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.

On Science and the Scientific Method

The purpose of science is to explain and guide, and the method scientists use, in briefest essence, is observation to raise questions followed by frequent testing and trying of alternatives to find correct answers.
 
In a single word, scientific method is conceptualization, the mental process of generalizing to identify universals and applying previously formed universals to understand particular cases. The former is a process of induction, the latter a process of deduction (1, 2).
 
We all use both cognitive processes, but scientists use them more intensely and in more concentrated areas.
 
Scientific method may or may not involve controlled experimentation with an elaborate array of instruments and it may or may not produce mathematical equations and hosts of quantitative data.
 
The ultimate aim of science is practical, to enhance human life.
 
The most fundamental science is philosophy or, as some have said, philosophy is the science of all sciences, with epistemology providing the principles of method to guide scientists in their choices and actions. The current post is based on Ayn Rand’s epistemology, especially her theory of concepts.
 
There are three fundamental special sciences: the physical that study inanimate matter and its actions; the biological that study living organisms and their behavior; and the human that study homo sapiens—the highest living organism that possesses a consciousness with the capacity to reason—and its behavior.
 
Special sciences representative of each are physics and chemistry, botany and zoology, psychology and economics.
 
All other sciences derive their basic premises from one or more of the fundamental ones. Derivative sciences are more applied than the fundamental ones and at some point may be called technology or applied sciences—engineering, medicine, psychotherapy.
 
Applied sciences are largely, though not exclusively, deductive. The fundamental sciences are largely, though not exclusively, inductive.
 
To return to our beginning concepts, the aim of science is not explanation and prediction as the logical positivists insist, but explanation and guidance. To explain means to describe the nature of an entity, its attributes, and its causal origin and effects. To guide means to provide principles of action to help human beings achieve specific goals.
 
Principles of guidance can be used to build spaceships and bridges; to diagnose diseases in plants, animals, and humans to recommend treatments; to manage small and large businesses; to make baskets (pp. 299-301); and to decide whether a specific action would be honest.
 
Ethics is a fundamental branch of philosophy that provides important principles of guidance throughout our lives.
 
Testing and trying are the etymological roots of the word “experiment” and testing and trying is what anyone who possesses the capacity to reason does to conclude that an essential distinguishing characteristic has been identified.
 
A child, for example, may throw, bounce, and chew a round, spongy thing before concluding that the round, spongy thing is a ball that bounces and rolls (but is not food). Aristotle opened twenty fertilized chicken eggs, one per day, to observe the development of chicks from beating speck of blood to live baby chicken. In this way, he tested and confirmed the hypothesis that baby birds are not born pre-formed, but grow gradually stage by stage within the egg (see Harré, chap. 1).
 
Today’s scientists test and try many options, sometimes using controlled experimentation to eliminate sources of extraneous variation. In the physical sciences, they may identify algebraic equations to explain the relationship between two or more entities or their attributes or actions.
 
The biological and human sciences, however, because of the nature of their subjects cannot be so precise. Since all concept formation, as Ayn Rand has shown (chap. 1 &2), involves measurement—measurement omission to arrive at the universal—these sciences can be quantified to a limited extent, using approximate measurements, such as greater than or less than, higher or lower, more important or less important.
 
The human sciences, of course, have the added proviso that free will reduces to absurdity the formulating of equations to predict behavior. All sciences work with universals by omitting—but certainly not forgetting—the measurements.
 
Technology or applied science uses measurements of individual cases, such as the engineer who needs to decide the best location of a new bridge or the sea captain who needs a reliable estimate of the tides in a specific harbor. The medical doctor needs to know a patient’s temperature and blood pressure and the psychotherapist needs an estimate of the kind and quantity of thinking errors an unhappy patient has made over the years.
 
Essentialization is the fundamental thinking method of scientists (and everyone else) because the essential distinguishing characteristic or essence of a concept explains and causes all or most of the other characteristics. The flat, level surface of a table explains why my glass of water sits stably on it and causes the liquid to stay within the glass. The motions of the sun and moon explain and cause the motions of water on earth.
 
Essentialization can be thought of as thinking in causes and effects.
 
Principles of guidance also explain the nature of the goals one is seeking and the steps that will cause that accomplishment. To sell a product, the salesperson must tailor his or her presentation to the prospect’s needs and wants. To build a bridge, the engineer needs to know many specifics, including precise measurements, of the width of the river and the nature and history of its soil.
 
Where does history fit in to this? Science, whether basic or applied, can be referred to as theory. History requires and uses theory to identify the nature and causes of a specific case, such as sedimentary rock embedded at a forty-five degree angle several thousand feet up on a mountainside or the nature and cause of a specific war.
 
What is called natural history uses theory from the physical sciences and human history uses theory from the human sciences to explain the nature and causes of the cases each study.
 
History is applied science.

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.
 

“Whataboutism” and the Nature of Principles

“Whataboutism” (1, 2) is an accusation of inconsistency.

In recent years it has become a form of the tu quoque (“you too”) fallacy: “what about your (America’s) human rights violations?” But it has another form that has been around probably since the beginning of intellectual argumentation.

“You don’t believe women should be drafted into the military, but what about men?”

“You don’t believe small business should be regulated, but surely you believe big business needs regulation?” What about the steel industry? What about automobiles? What about high tech?”

When it occurs in this form, it might be a logically valid point, or it might be a dropping of context by failing to connect to reality. To understand the difference, we need to understand principles and their application.*

Slightly adapting a definition from the Oxford English Dictionary, principles are fundamental truths on which others depend that provide causal explanations and guidance to human action.

For example, water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit at sea level, lower at higher elevations or higher if the water contains impurities. This is a causal explanation and implicit guidance—adjust cooking recipes in high altitude.

Never lie in human relationships, unless threatened with initiated coercion, uninvited invasion of privacy, or when a blunt truth may unnecessarily hurt the other person. This is a guide to human action, a moral one at that, and an implied causal explanation of what is required for benevolent cooperation and friendship.

Principles are combinations of concepts and each concept in the principle must be true, that is, correctly identify the facts the concept subsumes under it.** In this way principles state truths and enable subsequent truths to rest on them to build our personal knowledge (unique to each one of us) and our physical, biological, and human sciences.

Truth is not in reality to be corresponded to or “grasped” as the traditional theory of truth holds, which is to say truth is not in the thing intrinsically as Aristotle and other naïve realists believe.

Truth and falsity are in our heads based on how well—correctly or incorrectly—we have processed reality, performing certain mental actions to make our identifications. If I call the glass of water on my desk a leprechaun, I have mentally processed the object in a way that the content of my consciousness contradicts the facts. This violates one of Aristotle’s many major contributions to rational thought, the law of non-contradiction.

If I call the object a glass of water, I have mentally processed the object in a way that the content of my consciousness correctly identifies it, that is, subsumes it under the concept “glass of water.”

Correctly identified truths are universal, as are correctly formed concepts, but the fundamental principle that guides all our identifications is Aristotle’s law that includes a crucial phrase at the end of his statement: “at the same time and in the same respect.”

Concepts and principles are formed and applied within a context. Water does not boil at 212 degrees Fahrenheit without appropriate qualifications. Herein lies the problem with the “whataboutists” who fail not just to understand the correct nature of principles but also the context in which they apply, hence the many repeated questions “what about this?” “and this” “and this?”

The principle of individual rights identifies freedoms of action that are universal in a social, political context, meaning they apply to all individuals in society, whether male, female, black, white, American, or Chinese. The principle of rights also applies to anyone who runs a business, any business.

And these rights are violated by initiated coercion, especially when imposed by the government.

This means the military draft is involuntary servitude for both males and females, no matter what rationalizations the Supreme Court has given to justify it. Being against the draft for women means also being against it for men, and vice versa.

If initiated coercion is used to regulate business people, the consistent conclusion of universal individual rights applied to business must be laissez-faire capitalism.

Applying principles means recognizing specific cases that are subsumed under the principle. Men, women, blacks, whites, etc.—and business people—are all included in the principle of universal individual rights, which means all of the individuals’ rights must be protected by the government, not violated through the initiation of physical force.

If, however, we say that some human beings should be drafted into the military, a disconnect from reality has occurred and a concession to the alternative principle of servitude has been made. This sets up a problem of logical consistency: either men and women both should be drafted and turned into slaves, or no one—morally and legally—should be. There is no way consistently to apply the principle of involuntary servitude to one and not the other.***

The same applies to business people. If it is okay to regulate one, consistency of the regulation principle makes it okay to regulate all. This is how government interventions in our personal and professional lives necessitate a full march toward socialism, which is where we are heading today and have been for the past one hundred years.

Consistency means no contradictions, but that can mean what follows deductively from a principle detached from reality or whether the principle is anchored inductively to facts. “Draft and regulate everyone” follows from the principle of servitude, but individual rights as freedoms of action that are violated by initiated coercion are rooted in and derive from the nature of human beings that possess the capacity to reason. Consistency, fundamentally, means being connected to and anchored in reality.

In today’s postmodern culture where facts don’t matter, consistency doesn’t either. Throw in the mixed economy that by its nature violates principles to combine freedom with dictatorship and you have many inconsistencies to call out with “what about this?” “and this?” “and this?”

Nonetheless, there are occasions in which a “what about this?” question, as I alluded to earlier, may bring up a valid point you may not have thought about. Such a questioner, however, must be sincere.

As a teenager I was introduced to whataboutism from one or two adults who condescendingly said, “What about this? I’m just trying to help you. I don’t really believe any of this” (crap was the full implication of the adult’s statement). One even said, “It’s just good debate,” meaning there is no such thing as truth.

These whataboutists are people who do not take ideas seriously and I have no use for them.


* This post is based on Ayn Rand’s epistemology, especially her theory of concepts. See also this earlier post.

** From the OED’s etymology discussion of the verb to identify: “to subsume (several things) under one idea or concept (1610).” Identification means to recognize similarity or sameness in order to classify whatever is similar or the same under a particular concept or principle. Rand’s notion of measurement omission gives us the causal explanation of how we abstract to form valid universals, and the guidance to form them.

*** See my earlier post and Ayn Rand’s comments on the anatomy of compromise of principles (1, 2).

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.