounds good.
 
Rights are freedoms of action, that is, the freedom to take any action I choose to sustain and enhance my life, which includes the acquisition, use, and disposal of property, without being coerced one way or another by the government (or by a criminal), dealing with others through voluntary cooperation. “One way or another” means the government cannot force me to do what I do not want to do, such as get a vaccine or serve in the military, or force a woman to get an abortion. Nor can it forcibly prevent me from doing what I do want to do, such as raise my prices or increase the water pressure in my shower, or forcibly prevent a woman from getting an abortion.
 
Freedoms of action also especially include speaking and writing as I see fit, such as criticizing the government, providing one understands the presuppositions and complications I discussed last month.
 
Today’s “democracy” is in fact an oligarchy of unelected bureaucrats, many of whom are totalitarians both in spirit and practice. The system has also been described as “government by lobby,” because big businesses spend enormous amounts of money to influence congress and the bureaucrats to pass laws and regulatory rules in favor of the lobbyists.
 
Our de facto system is fascism: nominal—meaning "in name only"—private ownership of business and personal property, as well as of each of our lives, but extensive government regulation and control of it all. The system is a mixture of freedom and dictatorship, ruled by the despotic elites in power. As Ludwig von Mises pointed out (esp. chap. 1 and 2), any mixed system, unless corrected, must move inexorably to full dictatorship, a system we came close to enduring over the past five years.
 
Sometimes, one will hear the words “liberal democracy” or “constitutional democracy,” but the meaning of both depends on what is understood as “liberal” and “constitutional.” If, respectively, classical liberalism and the US Bill of Rights are meant by the adjectives, they are accurate. Voting is then used essentially to select new leaders thus ensuring a peaceful transition of power.
 
“Democratic republic” is also heard. When used and understood as Thomas Jefferson understood it—voting under a constitution and bill of rights to select leaders—it is accurate. If not, it is likely more BS.
 
Today, the blather and BS are so common in political discussions that the concept of democracy becomes whatever the speaker wants it to mean, which makes it a buzzword to scare the ignorant and unthinking into going along with the speaker and to disparage his or her opponents.
 
Democracy in fact is a form of dictatorship.
 
 
* Aristotle tells us (1295a11–12) that barbarians even elected their despotic monarchs.
 
** On BS, think of your local used car sales rep, no offense intended to those reps who shoot straight and are honest. There are many.

The Meaning of Logic

Aristotelian logic has been variously defined as the science and art of correct reasoning, of making correct inferences, or of correct thinking.
 
Ayn Rand makes the concept “correct” precise and fundamental by defining logic as “the art of non-contradictory identification” (p. 36). By “art” she means practice, or the practical application of concepts and principles to achieve a specific goal. Logic is therefore what she calls a concept of method, similar to such applied sciences as engineering and medicine, and even to the branches of philosophy, ethics and epistemology. All are concepts of method or, as one might say, “how-to” disciplines.
 
The goal of logic is to achieve true knowledge of reality, “true” being technically redundant, though we do sometimes talk about false or mistaken knowledge. The essential means of achieving knowledge is the correct—i.e., non-contradictory—formation and application of concepts, ensuring that the “in here” contents of our consciousness correctly recognizes what is “out there” in reality.*
 
For example, if I look to the side of my computer and identify the object sitting there as a little bearded man making shoes, when in fact the object is my glass of water, I have incorrectly identified reality. That is, the “in here” content of my consciousness that says there is a leprechaun on my desk has contradicted the “out there” facts. I have violated Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction and am holding a delusion of reality in my mind. Reality says glass of water; my mind says leprechaun.
 
Ayn Rand’s formulation of logic, I submit, focusing on the “in here” in relation to the “out there,” radically challenges the tradition of logic textbooks that have concentrated, in some cases exclusively, on the syllogism and deductive reasoning.
 
Over the centuries this tradition has given us both Scholastic and modern rationalism that is obsessed with deductive reasoning disconnected from the facts—such as endless debates about angels on the head of a pin, naked monads, or brains in a vat. The rules and validity of syllogism, a great discovery of Aristotle’s, are valuable to know in the construction of valid and true knowledge. And this includes discussions of contradictions in terms and argument consistency.
 
Rationalism, however, is a narrow focus on deductive reasoning at the expense of reality. This includes the unreality of economic theory that says capitalism must fit the mathematical formulas of “pure and perfect competition.” And the faux intellectual’s mistake that claims criminals by definition cannot be intelligent because they are irrational.
 
Rationalism can be described as a linguistic game of pushing words around. Proper syllogistic thinking and rationalism have certain similarities, namely relating one or more concepts to another, but a correct syllogism, in one of its forms, relates the subject of a conclusion to the predicate of what is called the major premise: all dogs have four legs, Fido is a dog, therefore Fido has four legs.
 
The textbooks spend huge amounts of time on these syllogistic forms, with mnemonic names like “Barbara” and “Celarent” and their propositions as “contraries,” “contradictories,” “subalterns,” etc., that only Medieval Scholastics would remember and use. All the layperson has to do is look at dogs, cats, and Fido to recognize that dogs are not cats, and Fido has four legs.
 
Rationalism, further, is not the deductive process of application that we all use every day, the deduction that identifies “a this as an instance of a that,” that is, the use of our previously formed (and correct) universal concepts to recognize the specific, concrete object that we eat breakfast on is a table. Rand calls this process “conceptual identification.” I call it application, of universals to concretes, and I include both application and the process of concept formation, of coming up with new universal concepts, under the general term of conceptualization.**
 
Excessive attention, however, in logic textbooks to an invalid syllogism that says all dogs and cats have four legs and therefore are the same, ignores or downplays a better, more sharpened focus on concept formation and application. Looking directly at reality means attending to the referents of each concept to identify the respective essential distinguishing characteristics of, say, dogs and cats as opposed to human beings.***
 
In the formation of concepts, to identify means to subsume or classify similar existents distinguished from a broader category of other existents into a concept, further identified by a word.
 
In the application of concepts, to identify means to subsume or classify one concrete existent as a member of an already known and held-in-mind concept.
 
Ayn Rand’s definition of logic makes the “how to” discipline of logic fundamentally connected to reality by emphasizing the distinction between consciousness and existence. Rationalism never gets out of consciousness.
 
In addition to the rationalism of the textbooks, I also question the excessive use by logicians of the word “proposition,” because I think it feeds into their rationalistic thinking. Aristotle’s word in the Greek is protasis and is usually translated as proposition, though the Liddell and Scott Greek-English Lexicon adds that the word especially means a premise in a syllogism. Today’s usage makes it a true or false statement.
 
My complaint is not that traditional logic texts are not worth reading—I have read three—I think the excessive use of proposition overlooks the significance of universals, especially thinking in universal principles, and their non-contradictory identification of the facts as Ayn Rand essentializes logic. The proposition and sentence “water with no impurities at sea level boils at 212º Fahrenheit” is not just a proposition or statement; it is a universal principle, with the word “universal” being redundant. (The texts I have read were written by H. W. B Joseph, 1916; Lionel Ruby, 1960; and David Kelley, 1988. They are less rationalistic than the typical logic text.)
 
Hence, my often-made assertion that theoretical knowledge—science—consists mainly of concepts and principles, not concepts and propositions. Yes, all sciences use many concepts that are universal and, at the same time, make many statements that are not universal, but it is the universal principles that give science its power. The science of history is the only exception in that its goal is to discover and report concrete facts of a life or event.
 
The rules of formal logic, in effect, are the grammar and syntax of deductive reasoning, and non-contradictory identification applies, but inductive reasoning requires getting oneself out of discussions of language to look directly at reality.
 
Ayn Rand in her discussion of abstraction from abstractions emphasizes the importance of tracing the links from broad abstractions to their roots in perceived concretes, in external reality. In an earlier post, I demonstrated this with three of Kant’s allegedly “a priori” concepts, namely space, time, and causality, that he said were innate and disconnected from perceptual reality. We perceive the meaning of space, for example, I wrote, by observing “a room that has no furniture, an available parking location, and the spot on my desk where my water glass was.” These three perceived concretes are the referents of the concept “space.”
 
This activity and, preferably, habit of retracing the links from broad abstraction to perceptual referent is not just what we might call an updated Aristotelian empiricism that says, “open your eyes and look at the world, then introspect to identify how you arrived at the concepts you have in your mind.” It is a means of maintaining a non-contradictory mental organization that requires and allows a sharp focus on the facts of reality.
 
A final note on definitions and thinking in definitions, which unfortunately is the rationalist’s favorite vehicle of argumentation, often by making grossly unrealistic assumptions, such as, “Let’s assume dogs can fly and see where that takes us.” Well-constructed definitions summarize and condense the content of our concepts and keep our knowledge connected both to reality and to the rest of the knowledge we already have. If “by definition” we mean arbitrary, disconnected floating abstractions and flimsily constructed tautologies, knowledge can be anything we want it to be, which is where we are today as consequence of Kant’s philosophy and his positivist followers.
 
 
* Of course, we, and our consciousness, are also a part of reality, which adds complications to the issue. See my discussion of Ayn Rand’s distinction between the metaphysical and epistemological as applied to consciousness.
 
** Rand does not seem to include application or conceptual identification under the term conceptualization. On her use of induction and deduction as the processes, respectively, of forming and applying concepts, see the last two paragraphs of chapter 3 in the Objectivist Epistemology. On her mentions of conceptual identification, see the third paragraph from the end of chapter 3 and page 50 in chapter 5.
 
*** This excessive, rationalistic attention of traditional logic, and the absurd, brain-twisting p’s and q’s of what is called symbolic “logic”—scare quotes intended—is what has given rise to critical thinking courses in today’s philosophy departments. Critical thinking as a concept is the attempt to bring reality and practicality back into logic, though the word “logic” is seldom used in those classes.

Space, Time, and Causality

Ayn Rand’s theory of concepts answers many so-called problems in philosophy. One of these is Kant’s claim that such concepts as space, time, and causality are innate (“a priori”), independent of sense perception and therefore of reality. Whatever we are aware of are phenomena, appearances in our minds, not the noumena of true reality. The positivists took this a step further and declared all abstractions from abstractions “arbitrary constructs.” Let us see what Rand’s theory can say about these broad concepts.
 
An abstraction from abstractions, according to Rand (chap. 3), begins with perceived concretes, such as chairs, tables, and beds. A first-level abstraction from abstractions might be furniture, by identifying the similar characteristics that the three concretes share, namely large objects designed to support the human body and smaller objects. A further abstraction might be household goods when we integrate furniture with furnaces, air conditioners, and kitchen appliances, and, further, the broad abstraction of human-made objects by integrating household goods with bridges, automobiles, and skyscrapers.
 
To keep our knowledge in good order, says Rand, we must be able to trace the steps from broad abstraction back to perceived concrete, in my example from human-made object to chairs, furnaces, and bridges. Consider now Kant’s broad abstractions and alleged innate concepts space, time, and causality.
 
Contrary to Kant, all of these concepts have referents in perceptual reality. Space, to put it rather simply and obviously, is an empty place, such as a room that has no furniture, an available parking location, and the spot on my desk where my water glass was. All of these concepts are perceptual, metaphysical (out there) referents of the (in here) abstraction from abstractions of “space” and “place.”  Note that my examples of space can be described in geometrical terms, respectively, as three dimensional, two dimensional, or just a point, all perceptually grasped.*
 
Time, said Aristotle, is a “measure of motion” as the cubit is a measure of length.** Ayn Rand says it is a “change of relationship,” of one entity that moves from one place to another in relation to an entity that is stationary (256–60). For example, if I move my water glass from the right side of my computer to the left, I become aware of the passage of time.

Historically, time was discovered as the changing phases of the moon in relation to the earth, then later as the movements of the sun across the earth’s sky. It was measured initially by water clocks and sun dials. Today, we base our understanding of time on the revolutions of the earth around the sun and measure it with more and more precise time pieces.

Because we must know several prior concepts—entity, change, motion, measurement—time is a broad abstraction whose referents can be traced back to perceptual concretes. It is not innate.

Causality, according to Rand, is decidedly an abstraction from abstractions, not an innate Kantian category.
 
For Rand, causality is “the law of identity applied to action” (Atlas Shrugged, 1037).  It is the actions of one or more entities in relation to the actions of one or more other entities. Essentially, this is Aristotle’s formal cause, including his distinction between potentiality and actuality, and a rejection of the view that has dominated philosophy of science since the Renaissance. That view looks only at efficient causation, the so-called billiard-ball causality.

One of Rand’s fundamental propositions is that an entity is all its attributes and that is its identity. There is no substratum or glue holding the attributes together, which would take us back to the intrinsic theory of essences. Thus, to arrive at a causal explanation of an event we have to recognize the nature of the entities involved.
 
A billiard ball, for example, going in the pocket of a pool table is not fully explained by saying the cue stick moved in a certain way to knock it in (efficient causation). We have to know that the balls are hard and roll easily on the fabric of the table and a well-chalked cue stick in the hands of a skilled player with good vision hits the ball at the right angle and speed.

The concepts of a round and hard ball, smooth and flat table, chalk and cue stick, and skilled player with accurate eyesight are all attributes of the respective entities and their interactions to cause this event.

Simple billiard-ball causation is not so simple. As can be seen, Aristotle’s other three causes—material, final (when talking about human and other living action), and efficient are relevant in a full explanation of a cause. But formal cause, the nature or identity of the entities involved, is central.
 
The implication of Rand’s view that causality is identity in action is that essentialization is a grasp of causality. Conceptualization through essentialization identifies causes and effects of the existents that the concept identifies. The essential distinguishing characteristic of an entity and Rand’s rule of fundamentality (45–46) say that to identify the essential characteristic of a concept, we must identify the one or more that explains and causes all or most of the others. Again, this means that the explanation is “in here,” in our internal mental process of consciousness and is epistemological, and the causal relationship is “out there,” in reality apart from that mental process and is metaphysical.
 
Thus, cholera is explained and caused by the essential distinguishing characteristics of the comma bacillus (today called Vibrio Cholerae) interacting with the digestive system of the human body. Dew is explained and caused by the characteristics of water condensation, that is, of water vapor in the air interacting with air temperature such that liquid forms on our cars, windows, and leaves of grass. And tides are explained and caused by the attractions between water on earth to the sun and moon as they move, especially the gravitational pull of the moon on the oceans of earth; those oceans that are on the side of earth closest to the moon, and furthest away, “bulge out” and create high tides. The in-between oceans, depending on rotation of the earth, experience low tides.
 
Which is not to say that the above explanations are exhaustive of the respective causes. Qualifications are often required, as the “simple” explanation that water boils at 212º Fahrenheit requires the qualifications “varying by air pressure and purity of water.” Nevertheless, the many concepts involved, which means the many entities with their specific attributes involved, had to be examined in detail through testing and trying in various experiments to arrive at the final essential distinguishing characteristics.

And the word “final” must be taken advisedly as this does not mean these findings are true “eternally.” Knowledge grows and discoveries increase, meaning that our causal definitions are contextual and may need to be adjusted. Einstein’s theory of gravity in relation to Newton’s is just one example of this “editing” of a previous theory.

Conceptualization by measurement omission, which identifies the cause of an event by singling out the essential distinguishing characteristic or characteristics of the existents involved, is the essence of theory in both basic and applied sciences. Measurement is not the essence of science; it is an aid, which may be extensive in some sciences, to the discovery and application of theory.
 
An appropriate note here is to point out that many controlled experiments performed today aimed at determining cause and effect relationships are superfluous, correlational, or performed with less than sound methodology, such as inadequate assumptions or insufficient study time to identify accurate effects. Many such studies only generate historical data, not theory.

Contemporary psychoanalyst Jonathan Shedler states that we do not need to conduct RCTs—randomly controlled trials, as they are called in some sciences, such as medicine—to know that “the sun causes sunburn, sex causes pregnancy, or food deprivation leads to starvation.”
 
These examples, Shedler continues, are known by observation because we know their mechanisms (or means) of action. And these examples, I would add, are applications of well-known concepts that illustrate Aristotle’s formal cause and Rand’s theory of causality. “Mechanism of action” means that by identifying the entities and their attributes in a causal situation—sun, skin, and sunburn; sex organs, sex, and pregnancy; nutritional organs, food, and starvation—we can know their actions and effects on each other.

Conceptualization, grasping the essential distinguishing characteristics of the entities and attributes involved, which includes retention of all the knowledge we have learned to date about the entities, that is, the information in our respective “file folders,” as Rand calls them, are key to knowing the operation of any action.
 
 
* Aristotle in the Physics, iv 212a5–31, preferred to use the word “place,” instead of “space.” Aristotle also regarded mathematical concepts as abstractions from abstractions, stating that the mathematician “strips off all the sensible qualities [of perceptual concretes] . . . and leaves only the quantitative and continuous, sometimes in one, sometimes in two, sometimes in three dimensions.” Metaphysics, 1061a30–35. By implication, using Rand’s theory, we perceive the solid object, then abstract from it the concept of plane, then from plane, the concept of line, and finally from line, the concept of point, which is the highest-level abstraction. Cf. Topics, 141b10–11: “A solid falls under perception most of all, and a plane more than a line, and a line more than point.”
 
** Aristotle, Physics, iv 221a1–3. A little later, Aristotle says time is “not motion, but number of motion.” 221b10. Cubit is an ancient measure of length that extends from one’s bent elbow to the end of the middle finger.

The Concept of “Getting At”

When my wife, philosopher Linda Reardan, and I read a new writer whose ideas do not quite fit our established notions, we ask ourselves “what is this person getting at?” The ideas are not ridiculous, to be dismissed out of hand, nor do they strike us as correct identifications of the facts of reality. “Getting at” means these writers are attempting, in their own way and depending on their historical context, to make what they believe to be correct identifications.
 
A major error, of those who have swallowed positivist premises, is to dismiss new (or different) ideas as not “verifiable” or not “falsifiable”—terms that are red herrings from post-Kantian philosophy and especially from Karl Popper’s philosophy of science. Another error, of many who follow Ayn Rand, is to dismiss such ideas because they do not agree with her philosophy, therefore they are not worthy of further consideration.
 
For the past several months (May 2023–February 2024) I have written posts about two scholars and what they were getting at: economist Ludwig von Mises and psychologist Sigmund Freud. Despite accepting some Kantian ideas, Mises produced outstanding works based on defending the epistemological foundation of economics against the positivist premise that all science must be quantitative. In addition, I address the issue of “subjective value” in economics (see also this post) as being essentially the same concept as what Ayn Rand calls socially objective value, which means, consistent with her theory of concepts, that value is not metaphysical, in the thing. Rather, it is psychological or epistemological (both words used by her).
 
Freud, who is far more Aristotelian than Kantian even though he lived in a neo-Kantian culture, focused on reality to help distressed patients discover un- (or sub-) conscious thoughts and experiences that made them unhappy in the present and then proceeded to help them achieve happier lives. He was not a “pan-sexualist,” as critics have said of him. As a result of his accomplishments, Freud must be considered the father of modern psychology.
 
Let us now go back to Aristotle and look at one issue he was “getting at,” though many Greek philosophers could be used here as examples of the “getting at” premise, including Plato. Indeed, Aristotle was developing further the discoveries of Socrates and Plato on universals, reason, and definitions when he came up with his theory of universals known as moderate realism.* Aristotle, in contrast to Plato, believed that the universal essence or form of a thing is intrinsic or embedded in the individual thing, and we abstract it using nous—reason—to arrive at rational knowledge.
 
Aristotle’s theory today is a layperson’s common-sense epistemology that says, “We just see tableness in the tables out there in reality.” But that is not correct, as critics of the theory for centuries have shown. Essences are not out there, in the thing. Ayn Rand, aware that the mental process is more complicated than Aristotle believed, improves his theory by demonstrating that abstraction is a mental process of omitting precise measurement of the many similar tables we have observed. That is what gives us the universal. The process, she goes on to discuss, is even more complicated, requiring volitional effort to form abstractions from abstractions (Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, chap. 1–3).
 
Aristotle was “getting at” the right thing, but did not quite get there.
 
Moving along chronologically, let us look at Christianity. St. Augustine, according to Professor E in the Appendix to Ayn Rand’s Epistemology (262–63), was the first in history to give us the concept of consciousness (though the Stoics anticipated it). The Greeks had identified several important processes of our minds, such as perception, imagination, emotion, and reason, but did not put them together into one concept. Augustine’s human consciousness was a reflection of the monotheistic Christian God, who, in effect, is the “giant consciousness in the sky” that causes events on earth and may or may not grant us our wishes through prayers (Independent Judgment and Introspection, 38–40). Augustine’s concept of consciousness nevertheless was a step forward.
 
Descartes, more than any of the previous religious thinkers, in a confused manner, brought the consciousness in the sky down to earth and put it in our bodies, making it personal to each one of us (likely influenced by Protestantism). He attempted to integrate mind and body as a naturalistic entity, but is remembered, though the dichotomy goes back to the Greeks, as the one who gave us mind-body dualism. Descartes’ fundamental error was to assert that consciousness is the first thing we know, not existence. This is his prior-certainty-of-consciousness premise that continues to plague philosophy today. Or, as Linda has observed, modern philosophers, ever since Descartes’ cogito (I think, therefore I am), have been stuck in their own minds trying to find a way out to reality.
 
When we get to Immanuel Kant, we do have to acknowledge that he is the first to solidify the notion that consciousness is not a mirror of nature, as critics of moderate realism say to disparage the doctrine, but has its own identity. Unfortunately, he concluded, or rationalized—philosopher Walter Kaufmann (116) describes him as a “virtuoso of rationalization”—that because consciousness has a nature we can never know true, noumenal reality, only a phenomenal world.
 
Positivism is a doctrine I resist granting anything to after getting it in spades in graduate school, but I must admit that its advocates were attempting, and still attempt to this day, to answer Kant’s conclusions and to defend science—at great expense. The expense of positivism was, and still is, to declare the following meaningless: metaphysics, universals, facts, values, and truth. The “truths” it says we can know are only those that are synthetic, that is, tied to perceptual concretes—they are not universal—and analytic “truths,” which are universal but arbitrary and say nothing about reality. The positivists’ misguided “contribution” is to require in the human sciences a distorted version of the method of the physical sciences. (See “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy” in Rand’s Epistemology, 88–121.)
 
Pragmatism, instead of being a villainous philosophy, was a doctrine of empiricism, based on the acceptance of the biological nature of consciousness and the attempt to defend knowledge and science against the attacks of the German, British and American Idealists, this last including the work of Brand Blanshard. The so-called pragmatic theory of truth, namely that truth is what works, attributed to William James, may be poorly formulated, but it is an answer to the rationalism of idealism. It insists that we must stay tied to real activities of life to know what is true. Using this theory of truth, we can say, with qualifications, that capitalism is true because it works, whereas socialism is false because it does not work. My qualifications are that a theory of truth requires more than what the pragmatists offered.
 
John Dewey, whom I read extensively when writing Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism, did not like the word “pragmatism,” preferring “instrumentalism,” in the sense that thought is the instrument of action, which means all thought and knowledge are for the sake of action, not ivory-towered speculation. I learned many things from my study of Dewey. One is to trust the original source of the author’s own words, not summaries. I read three summaries who disagreed with each other and did not sound like what I read in Dewey. After I had read many works of his, I read Dewey’s Metaphysics by Raymond Boisvert and agreed with him that Dewey not only has a metaphysics, but that it is Aristotelian and his theory of truth is a correspondence theory, though Dewey improves on Aristotle’s theory by rejecting any form of intrinsicism of essences or values.
 
For more on what I found Dewey to be “getting at,” read my post in Applying Principles, 295–99. No, Dewey does not have a theory of concepts or universals, nor is he an advocate of capitalism. I did not read his works on ethics. His metaphysics and epistemology, however, were “getting at” something. He is difficult to read, though he does sometimes use interesting business metaphors, such as, subject matter in education is the working capital of thought. His theory of education is not too different from that of Maria Montessori—and is not, I must emphasize, what many progressive educators say it is.
 
Let me conclude this post with reference to two previous posts about the Bible. The first concerns Jewish political commentator Dennis Prager’s The Ten Commandments, which, he points out, should be translated from the Hebrew as the Ten Statements. What is significant about this short book is that it is not deontological in the Kantian sense that they are ten duties. Indeed, Prager says that these ten statements have driven the development of civilization and “are the greatest list of instructions ever devised for creating a good society.” One other mistranslation, he points out, is that “do not kill” in 1610 King James English should really be “do not murder.”
 
My other post looks at Matthew 7:1–6 in the New Testament. The first verse is the “do not judge” statement that Ayn Rand has made pointedly negative comments about, though some of her followers misunderstand her interpretation of the advice. The rest of the Matthew verses relate the Golden Rule, an early statement of justice, and emphasize that we should use the same standard of value when judging others as ourselves. And that we should be careful when forming partnerships, personal or professional, lest we end up throwing our pearls to pigs who turn on us, trampling the pearls and attacking us.
 
Pretty good advice coming from the New Testament. Even the Bible was “getting at” many true things.
 
 
* In an earlier post, I referred incorrectly to Aristotle’s theory as naïve realism. The theory is occasionally denigrated as “naïve” and I seem to recall it in my undergraduate days being identified as such. But the more acceptable term today is “moderate,” or sometimes “metaphysical,” realism, meaning the essence is “out there” in the thing.

Dreams and the Subconscious*

Aristotle said dreams, as paraphrased by Sigmund Freud (The Interpretation of Dreams, 36-37), are “mental activity of the sleeper in so far as he is asleep.” They are not supernatural messages from the gods.
 
Freud’s study of dreams said they are harmless hallucinations when asleep, unconscious urges expressed as a wish or urges from our “day’s residues” (waking life) expressed as a wish, or some combination.
 
He did not say that dreams are all about sex, as some critics have alleged! (And symbolism, sexual or otherwise must be related to the dreamers private meanings.)
 
Let us elaborate.
 
By analyzing an enormous number of dreams of both normal people and people with psychological problems, Freud provided a valuable contribution to psychology, the identification of primary and secondary processes of consciousness and a better understanding of the unhealthy processes.
 
For dreams in particular, he gave detailed descriptions of their nature, including a terminology to use for analysis and a three-part classification of them.**
 
“Manifest content” is the actual events of the dream that we experience, weird and distorted as they may be. “Latent content” is the underlying dream thoughts that evoked the dream. And “dreamwork” is the mental process that transforms the latent into the manifest. The work of dream analysis is to trace this transformation and identify the meaning of the dream.
 
Manifest dreams, Freud thought, are considerably condensed, versus the actual events of a memory, and exhibit a great deal of displacement, that is, the shifting or substitution of minor elements from reality to major ones in the dream or vice versa, or some mixture. As often occurs a single dream can have several elements, including contraries or contradictions side by side one another.
 
The simplest and most fundamental dream is the child’s direct wish fulfillment. For example, a little girl who was ill during the day and forbidden to eat strawberries experienced an elaborate dream of eating “strawbewwies and omblet” during the night. And a little boy whose hike to a nearby mountain was cut short for lack of time dreamed of his conquering the mountain.
 
Of course, adults can experience direct wish fulfillments, such as having to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and dreaming of sitting beside a waterfall, or of being hungry and dreaming of a gourmet meal, or, yes, of dreaming about sex. But most of our dreams are distorted. Why?
 
In addition to the direct wish fulfillment, Freud classifies dreams as either anxiety dreams or punishment dreams. In my case, if I may cite a recurring dream, I retired from teaching in 2015, but find myself since dreaming about being late for class and/or unprepared, which never happened in thirty-six years of teaching. And in some versions, the building I am belatedly trying to get into to teach a class is the junior high school I attended in my hometown! (Anxiety dreams can be experienced as nightmares, though I have not experienced these dreams that way.).
 
The underlying dream thoughts: I do have an anxiety about being late to any appointment and prefer to arrive five to ten minutes before the appointed hour. How is this a wish? Freud would say that when asleep my subconscious brings up the repressed anxiety and emotions of embarrassment and humiliation about being late, then distorts the wish of being on time, turning my latent dream thought into a distorted manifest dream, perhaps as a caution to be extra careful about appointments.
 
And the junior high school building? I think there is an element of direct wish fulfillment here, as I do have a fondness for the building. Both of my older brothers attended it when it was a senior high school and I attended many an enjoyable performance in the school’s auditorium, plus basketball games in the gymnasium and high school football games in the nearby stadium. But no, I never had a desire to teach in that building. One might say, “all school buildings look alike,” hence the displacement.
 
Punishment dreams often dredge up unpleasant events from the past that the dreamer experienced as embarrassing or humiliating, sometimes resulting in a sense of guilt. A well-known author in his younger years was a tailor, which he preferred not to think about, but repeatedly dreamed about those years. Similarly, Freud admits that he was not particularly competent when working as a young man at the Chemical Institute, yet in his successful older years continually dreamed about those humiliating days. How is this wish fulfillment?
 
Punishment dreams, says Freud, are not wishes of subconscious drives or memories, but of “a special critical and prohibiting agency” in the mind, the above-I, Über-ich in Freud’s German (New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 34).*** Punishment dreams are a wish of punishment for the sense of guilt from earlier days.
 
At this point, Freud discusses the issue of traumatic dreams, especially those of war trauma or, in modern terms, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Trauma is experienced as the emotion of fright, which is terror deriving from an unpreparedness for and surprise at the severity of the threatening event. Freud concedes that it is difficult to call these dreams wish fulfillments and suggests that the dreamwork fails to transform the memories into a wish fulfillment.
 
Let me object, though, and suggest that, as Freud acknowledges, all psychological processes are continuums from normal to abnormal, thus the punishment and traumatic dreams may be variations on the anxiety dreams. We all differ in how we react to negative events in our lives, depending on the level of self-esteem we each have, other inner resources, and the severity of the trauma. And there are war veterans who do not suffer PTSD.
 
Sleepers who have traumatic dreams are often awakened feeling acute anxiety, because the dreams just as often are exact replicas of the traumatic event. The dream and anxiety indicate the amount of fright experienced during the initial event, along with the lack of preparedness for such a terror. Afterwards, an emotion of guilt that says, “why me?” can easily arise—that is, a guilt for having survived the terror when one’s comrades did not. Punishment dreams? Sounds like it.
 
Freud’s work on dreams, answering the critics in his time who regarded dreams as meaningless, considerably elaborated Aristotle’s identification of dreams as mental activity while asleep.
 
His work led him to make an important distinction between the actions of our subconscious mind and the conscious level of reason. He called the former “primary process,” because it arose in the evolutionary process before our human conscious mind, which he called “secondary process.” The higher animals exhibit a primary-process consciousness, and a modicum of choice, though not a true, self-aware volitional consciousness.
 
Primary process seems random, meaning no predictable pattern, but as Freud demonstrated dreams are not random. He recognized that the source of psychological problems, both neurotic and psychotic, this last called by many thinkers “waking dreams” (Interpretation, 115), can be found in our subconscious primary-process minds.
 
Which is why Freud wrote many times that the goal of psychotherapy is to “make the unconscious conscious.”
 
Later psychiatrists, Eilhard von Domarus and Silvano Arieti, based on their study of schizophrenics, offered additional explanations how our subconscious mental processes do have a logic to them, albeit a lesser logic than what our conscious minds are capable of generating.
 
(To be continued next month)
 
 
* See the appendix to Independent Judgment and Introspection, 177-80, for my reasons for considering the prefix “sub-” more correct than Freud’s “un-” when talking about consciousness.
 
** In addition to The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud discussed dreams in the shorter book On Dreams (1901) and in chapters or segments of later works: Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (part II, 1915-17), New Introductory Lectures (lecture xxx, 1933), and in the highly concise but incomplete posthumous publication An Outline of Psychoanalysis (chap. v, written in 1938, published in 1940).
 
*** Freud wrote Über-ich, the above- or over- I. Latinized English translations make Freud “both more prolix and more genteel than he really was,” giving us such neologisms as superego. “Prolix and genteel” are the words of Freud biographer Peter Gay (quoted in Kaufmann, 23). They mean diffuse and verbose (prolix) and gentrified, scholarly, academic (genteel). More on the English translations in a later post.

Mises and Epistemology (part three of a three-part series) (Go to part one)(part two)

The human sciences aim to explain the causes of human motivation and behavior, healthy and effective, as well as harmful, and to guide humans in their choices and action to achieve chosen goals. This includes all applied human sciences whose aims are to get things done and done well. Economics is not just a highly deductive science, but also highly applied in that its aim is to define the principles of cooperation under a division of labor that will secure peace and prosperity in a social setting.*
 
Let us now continue with a few additional epistemological issues in Mises’ writing.
 
 
4. The specific understanding. The two fundamental methods of cognition, according to Mises and the Kantian philosophers, are conception and understanding. Concepts, we have seen from part one of this series, according to Kant, are limited to the phenomenal world, which means we cannot know concretes. This poses a problem in particular for historians, since their work is to explain concrete human events of the past. The solution in German philosophy is the specific understanding (Human Action, 49-50). Mises writes:

It is the method which all historians and all other people always apply in commenting upon human events of the past and in forecasting future events….The scope of understanding is the mental grasp of phenomena which cannot be totally elucidated by logic, mathematics, praxeology, and the natural sciences.

The philosopher Bergson, according to Mises, called this cognitive power “intuition,” which sounds antithetical to reason and mystical. And it is, because for Kant concepts and reason, which he had to limit to make room for faith, cannot know true reality.
 
But a correct theory of concepts proves we can know reality. This cognitive power is not properly described as a “specific understanding,” but as the application of previously formed universal concepts, a deductive process. Since our concepts refer to all concretes of a particular type, we live our daily lives applying our previously learned knowledge to identify correctly the specifics we confront. Thus, Sherlock Holmes deduced that Watson just came back from Afghanistan, based on Watson’s tan and signs of having been wounded. And our medical doctor deduces that our cough and runny nose are instances—symptoms—of a cold.
 
Application (1, 2) is the mental process of identifying a this (concrete) as an instance of a that (concept). It is what historians do and what we all do every day.
 
 
5. Regularity in human action, but no constants. Mises (Human Action, 1) is correct to state that there is “a regularity in the sequence and interdependence of market phenomena,” but no “constant relations” (56), or standard unit that can be used to make quantitatively exact measurements of human behavior. Which means no algebraic equations can be identified or used as in physics and chemistry.
 
Human behavior is not deterministic because of free will, which Mises does not explicitly endorse, though he does say that human action is teleological, which is another instance of his Aristotelianism. But because of the observed regularity that is present in human nature, principles and laws of economics, such as the laws of marginal utility and supply and demand, can be formulated and used to interpret current and past economic events and to make predictions, albeit not mathematically precise predictions. This is Mises’ rejection of the positivist demands for a mathematical economics.** (See In Defense of Advertising, 127-30.)
 
Indeed, the inability to formulate mathematically precise propositions and equations is true of all human sciences, basic and applied, not to mention of all the branches of philosophy. Positivism has corrupted our understanding of science, the actual essence of which is conceptualization, which means measurement omission even in the formulation of the equations of physical science. (See In Defense of Advertising, 153-58; Independent Judgment and Introspection, 72-81.) Most measurements, especially statistics, produce historical data, not universal knowledge of cause-effect relationships.
 
 
6. Subjective value. I touched on this subject in a previous post based on what I call Ayn Rand’s general theory of value, but more needs to be said.
 
Mises (Human Action, 96) is mostly correct when he states, “Value is not intrinsic, it is not in things. It is within us; it is the way in which man reacts to the conditions of his environment.” Values, and all concepts are within us. Essences and values are not “out there” in the thing. They are not metaphysical. We, using the tools, or mental processes of our consciousness, create, construct, or form concepts, including the concept of what is valuable. But values are objective in the epistemological sense—if the identification of what is valuable contributes to the flourishing of human life.
 
Yes, there is a distinction between object and subject, meaning objects are “out there” and whatever goes on in our minds is subjective, but that is a different usage. Customer value judgments are subjective because their judgments come from inside their heads, but they may or may not be epistemologically objective (correctly identified as beneficial for or harmful to them).
 
Mises—and the positivists—talk about the necessity of all sciences being “value-free,” which means “shoulds” and “oughts” do not belong in science. This derives from Kant who faced a dilemma between ethical values that come from the nature of the mind (not the requirements of human life) and free will that comes from the noumenal world, but is unknowable. Positivists “resolved” the dilemma by explicitly making all values subjective.
 
Economics for the most part is a practical science, establishing principles of how to increase wealth for everyone. One can say that price controls are both immoral and impractical—immoral because of the harm to human life caused by injecting force into voluntary trading and the consequent shortages that result, thus introducing values into the discussion, and impractical because wealth for everyone is decreased, not increased. It is only increased, if in fact it is, for certain privileged groups.
 
Yes, there are those today who say that all issues are moral and political, proclaiming “consumers should or ought not to buy that product” or “that bridge should not be built in that location.” In a free society where individual rights, especially property rights, are respected, such shoulds and oughts would be minimal. Applied sciences assume that actions to be taken are moral and legal, then provide guidance to the achievement of particular goals. The actions are assumed to be moral and legal because the aim of applied science, all sciences actually, is to improve life.
 
Two final quotations from Mises about values: “By means of its subjectivism, the modern theory becomes objective science” (Epistemological Problems of Economics, 192). And: “it is in this subjectivism that the objectivity of our science lies” (Human Action, 21).
 
Mises is stating that the theory of marginal utility answered the water-diamond paradox of the classical economists who had assumed values are “out there” intrinsic to reality. If “subjective” is understood as explained above and can be viewed as epistemologically objective, then Mises is correct.
 
I prefer to call our values, market values in particular, “psychological,” which makes them epistemological, not metaphysical. Restating Mises’ second quotation, I would say, “it is in this recognition that values are psychological, not intrinsic or metaphysical, that the validation of economics lies.” (See In Defense of Advertising, 175-78.)***
 
 
In the first paragraph of the Preface to the Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science, Mises writes, “This essay is not a contribution to philosophy. It is merely the exposition of certain ideas that attempts to deal with the theory of knowledge ought to take into full account.” Mises in dealing with these issues is taking steps toward a post-Kantian Aristotelian foundation of economics. Those who would advance economics further can build on his work.
 
The present three-part series has been my attempt to deal with some of the issues, based on Ayn Rand’s epistemology. It is also my encouragement to students of Ayn Rand to take the work of Mises as both profound and serious. There is much to be learned from him.
 
 
* All sciences, basic and applied, use induction and deduction throughout (cf. Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, in McKeon). The applied sciences—medicine, engineering, psychotherapy, and the business disciplines, among others—are predominantly deductive, drawing their basic principles from the more fundamental sciences.
 
** In technical terms, the physical sciences measure the world using interval and ratio scales, the former using equal intervals from one number to the next (1 to 2 is equal to 4 to 5) and the latter requiring equal intervals and a true zero point to produce valid ratios (for example, Kelvin temperature, but not Fahrenheit or Celsius, which are scaled at the interval level). In the human sciences, measurement is teleological using ordinal numbers and ordinal scales (A is better than or preferred to B and B to C). Relationships of means to ends are graded or ranked because we do not have a unit that serves as a standard of measure in the way interval and ratio scales do. The intensity of preference in the intervals of two people preferring A to B may or may not be equal; we do not know. See Stevens and cf. Ayn Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, 32-34, 223-25.
 
*** Ayn Rand in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (16-17) distinguishes between market value, or price, as socially objective value, “the sum of the individual judgments of all the men involved in trade at a given time” and philosophically objective value, “as value estimated from the standpoint of the best possible to man.” Understanding this last means philosophically objective values are not much involved in economics, as no such value should or ought to be mandated by law, or priced a certain way.

Read part one, part two.

Mises and Kant (part two of a three-part series) (Go to part one)(part three)

Aristotle’s categories, detailed in his work called The Categories, are fundamental concepts of reality, such as entity, quality, action, etc.
 
Immanuel Kant, using some of those terms, describes categories as fundamental, innate concepts that prevent us from knowing true, noumenal reality. We can only know appearances, says Kant, called the phenomenal world. This creates the impossibility of perceiving “things-in-themselves,” which means concept formation is limited and cannot know concretes (Rickert 1; 2, chap. 5).
 
This is what makes reason impotent to know reality and in essence is Kant’s disastrous influence on later philosophy. It has confounded nearly all who have followed him, including economists such as Ludwig von Mises.
 
But let us go back to birth—of an infant. Perception, which is to say, knowledge of concretes, begins at birth. The infant cries when hungry and cries when having to eliminate. We know this because infants, after a short time out of the womb, will give us a cute smile when sated and when vacated. This is one of our (the infant’s) first perceptions of concretes.
 
Awareness of the concretes of reality is not, or rather should not be, a philosophical problem. We live and act in the world of concretes, which in fact are the so-called things in themselves. A theory of concept formation that incorporates concretes is what has been needed for hundreds of years. Ayn Rand, I submit, has provided this solution and the answer to the philosophical problem of universals (Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology).
 
A child at around one or two, after learning some elementary words, begins to form and apply universal concepts, such as “ball,” “dog,” and “table.”
 
In briefest essence, the child, according to Rand’s theory of concept formation, observes differences and similarities in the world and focuses on the similarities of what we eventually call a ball, dog, or table. Similarities of, say, tables are abstracted from the concretes by omitting their measurable differences, then by integrating the similarities into a new mental entity called a concept. The mind is “so constituted as to be capable of this process,” to borrow a few words from Aristotle (Posterior Analytics, 100a13), which means the child does not have to think about that particular process for it to happen.
 
The concept, using Rand’s metaphor, is like a file folder that includes all concrete, specific tables past, present, or future, observed or not. The (mental) omission of measurements gives us the essential distinguishing characteristic and the nature of the concept as universal. A word labels it and its definition summarizes its meaning, tying it to the general category from which it was differentiated, and to all of those observed and unobserved concretes, its referents “out there” in reality.
 
This is the inductive process of concept formation. Application is the deductive process of recognizing an object initially unfamiliar to us and identifying it as an instance, a concrete, of the concept table.
 
Now let us see what we can say about some of Mises’ confusions caused by German, especially Kantian, philosophy.
 
 
1. A priori categories and the logical structure of the human mind (Human Action, chap. 1 & 2). If by “logical structure of the human mind,” Mises means that consciousness has an active nature, or identity, then he is correct, but Mises says that such categories as causality and human action are innate, prior to experience like, allegedly, mathematics and logic. Therefore, deduction is the fundamental method of praxeology (human science).
 
The a priori/a posteriori distinction, however, is a false dichotomy. All cognition is cognition of reality. If our concepts are true—correctly recognizing or identifying reality—then the most abstract concepts, such as the law of non-contradiction, integral calculus, causality, human action, and the law of supply and demand, are all derived from reality and therefore are empirical. The chain of abstractions required to arrive at these concepts may be extensive, but if true, will be anchored in the perceptual world. In the same way that “human-made object” is anchored in the perceptual world, derived initially from “tables,” “chairs,” and “beds,” and connected to the abstraction from abstraction “furniture,” and still further connected to the broader abstraction of the human made, all the different categories and subcategories of objects that humans create. This last notion of a broader concept becomes a big file folder holding all human-made objects.
 
Mises does not seem to have a notion of abstractions from abstractions, only directly perceivable concretes (an apparent influence from positivism) and the innate categories from which all of economics is supposedly deduced. Indeed, economics is a highly deductive science of application, but its basic concepts and laws are empirically and inductively derived from experience. The concept of human action is not a self-evident axiom, as Mises asserts. Action is an attribute of all living organisms, human action of human beings.
 
 
2. More on the logical structure of the human mind (Human Action, 35).
 
Mises writes, “The human mind is not a tabula rasa on which the external events write their own history.” True. Reality does not write on our minds. We actively identify it.
 
“[The mind] is equipped with a set of tools for grasping reality.” True. We have tools, such as perception, conceptualization, evaluation, etc. They are mental processes that we have the innate capacity or potential to perform. And they constitute the nature or identity of consciousness. But they are not content. Tabula rasa means there is no content in our minds at birth.
 
“Man acquired these tools, i.e., the logical structure of his mind, in the course of his evolution from an amoeba to his present state.” True. “But these tools” Mises continues, “are logically prior to any experience.” They are built-in from birth, yes, and we use them, as mental tools, to identify, not passively receive, reality and to guide our choices and actions.*
 
 
3. Does Mises believe we can know reality? Yes, and this, along with his methodological individualism and emphasis on the nature of things (money, capitalism), makes him Aristotelian, or as Hülsmann (liii) says, “a representative of Aristotelian realism.” In his last book on epistemological issues, Mises writes, “From the praxeological point of view it is not possible to question the real existence of matter, of physical objects and of the external world” (Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science, 6).
 
In Human Action (36), though, he is more equivocal: “It is idle to ask whether things-in-themselves are different from what they appear to us, and whether there are worlds which we cannot divine and ideas which we cannot comprehend. These are problems beyond the scope of human cognition.”**
 
To clarify, nothing is unknowable—with emphasis on the -able—to the human mind. We do not live in a phenomenal world, unable to know the noumenal. We live in reality. And the appearance of a bent stick in water is a correct perception of what looks like, or rather appears to be, a bent stick, though with the use of our sense of touch and our knowledge of the causal effects of light in water, we know that the thing-in-itself stick is not bent. (See the form-object distinction in Rand, 279-82.)
 
 
To be continued next month. At this point, let me emphasize that my comments about Mises are not meant to be serious criticisms of his work. His accomplishments are vast and exemplary, even his partially mistaken epistemology, and especially considering his professional life where he was not offered a professorship in either Vienna or New York. In spite of this he taught and wrote tirelessly as a decades-long lone voice for laissez-faire capitalism. He needs to be read.
 
 
* Ayn Rand rejects the correspondence theory of truth and the misleading notion of “grasping” reality, a relic of naïve realism (though she does use the word in a metaphorical sense). Hers is an identification theory of truth. Our minds must actively focus on reality and form those concepts to identify correctly what is “out there.” The “out there” is what Rand would say is metaphysical, whereas the “in here,” the mental processing of our consciousness, is epistemological. The empirically derived and recognized principles of the applied science of logic, and especially the law of non-contradiction, are the tools by which we judge whether or not our mental content has correctly identified reality or contradicted it.
 
** This quotation apparently is Mises’ way of dismissing as unimportant Kant’s dilemma of appearance versus reality and of asserting his emphasis on analyzing the world in which we live—the Aristotelian world. A few pages later (Human Action, 39), he writes, “Praxeology conveys exact and precise knowledge of real things,” and in Ultimate Foundation, 18, he says, “We see reality, not as it ‘is’ and may appear to a perfect being, but only as the quality of our mind and of our senses enables us to see it,” which I would take to mean reality with no Kantian distortions.

Read part one, part three.

On the Correct Roles of Induction and Deduction in Human Life: Two Sentences from Ayn Rand’s Theory of Concepts

Original thinkers often state their identifications succinctly.

Ayn Rand’s notion of measurement omission (Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, chap. 2) in the formation of concepts is one such identification. Here is another (p. 28):

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.

These brief and to the point sentences state not just the two fundamental methods of cognition, but more importantly, the correct roles of induction and deduction in human life.

And by “human life,” I mean science as well as everyday life.

Induction is the process of generalization, of forming universal concepts based on our observation of particular objects or events. The definition of a single concept states a principle—all humans possess the capacity to reason, for example—and the combination of several or many concepts and principles builds our knowledge of reality and, in some cases, establishes the physical, biological, and human sciences.

Induction is conceptualization. From an early age, probably before we can assign words to them, we all practice the inductive formation of universal concepts.

This was my example in an earlier post of our daughter, before she could walk or talk, laughing heartily at her first sight of a bouncing ball (Applying Principles, pp. 322-24). She identified a universal, because her mind, to quote Aristotle (Posterior Analytics, 100a13), “is so constituted as to be capable of this process” (though the universal is not “in the thing,” as Aristotle assumed).

Rand’s identification describes in general terms the true nature of induction and makes the biological and human sciences as exact and valid as the physical sciences.*

Deduction is the process of identifying particular objects or events as instances of the general knowledge we have already acquired. The process, more accurately, is one of application.

Deduction is what Sherlock Holmes did and what medical doctors do, and what we all do in our everyday lives. We apply general knowledge to specific cases to guide us in making choices and taking actions.

Technology and the applied sciences are sciences of method and therefore are largely deductive, deriving their basic principles from the more fundamental sciences on which they rest, for example, engineering from physics and chemistry, medicine from biology, and economics from psychology with several business disciplines drawing their basic principles from both psychology and economics.

This identification of deduction as application dispenses with the detached-from-reality deduction for the sake of deduction that has dominated the academic world since the Middle Ages. Deduction as application demonstrates how much deduction we practice in our everyday lives.

We all induce and deduce—some of us better (more accurately) and at greater length (in intensive study) than others. What Ayn Rand’s identifications mean is that induction and deduction are not a monopoly of scientists, philosophers, or academics in general.

Where then does measurement fit in the sciences? Conceptualization is universalization, which means its essence is measurement omission, which means the essence of theoretical science is measurement omission. This means that measurement is an aid to theoretical science, not its essence.

Measurement is crucial in the applied physical sciences when, for example, we want to send astronauts to the moon and back. Measurement in the biological and human sciences, however, is not quantitatively exact in the sense of constructing advanced mathematical equations to predict the behavior of animals or humans.

In the human sciences it is that annoying thing called free will—annoying to many human scientists, most of whom are materialists and determinists—that prevents the human scientists’ “elegant” equations from making any practical sense, or from being replicated in subsequent studies.**

The biological and human sciences are exact and valid, if the conceptualizations made by the scientists working in those fields have correctly identified the aspect of reality they are studying. The identifications are not equations, but they are quantitative. For example, psychological depression can be severe or mild.

“Measurement omission” does not mean that conceptualization ignores measurements. One individual case is quantitatively distinct from the next one, as two balls can be two different sizes and can be made of different materials.

Precise measurement is what technology and applied science, especially in the physical sciences, must critically pay attention to. Measurement in the applied biological and human sciences does not have to be so precise—because it cannot be.

“Truth,” to quote another succinct identification of Ayn Rand (Objectivist Epistemology, p. 48), “is the product of the recognition (i.e., the identification) of the facts of reality.” Truth, for Rand, is not a correspondence theory, but one that identifies facts. It is a recognition or identification theory.

And what is our guide to truth? Logic, of course, as “the art of non-contradictory identification” (Objectivist Epistemology, p. 36), not the mathematical or symbolic stuff that is taught in universities today or the medieval rationalism that permeates the older logic textbooks.

Induction and deduction are what we all use every day in our practical lives.

Induction and deduction, respectively, are conceptualization and application. Measurement is an important component of the two, but it is not their essence.


* See John P. McCaskey, “Induction in the Socratic Tradition,” in Shifting the Paradigm: Alternative Perspectives on Induction, ed. Louis F. Groarke & Paolo C. Biondi (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 161–192, on his efforts to revive Socratic induction, a tradition promoted and debated both before and after Francis Bacon, but eventually overtaken by the nineteenth-century positivistic, Millian hypothetico-deductive method, a form of rationalistic, propositional inference. Socratic induction—generalization from particular things or concretes to universal abstract ideas—is consistent with Ayn Rand’s epistemology as inductive concept formation through measurement omission.

** “Man is that which fits economic equations,” as Ayn Rand (Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, p. 7) so simply and aptly caricatured the very rationalistic, pseudo-deductive doctrine of pure and perfect competition in economics.