Positivism

The philosophy of positivism—also called logical positivism and logical empiricism—has for decades been the bane of science, especially the human sciences.
 
The concept “positivism” that I am using is broader than the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle in the1920s–1930s, which attempted, but failed, to find Immanuel Kant’s noumenal world through symbolic logic applied to sense data. Positivism (495–98), as it is still used today and derives from the work of August Comte, means the use of the so-called scientific methods of physics and chemistry to attempt to discover laws of human behavior and events.
 
All science, that is to say, must be quantitative, and if it is not quantitative, it is not science. The post-Kantian premises of positivists, in their attempt to defend science, are the following: the entire branch of philosophy called metaphysics is meaningless—that is, the concept cannot be “empirically verified”—and universals, facts, values, and, especially, truth are similarly unknowable and therefore meaningless. Awareness of reality is restricted to directly perceived concretes. At best, say the positivists, we can try to come up with “successive approximations” of statistical probabilities, but we will never reach “absolute” certainty or “eternal” truth, and, of course, all science must be “value-free.”
 
Thus, an endless parade of statistical studies to incrementally—and slowly—pretend to develop science, never achieving the status of universality because universals, well, as stated above, are metaphysically meaningless. This method, or epistemology, is gospel in the so-called social sciences today, which I prefer to call human sciences, the sciences of homo sapiens that emphasize and study the animal that possesses a volitional consciousness. The human sciences, in other words, study human nature as the being who exercises, or does not exercise, the capacity to reason.
 
The two fundamental special sciences of human nature are psychology and economics, that is, respectively, the science of the motivation and behavior of individual human beings, healthy or unhealthy, and the science of cooperating individuals in a social setting the aim of which is to generate and produce peace and prosperity.
 
Austrian economists do not agree with the positivist mantra, preferring the method of logical reasoning, the process of identifying correct concepts and integrating them into principles, then integrating principles into theories—leaving Newtonian-type algebraic equations to the physicists and chemists. Sigmund Freud essentially did the same thing in the development of psychoanalysis.
 
Austrian economist F. A. Hayek in his 1974 Nobel laureate address did not use the word “positivism,” but did say that scientism and the scientistic attitude of insisting on using the methods of physical science in the social sciences “quite arbitrarily limits the facts which are to be admitted as possible causes of the events which occur in the real world.” Scientism is a close synonym of positivism and is defined by Hayek as a pretense of knowledge.
 
Positivism over the years has been criticized, notably for its contradiction that metaphysics is meaningless—because that statement itself is a metaphysical assertion.
 
What positivism in particular lacks, among its many other faults, is a sound theory of universals and theory of abstraction from abstractions, which I have written about in previous posts (1, 2, 3).
 
According to Ayn Rand, universal concepts are formed by omitting the measurable differences of the concept’s referents—length, width, and height, for example, of several perceived, concrete objects we come to identify and label as “tables.” After identifying other similar but, in some respects, different perceived concretes—such as chairs and beds—we omit the measurements of size and focus on, but also omit, the different purposes of tables, chairs, and beds, retaining their use in a human household to form the concept “furniture,” which is an abstraction from abstractions.
 
When we move to broad abstractions in psychology and economics, such as depression and the business cycle, we require focused attention on the chain of abstractions from perceived concrete to broad abstraction—and back to the perceptual level. This mental effort—and it is mental effort—is precisely what is lacking in positivism because, as they say, the abstractions are “analytic,” arbitrary constructs, subjectively defined. Only “synthetic” perceived concretes can be true or false.
 
The mental effort in forming and correcting our abstractions from abstractions is precisely what led Ayn Rand (67–68) to say, rather pointedly:
 
Like a spoiled, disillusioned child, who had expected predigested capsules of automatic knowledge, a logical positivist stamps his foot at reality and cries that context, integration, mental effort and first-hand inquiry are too much to expect of him, that he rejects so demanding a method of cognition, and that he will manufacture his own “constructs” from now on.
 
Karl Popper (chap. 1) denied that he was a positivist though his premises are positivistic. He attempted to defend science by proposing the still widely accepted criterion of “falsifiability,” that is, the notion that a concept is valid only if it can be falsified.
 
Meaning precisely what? In the human sciences, the answer to this question is that concepts, or rather “constructs,” must be “operationalized” in order to test them using the experimental-statistical methods of the physical sciences. If that cannot be done, the concept cannot be falsified.
 
Operationalization means to make measurable. What is the measuring instrument to be used in the human sciences, where volition is the fundamental premise? Well, first of all, volition is not relevant because it cannot be “falsified” and, besides, real science does not acknowledge such “pseudoscience,” which, as Popper might say, is akin to astrology.
 
Therefore, following the Popperian method, such constructs as “attitude” from psychology and “utility” from economics must be measured by administering a “paper and pencil” instrument called a questionnaire to a sample of five hundred or more people. The collected data is then analyzed, perhaps using sophisticated multivariate statistics. Probability estimates and confidence intervals are calculated. Universals are never discussed or considered relevant or possible.
 
If a concept cannot be measured using this method, it cannot be falsified. It is therefore meaningless and invalid.
 
Popper states that science begins with highly informed guesses” (conjectures) and then attempts to falsify or refute them (chap. 3; my italics). Similarly, economist Milton Friedman (14) says that economic research, in the positivist-Popper tradition, begins with “wildly inaccurate” assumptions that we test and attempt to “empirically verify,” or rather “falsify.”*
 
The problem here is that the terms “guess” and “hypothesis” do not have the same referents. A hypothesis begins with significant evidence about what we are studying, but not enough to draw a definite conclusion. A guess has little or no evidence.
 
 “Empirical verifiability” of the positivists and Popper’s alternative of “falsification” are not essentially different. They both constrict science—all science, not just the human sciences—to perceived concretes and the experimental-positivistic-behavioristic methodology, essentially dismissing broad abstractions and logical reasoning.**
 
As Rand’s theory indicates, the essence of science is measurement omission, not measurement, and the proper method of doing science is conceptualization. The criterion of what is true or false, that is, the correct identification of reality, is Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction. Whatever violates the law in the name of science should be called pseudoscience.
 
Which seems to be an appropriate descriptive of positivism.
 
 
* Friedman, “The Methodology of Positive Economics.” Friedman, however, apparently regretted writing this essay.
 
** The experimental-positivistic-behavioristic terminology is psychologist Abraham Maslow’s disapproving description of positivist epistemology (xlvi).

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 Metaphysical versus the Epistemological as Applied to Consciousness

In Ayn Rand’s theory of concepts (chap. 1, 2), influenced by Aristotle’s fundamental premise of the primacy of existence, Rand makes an important distinction between the metaphysical and the epistemological.
 
Metaphysics, in contrast to the special sciences, studies all of existence—reality, the universe as a whole. This includes consciousness, which is a natural, not supernatural, part of existence that is an attribute of many higher level animals, especially human beings.
 
Epistemology studies the fundamental nature of human consciousness, the mental processes by which we know, or attempt to know, existence. Rand identifies (chap. 6) the two primary, self-evident concepts of existence and consciousness—self-evident in the Aristotelian sense that they are implicitly known in every act of awareness and thus cannot be denied without having to be accepted in the process of denial. Hence, such denials are self-contradictions. She calls these two primaries axiomatic concepts.*
 
When Rand uses the words “metaphysics” and “epistemology” as describing adjectives, such as metaphysical referent and epistemological essence, she is narrowing the usages to draw attention to how her theory of concepts differs from the moderate realism of Aristotle and the nominalism (arbitrary subjectivism) of today. (For example, see pp. 21, 35, and 52 in the Epistemology.)
 
The metaphysical, in its older, traditional sense, is everything that is outside of our minds—termed objective reality—and everything in or related to consciousess is termed subjective. It would be better, however, to use the term “external” as modifier of “outer” reality since consciousness is our internal—and metaphysical—reality, especially when it becomes the object of study to formulate theories of epistemology and psychology.
 
In Ayn Rand’s theory, there are metaphysical and epistemological components of consciousness.
 
In this context, the epistemological is everything our minds do—the mental processes they perform to create accurate concepts and principles, to acquire knowledge of both the external world and the internal world of consciousness, as well as to guide our choices and actions.**
 
Rand here is emphasizing the difference (165–66) between perceiver, the method of using our minds, and perceived, the facts of reality. When the processes of our minds are the objects of study, our consciousness is itself the perceiver and the processes are the perceived.
 
We are at once both observer and observed.
 
“Epistemological” as the describing adjective means, in Rand’s words, for example, the method we use “to discover a causal explanation” (230), that is, to identify the facts. “Epistemological” refers to our use of the processes and products of our minds, such as conceptualization to form the concept “table,” or, for that matter, the concept “concept.” We are being “epistemological” whether extrospecting or introspecting, and this includes the formulation of those sciences of consciousness, epistemology and psychology. The objects of study, the referents of the concept “table” and of the concept “concept” are metaphysical, as are the consciousnesses of each one of us when under study by an epistemologist or psychologist.
 
For years, if not centuries, the subject-object distinction in both philosophy and science has plagued all those who work with consciousness.
 
It is not a contradiction to say that the processes and products of our minds are the objective and metaphysical reality that both epistemology and psychology study. They are “subjective” only in the sense they are “in the subject,” the subject’s mind, as opposed to being “out there” in the external world. Consciousness is our internal reality and is our means of knowing existence—all of existence, including consciousness.
 
Epistemologists and psychologists, in effect, perform a “double duty,” of using the epistemological methods of our conscious processes to identify the metaphysical nature of those processes. “Double duty” just means scientists of the mind must introspect, as opposed to the scientists of matter who extrospect.
 
It is equivocation to say that psychology is subjective because its object of study is “in the head” and therefore not objective, that is, false, arbitrary, or unknowable.***
 
This is precisely what the Kantians and post-Kantians assert, namely that because our consciousness has a nature, we cannot know, or know with certainty, what is inside or outside of our minds. Consciousness, they say, distorts awareness of reality. How do they know that? Yes, some people’s minds distort reality, such as the ignorant and neurotic, and everyone at times makes mistakes, but the solution to this alleged problem is to follow Aristotle’s laws of logic.
 
As I have written before (65), although introspection has been effectively banned from psychology for over a century, logic is “the introspective science” (my emphasis).
 
The criteria of epistemological objectivity are Aristotle’s laws, especially the law of non-contradiction. If I say that the contents of my mind includes seeing the object on my desk as a leprechaun, not a glass of water, there is a contradiction between what I am thinking and what the actual fact is.
 
A valid theory of concepts, or universals, as it is also often referred to, must answer the question, how exactly do the products of our consciousness relate to the facts of both external and internal reality? How do we know that what is “in our heads,” epistemologically, correctly identifies what is “out there,” metaphysically.
 
And in a more complicated fashion, how do we know that what is “in here,” in our own minds, that is, its processes and products, correctly identifies what is . . . “in here”?
 
Ayn Rand’s theory of concepts holds that concepts and essential distinguishing characteristics are indeed in our minds, not “out there” in the thing, but if we correctly identify what is “out there,” and “in here,” the essences and concepts are objective in the epistemological sense, but not intrinsic or metaphysical as both Plato and Aristotle thought.
 
Historically, most philosophers have exerted considerable effort trying to find essences “out there” in the thing, but never found them, often concluding that concepts or universals are subjective, “names” only, hence the theory of nominalism.
 
That the essences are not intrinsically embedded in the things of metaphysical reality does not mean that they do not or cannot have a valid existence elsewhere, epistemologically, in our minds. We are not condemned to skepticism, or to Kant’s and the positivists’ complacent skepticism.
 
Indeed, any doctrine of skepticism is self-contradictory, because its proponents, in effect, and often explicitly, say, “We know that we know nothing,” which is absurd. And the statements of the complacent skeptics—"we don’t need complete certainty to live our lives”—are equally absurd. The concepts of probability and uncertainty presuppose certainty as much as and in the same way as the concept orphan presupposes parent. Rand calls this the stolen concept fallacy.
 
To sum up, the metaphysical refers to existence, which includes the processes and products of consciousness. The epistemological refers to consciousness as an active processor, both extrospectively and introspectively, guided by Aristotelian logic, that correctly (or incorrectly) identifies the reality of the “out there” and the “in here.”
 
 
* Identity is a third axiomatic concept, which Rand points out is a corollary of existence.
 
** Rand sometimes substitutes the word “psychological” for “epistemological,” especially when talking about concepts of consciousness (chap. 4 in the Epistemology; see also p. 256.)
 
*** Note the two meanings of the word “objective” as Rand uses it: the metaphysical referents of existence, the outer physical world and the inner mental world, and the epistemological essences we identify to formulate objective truth and knowledge. If our concepts and essences—as well as our values—are true, they are epistemologically objective. Only if arbitrary or false would it be correct to call them subjective.

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.

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.

The Meaning of Sacrifice and the Staying Power of Statism

Why does statism and its collectivist progeny, communism, socialism, fascism, and, especially, democratic socialism, still attract followers?

The answer is still Ayn Rand’s. You can argue the impracticality of statism until you are blue in the face, but unless you reject the moral ideal on which statism rests—altruism, the doctrine of self-sacrifice—your listener will respond by saying the failures of the USSR or Mao’s China or today’s Venezuela were caused by the selfish dictators who usurped power and destroyed the ideal.

In our present cultural, historical, and epistemological ignorance and chaos, discussion of ideas is rare and discussion in terms of fundamental principles even rarer. Let’s see if we can find some fundamentals.

Altruism, as I have written before, does not mean kindness or gentleness or helping little old ladies across the street (Applying Principles, pp. 39-41, 88-90). Immanuel Kant, though he did not know the word “altruism,” clarified its essence when he said moral behavior means always acting from duty, never from inclination.

And coiner of the term, Auguste Comte, as cited by George Smith, makes it clear that altruism has nothing to do with individual rights or individualism, but with living for the collective of “humanity.”

Which is to say that morality is not supposed to be fun. It means obedience to authority . . . of God, society, or some group. Pleasure and fun lead to selfishness and that is bad.

Self-sacrifice, then, is meant to be painful. The word, in fact, means to kill, destroy, or abnegate, which means sacrifice is supposed to hurt and you especially should not get anything in return for your pain.*

Sacrifice means giving up something that you value highly to something or someone you value less highly or not at all.

For example, a sacrifice from pre-historic times meant throwing your child into the fire to pay homage to the gods. Now that may be rationalized as giving up a lesser value for the sake of a higher one, and some usage and dictionary definitions of the word “sacrifice” tend to support this notion, but the correct meaning of self-sacrifice in religion and ethics remains the act of giving up a higher value to a lower- or non-value.

Sacrifice, in other words, is not a commercial trade in which a buyer gives up money (the lesser value) for a product (the higher value), and vice versa for the seller. Religious and ethical sacrifices are painful and are meant to be painful.

To further illustrate, it is not a sacrifice to spend extra years of your life, perhaps working at multiple part-time jobs, to acquire an advanced college degree in order to pursue a more personally rewarding career.

Nor is it a sacrifice to have children and raise a family. The parents, after all, have made a choice—they signed a twenty-plus year contract—to start a family and presumably they value the children more than the childless life they used to enjoy. (I have to admit that this last is not always obvious when observing the behavior of some young couples.)

Self-sacrifice means the pursuit of a career to please your parents instead of the career you truly love and want. It means marrying a person you do not love—again, to please those “significant others” who may disapprove of your choice’s religion, social class, race, or ethnicity.

Sacrifice means doing your job because it’s your duty—not because you enjoy it.

“Moral purification through suffering” is how the ascetic life is sometimes described. It is the motto of altruism. This is why young women who get pregnant are punished—for a lifetime, as it often turns out—by preventing them from aborting the pregnancy.** This is why small business owners are coerced, in flagrant violation of property rights, to provide services to customers they do not willingly choose to serve.

Your duty is to suffer and, if necessary, die for your country. This is why involuntary servitude in the form of a military draft or “national service” is justified.

You are immoral if you think you have a right to pursue your own self-interest.

Why does statism continue to thrive? Continued support of the doctrine of self-sacrifice and hesitancy or outright refusal to defend a morality of self-interest.

Capitalism and the free society rest on and require a foundation of rational egoism. Altruism and its statist political manifestations are acts of enslavement and destruction.

Thus, if we continue to allow the state to claim authority to coerce us in any way other than self-defensive, retaliatory force against those who initiate its use, we compromise our principles and yield the high ground to the statists.

These compromises include the acceptance or tolerance of coerced prohibition of abortion, coerced business service to unwanted customers, coerced military service, coerced removal of money from our wallets (through taxation and the depreciation of the value of money) . . . and on and on, including the thousands of coerced rules, regulations, and laws passed by the deep state and legislatures to control our business and personal lives.

Democratic socialism? The vote, somehow, since at least Marx’s time, and on all sides of the political spectrum, has become the panacea for all kinds of decisions, including the initiated coercion of socialism.

If it has been voted on, so goes the thought and argument, then it must be okay.

Democracy unrestrained by individual rights is a form of dictatorship. Anyone who advocates the vote without the rights qualification—or without making it clear that there is a rights qualification—is supporting and endorsing statism.

This worshipful blather over democracy, of course, in just another indication of our cultural, historical, and epistemological ignorance and chaos.


* From the Oxford English Dictionary (OED online), self-sacrifice means “the giving up of one’s own interests, happiness, and desires, for the sake of duty or the welfare of others.”

** “An embryo,” as Ayn Rand vigorously argued, “has no rights. Rights do not pertain to a potential, only to an actual being. A child cannot acquire any rights until it is born. The living take precedence over the not-yet-living (or the unborn). . . . One may argue about the later stages of a pregnancy, but the essential issue concerns only the first three months. To equate a potential with an actual . . . is to advocate the sacrifice of the latter to the former.” (Emphasis in original.) If both pro- and anti-abortionists were sincere about women’s liberty and rights, they would promote above all else the removal of bureaucratic obstacles to child adoption and the governmental encouragements (entitlements, welfare, incompetent government schools, etc.) of unwed teenage pregnancies. Instead, both sides would rather punish, that is, coerce sacrifice of, those who violate their arbitrary rules.

From the Stick Motivation Department: Chores

There are many ways in which adults lord their size and power over children.

It usually begins with spankings of a disobedient toddler by, say, a towering six-foot-plus dad who leers, yells, then hits the helpless tot. (See related posts 1, 2, 3.)

Why? Aside from the excuse that “that’s the way my parents treated me and their parents treated them,” etc., ad infinitum, the most common rationalization is that children have to learn to mind, lest they run out into the street and get killed, or turn into juvenile delinquents, or become criminals.

“Didn’t hurt me none” is the less than introspective response of some adults when asked why they did not question their parents’ stick-motivation techniques.*
 
The assignment of chores to kids so they allegedly will learn how to work hard and become responsible citizens of society is another form of stick motivation.

Webster’s Unabridged and the Oxford English Dictionary both define “chore” as a tedious task that must be performed regularly, such as washing the dishes or hoeing long rows. The OED also says the word is a colloquial Americanism.

What astounded me when examining these two reference works was the absence of any mention that chores are not optional. Yes, adults sometimes do refer to their own monotonous tasks, such as brushing their teeth twice a day, as chores, but the origin of the term in American culture surely is coercion of the young.

Chores for children are almost never voluntary. Just ask a child what happened the last time he or she refused to do one!

Fortunately, novelist Jane Smiley, writing in Harper’s Magazine (paywalled here, available here), has put the kibosh on the supposed benefits of this favorite of coercive parenting.

Smiley was born with a silver spoon in her mouth, so she never had to clean her room or wash the dishes. She did have a horse and, as she puts it, through her love of and interest in the animal learned to work hard to groom and feed it and clean its stall, which meant removing the poop.

Smiley’s husband, on the other hand, grew up in Iowa, less than wealthy, and was forced to do chores—mixing concrete with a stick at age five and, later, pushing wet, heavy wheelbarrow loads of it across the yard.

Guess which one, Smiley or her husband, enjoys life more today?

Smiley’s husband feels guilty playing golf when there is always more work—chores—to be done at home; when doing the chores, his motivation is to get them over with as quickly as possible.** He was taught well. Chores are tedious drudgery, which means work is drudgery.

And that’s because parents give kids the dirty work as chores. Says Smiley, “Mom cooks and Sis does the dishes; the parents plan and plant the garden, the kids weed it.”

In addition to teaching the “value” of work, Smiley points out that another apparent purpose of chores is to make sure the children contribute to maintaining the family, by sharing the work that needs to be done. Smiley comments:

According to this rationale, the child comes to understand what it takes to have a family, and to feel that he or she is an important, even indispensable member of it. But come on. Would you really want to feel loved primarily because you’re the one who gets the floors mopped? Wouldn't you rather feel that your family's love simply exists all around you, no matter what your contribution? And don't the parents love their children anyway, whether the children vacuum or not? Why lie about it just to get the housework done?

Why lie indeed? It is really a threat to withdraw love if the child is not obedient, similar to the withdrawals of love for disobedience that result in time outs and being sent to one’s room.

Smiley concludes: “It's good for a teenager to suddenly decide that the bathtub is so disgusting she'd better clean it herself. I admit that for the parent, this can involve years of waiting. But if she [mom] doesn't want to wait, she can always spend her time dusting.”

Parenting, after all, is a twenty-plus year contract chosen and signed by the parents. Children are not their slaves.

Presumably, the American concept of chores originated on self-subsistent farms, where there certainly was a lot of heavy, tedious work to be done to maintain the homestead.

The “justification” of requiring pre-school children to lug heavy pales of milk and to pluck chickens, however,  is not the assumed necessity of a division of labor in the family. It is the value system of nearly all American farmers, absorbed by their citified descendants, of Puritanism. American culture still today is highly Puritanical.

And what might that value system be? The duty ethics of Christianity reinforced by philosopher Immanuel Kant. As one middle American farm-raised father said not too long ago: “You do your job because it is your duty, not because you enjoy it.”

As Kant said, never act from inclination, but always in accordance with duty. Fun and pleasure are out. Chores are in.

In contrast, visit a Montessori school to see how children are taught without coercion to love work, to associate pleasure with it, and to learn the skill of intense concentration.


*Corporal punishment in all settings, which includes spanking by hand in the home, is now banned in forty-nine countries of the world. The United States is not one of them. Sweden was the first, in 1979, and surprise, surprise, those children who were not smacked or beaten did not turn into juvenile delinquents or criminals!

The website corpun.com archives a large number of video clips from around the world of both adult and child corporal punishment. I could only stomach watching one: a Sri Lankan military trainer hitting female recruits with a long stick.

**Stemming from the same value system, this is the motivation for children who eat their peas first to get the disgusting stuff out of the way so they can enjoy the good-tasting meat and gravy last!