The Applicator in Academia

Not too long ago, I mentioned to my wife, only partly joking, that because my career as a professor was in the applied science of marketing I was and am an applicator. I take ideas from the more fundamental disciplines and apply them in my teaching and writing.
 
I have come to accept the term as accurate and, in retrospect, have realized that my professors in both undergraduate and graduate school were applicators also.
 
Think of the person who installs new tile on your floor or shingles on your roof. The construction applicator takes what is on the shelf at the supply shop and lays it on your floor or roof. Professors do the same thing, in all fields of learning including philosophy. They take what’s on the shelf (of the more fundamental disciplines, the supply shop), apply it to their specific fields, then teach it to their students and write about it. The “shop” includes the discipline’s current and past literature that professors often accept too uncritically.
 
Philosophy is the most fundamental of the campus disciplines, so its “shelf” is the latest philosophy books and journal articles. Professors of philosophy—nearly all professors, actually—feel compelled to fit into the mold of that current context and teach and write in the same style as what they have read.*
 
What is on the shelf today for the business disciplines of marketing and management? The doctrine of pure and perfect competition and Keynesianism in economics and behaviorism (positivism more broadly) in psychology. The professors take these two doctrines as givens and, without question, spew them forth to their students and publication audiences.
 
If Austrian economics is acknowledged to exist at all, it is dismissed and disparaged. The same for any alternative in psychology. Cognitive psychology has been corrupted by behaviorism where it is now called “cognitive behavioral psychology” and “cognitive behavioral therapy.” Research and writing is entirely conducted in the older behaviorist mold. Studies must use statistics and probabilities (because there are no universals) and the “falsifiability” criterion of Karl Popper, rather than identification of the facts of reality and the formulation and clarification of universal concepts, are the fundamental methodologies. (Freud is also smeared and ignored, with the exception of specific training programs in psychoanalysis.)
 
Needless to say, Ayn Rand is still not taught, understood, or accepted in any way today in the academic world. (There are exceptions, but not many.) I am tempted to say that there is an “Ayn Rand derangement syndrome” operating in the minds of many academics. Nothing she said or wrote, as the attitude goes, could possibly be correct, interesting, or appropriate for a college classroom.
 
Neither Ayn Rand nor Ludwig von Mises are on the academic supply shelf.
 
This was true in the 1960s and ‘70s when I was in undergraduate and graduate school, and it seems to be the same today, perhaps worse, because of what is now available, namely the postmodern version of Marxism.
 
What did I do in graduate school (and somewhat as an undergraduate)? I called it my “double duty” education. In class and the textbooks, I reluctantly absorbed what was being taught me, but at home would go over the material to figure out what was wrong and what I thought was correct. It took extra time, but it was worth the effort.
 
Because so much bad epistemology was being taught to me in class—even marketing professors were trashing advertising—I began thinking about what became my first book In Defense of Advertising. I also quickly became aware that anything like that book could not be written or submitted as a PhD dissertation. It was not a “true [positivist] study.” My dissertation, consequently, was a study on perceived risk, which is a valid concept in psychology, but the results, to use Edith Packer’s word, were minutia.
 
The problem with the “applicators” of ideas is that everything on the shelf must be questioned and examined carefully for falsehoods, especially epistemological errors, then replaced with better ideas. Which means going away from the standard academic supply shop to find those better ideas, which is seldom done by today’s professors. It means a lot of rethinking of subjects from the ground up.
 
Schools of engineering and business are better than the “social” sciences and humanities, because the professors of engineering and business still rely on objective facts to teach their students how to build bridges and rockets and how properly to run a business for a profit. Engineering is better than business, as bad economics and psychology mentioned above taints the content of business courses. The so-called social sciences and the humanities are the worst.
 
Bad epistemology is everywhere in today’s academic world and it affects content. Good applicators, to conclude this metaphor, must know and use good epistemology—specifically, Ayn Rand’s theory of concepts—to analyze, review or reject, or expand and revise what is on the academic supply shelf before applying it for purposes of teaching and writing.
 
Better or improved tiles and shingles, or a totally new and creatively different covering, are what are needed in today’s academic world. This is how and why I call myself an applicator.
 
 
* See Brand Blanshard’s short book, On Philosophical Style, for a discussion of clarity in philosophical writing. All academics could learn from it.
 

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.

From the Preface to Applying Principles

Applying Principles: Short Essays Based on the Philosophy of Ayn Rand, Economics of Ludwig von Mises, and Psychology of Edith Packer will be published October 1. It is my first ten years of blogging. The book may be preordered at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, with more information on its website books.jkirkpatrick.net. Here are edited selections from the preface.


Although I spent thirty-six years in college classrooms teaching undergraduate and graduate students business marketing, my bachelor’s degree was in philosophy. That subject influenced and underscored my entire career. As a result, I never let the day job of teaching students how to sell soap (as I would often describe my academic duties) become disconnected from its foundations in psychology, economics, or philosophy.

Indeed, I recognized early in graduate school that marketing, as well as the other business disciplines, are properly described as applied sciences that rest on those more fundamental fields. “Art” is sometimes used to describe applied science, but the usage is correct only if it is meant as a synonym. Often the word is meant to disparage applied fields because they are allegedly less precise or rigorous than “real” science, which means the physical or quantitative sciences. A student many years ago complimented me when she realized that advertising was as disciplined (her word) as finance, her major. There may not be universal equations in the applied human sciences, but the principles are universal in their appropriate context and the fields are “disciplined.”

Business as applied science is analogous to medicine and engineering. Medicine rests on biology for its more fundamental foundation and engineering on physics and chemistry. All fundamental and derivative special sciences, again in turn, rest on philosophy. All such fields are related and should be integrated, rather than isolated as they so often are in today’s academic world.

Thus, what I did when researching, writing, and teaching was to apply principles from the other, more fundamental fields, which explains my interest in epistemology and psychology, as well as the principles unique to marketing and advertising.

To illustrate further, the civil engineer whose goal is to build a bridge must know not just the fundamentals of physics and chemistry, but also the nature and composition of materials (used to build the bridge), and also the nature and behavior of rivers, which includes the history of the particular river over which the bridge will span and the nature and behavior of the river’s soil and water.

Applied science gathers all relevant concrete facts of the specific case it is working on, then uses, that is, applies, the universal concepts and principles of the fundamental sciences on which it rests, plus the narrower concepts and principles of its discipline.

Application is one of the two fundamental methods of cognition and is deductive. Generalization is the other and is inductive. We all use both every day in our lives. The two methods, as I say in my 2018 blog post, “are not the monopoly of scientists, philosophers, or academics in general.” Generalization gives us concepts and principles to guide our lives, while it also gives us theory and theoretical science. Application, which requires the previously acquired knowledge that generalization gives us, is what our medical doctors do, what Sherlock Holmes did, and what we do on a daily basis.

Application means we identify “a this as an instance of a that.” We present a cough and runny nose to our doctor and he or she quickly concludes, based on accumulated knowledge and patient history, that we have a cold. Similarly, Holmes saw that Watson was tanned and showed signs of having been wounded in a war; thus he concluded Watson recently came back from Afghanistan. And a child applies the previously learned concept of balance by shifting weight when learning to ride a bicycle. All three examples are processes of deduction, and illustrate how deduction is the predominant method of applied sciences, as well as everyday life.*

Deduction, therefore, is essentially what I have been doing when writing my blog posts. I am not in any intended way coming up with new concepts or principles, nor am I repeating the proofs of the great writers listed in my masthead, or others I may cite in a post as a reference. I take their ideas and apply them to specific issues.


The following essays are not journalistic as a newspaper column might be. I gave myself the assignment always to come up with something more fundamental than the news of the day, whether theoretical or historical, which last includes relevant citation of research.

The posts are organized into seven chapters, listed chronologically within chapter. Because of the way I write—“interdisciplinary” to use the academic jargon—one may quibble over some classifications. The chapters are “Capitalism and Politics,” “Academia,” “Education,” “Psychology,” “Epistemology,” “Youth Sports,” and “The Arts.”

I do have favorites. It was difficult to choose one per chapter, but here they are, in chapter order:

• “The Reductio of Bureaucracy: Totalitarian Dictatorship”

• “Because the Stakes Are So Small”

• “Go Fish!”

• “Look at Your Premises. Look. Look. Look!”

• “Why Don’t Facts Matter?”

• “Yes, There Is Crying in Softball”

• “Life in Three-Quarter Time”

My idea for publishing this collection comes from two books of columns: All It Takes Is Guts by economist Walter Williams and Double Standards by radio show host Larry Elder. I did not read these books from beginning to end. I skimmed the table of contents and read whatever caught my attention. Readers of this work might want to do the same.


* It is in this sense that history is also an applied science. We, as well as professional historians, look at past events, natural or human, and try to explain them, that is, identify their causes, by reference to our accumulated theoretical knowledge. Historians in the human sciences rely in particular on political philosophy, economics, and psychology. See Ludwig von Mises, Theory and History, amazon.com.
 

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.