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.

Intellectuals in Residence at Corporations, the Self-Righteous Press, and Bias versus Objectivity in Public Relations and Journalism

In the early 1970s, in mid-town Manhattan, I worked for a service firm to the public relations industry. My clients were both senior and junior public relations professionals. We printed their press releases and mailed them to the media. My work involved interaction with the pros, mostly by telephone, but also in person, and I read a lot of their press releases.

One thought I had at the time was that the personal identity of many public relations professionals is that of “intellectual in residence at corporations.” My thought continued, “Given the present intellectual atmosphere [the Progressive’s denigration of big business], that’s not good for the future of capitalism.”

My clients were highly competent and honest, but the profession—then and today, as well as in its beginning in the early nineteenth century—was, and still is, imbued with the unexamined and unacknowledged Marxist premises that “we, the ethically astute intellectuals in the company, must communicate to the public our apologies for selfishly making a profit.”

Appeasement of the critics, not moral indignation toward them and condemnation of their ideas, was, and is, the accepted norm. A slightly exaggerated press release headline, for example: “We gave $xx millions of dollars to charity last year, so please don’t attack us.”

Considered something of a PR coup, to give a real life example, The Texas Company—Texaco—for 63 years sponsored the Saturday radio broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera. Texaco’s public relations message: “See? We’re not greedy, materialistic money grubbers. We support high art.”*

The problem is that business executives are not intellectual. They are ignorant of a proper defense of business and capitalism and are decidedly timid, lacking courage to defend themselves with moral defiance against the attackers. So, they let their spokespersons speak for them.

Now let’s switch to the press and the journalistic profession. This is an easy switch, because journalists and PR pros are trained in the same schools of journalism (now called schools of communication). Job hopping is frequent between the two professions. In my day, PR was the more lucrative and preferred hop.

Journalists, today and in the past, unfortunately, often are the ones who self-righteously lead the attacks on big (and small) business, although they are supposed to be uncovering facts and presenting the truth of any story. The result is charges from critics of the press of yellow journalism (in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) and of bias and fake news today.

The job of the journalist, however, as stated by the American Press Institute, is to use objective methods in the search for and presentation of facts and truth. The difference between the two concepts? The facts are that the bus hit the car. The statement of the facts—the bus driver was drunk and wanted to kill people—may or may not be true. How good, that is, how objective was the reporter’s method? How did the reporter acquire and verify his or her statement of the bus driver’s motivation?

If methods are less than objective, bias, those unexamined and unacknowledged premises, enter to influence the reporter’s statement of the facts.

In previous posts (1; Applying Principles, pp. 130-32), I have touched on bias and objectivity. I stated that bias per se is not bad because it just means leaning in one direction. (This blog for the past twelve years has unmistakably leaned in one direction.) Unexamined and, especially, unacknowledged underlying premises, as I stated in the earlier posts, create what I called “negative bias.”

A negative bias disparages opponents by ignoring or denying the existence of valid alternative viewpoints and by expressing moral outrage at anyone who challenges the writer’s or speaker’s fairness. Dissenters and critics are often punished.

Such negative biases dominate university classrooms and today’s media. Publicly financed universities, as well as most private ones, and most mainstream media, are explicitly committed to freedom of expression for all viewpoints.

They also are supposedly committed to reason, facts, and truth, but they fail miserably on all counts.

Some private universities and media state an explicit viewpoint as their driving philosophy and therefore lean in one direction, but they are aware of and acknowledge that viewpoint.

Many universities and media, unfortunately, practice explicit suppression of alternative viewpoints, often because they are oblivious to what guides them—or are willful in the suppression.

Indeed, those journalism schools, where PR pros and journalists are trained, have for many years been teaching that objectivity is impossible. This derives from the post-modern destruction of Aristotelian logic and has become prescription for the spectacle we are witnessing today: whoever shouts the loudest and longest wins the argument, though I am being generous to call what goes on today an “intellectual argument.”

Objectivity—in journalism or anywhere else—is the accurate perception and communication of our objects of perception. Our method of awareness is guided by Aristotelian logic to correctly, that is, non-contradictorily, identify the facts we are examining.

This means being aware of and acknowledging predispositions (underlying premises) we may hold guiding our investigations and presentations.

To youth who are looking for an academic career in an applied field that desperately needs rehabilitation, I recommend a job in one of those schools of communication, to teach future public relations professionals and journalists the valid concept of objectivity and the role of bias in our perceptions.



* I hasten to add that these two examples are one specialty—sometimes called “image” or “social responsibility” PR—in the larger field of public relations. Journeyman professionals may spend their efforts on product publicity, personnel announcements, writing and editing the internal employee magazine, or entertaining certain reporters to convince them to write a feature story about the company.

Our Goebbelsian Culture and the Soviet Minders Who Claim to Protect Us

A smear, according to Merriam-Webster’s unabridged is “a deliberate and usually unsubstantiated charge or accusation intended to foment distrust or hatred against the person or organization so charged.”

As a logical fallacy, it is one-half of ad hominem. The fallacy runs as follows: “Mr. X is immoral. Therefore, his argument is false.” Today’s smear merchants, to use Sharyl Attkisson’s term, specialize in using the first sentence, embellished and sensationalized in varied ways, and omit any pretense of talking about logical argument.

In a world where facts don’t matter, our culture has become Goebbelsian. (See also (Applying Principles, pp. 293-95, 307-15)

Attkisson’s book The Smear: How Shady Political Operatives and Fake News Control What You See, What you Think, and How You Vote cites Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda from 1933-45, as one of the pioneers of smear-merchantry. The Gobbelsian method, in Attkisson’s words, says: “Tell a big lie. Focus and repeat—until the audience recites it in their sleep” (p. 12).

Smear merchants are unprincipled promoters who work for the highest bidder, and they have worked on both sides of the political aisle, but the difference today is that in the last twenty to twenty-five years that Attkisson chronicles, there are more “useful innocents” on the progressive Left who fan the flames of the smear.*

The fanners, says Attkisson, are the mainstream press, reporters eager for hot stories with legs, fed to them by the promoters and reproduced wholesale with little investigation on their part. The reporters, of course, are oblivious (or hostile) to the concept of objectivity in journalism and their own biased premises guiding the sensationalized slurs.

How do the smear merchants work? First, they funnel millions of dollars into nonprofit organizations that pretend to be unbiased watchdogs and protectors of the “public good.” (Words like “free” or “free society” are no longer used.) Next, they find influential targets to destroy, targets who are considered enemies of the “public good” (which means political correctness).

The organization assigns one Nazi- or Soviet-style “minder” (my term, not Attkisson’s) to read, listen to, or watch every word of the target, sitting in wait for the tiniest slipup, though the slip does not have to be actual. It may only be apparent, but once the smear merchants do their work, the audience will see it as actual.**

The slip, or alleged slip, is posted on the internet and distributed to hundreds of sympathetic members of the press who will then magnify and sensationalize it and express unforgiveable outrage, demanding not just groveling apologies but removal of the target from his or her influential post.

Part of the smear technique that is new in today’s world of the internet is the immediate use of social media and email. Media Matters, the most notorious and effective of these organizations, uses an algorithm and a small number of operatives to send thousands of social media messages and emails that appear to come from thousands of different people from all over the country. They all, of course, express the same outrage as the press.

The death blow for the target is thousands of emails sent to advertisers, who seldom have the spine to stand up to these kinds of assaults or the will or resources to verify the assertions. Advertisers then join the cabal for removal.

This is how Don Imus was removed from CBS radio and Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly were removed from Fox television. Sean Hannity was attacked in the same way, but he was prepared and has survived.

Imus, for example, made his name making shockingly offensive remarks as humor about a wide variety of people all over the political spectrum. The last straw for the Left were racial comments made in jest by him and his producer.

Beck, in a Media Matters campaign funded by wealthy Leftist George Soros, was accused of potentially inciting violence, domestic terrorism, and recklessly endangering innocent lives. O’Reilly was smeared for unverified charges of sexual harassment.

Hannity fought back loudly and at length on his television show and threatened to sue for slander and libel, which is what is necessary to defeat the smear merchants.

Joseph Goebels reportedly said, “A lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.” This is the essential modus operandi of the smear merchants.

What happens if someone from the other side of the aisle commits a slip? Nothing. Attkisson lists seven such actual, not apparent, slipups—double standards, she calls them. One slip was dismissed simply as a “lame attempt at humor” (pp. 52-53). Everything thereafter was right with the world.


* I begrudgingly use the kinder words of Ludwig von Mises. Mises used the words to describe naïve, alleged classical liberals who flirted with and made concessions to the communists. “Useful idiots,” my preferred choice, were words attributed to Lenin, apparently mistakenly, though Lenin had many such idiots to swallow and distribute his propaganda. Attkisson just calls the innocents “friendlies in the media.”

** “Tracker” is what the organizations call their minders. When the target commits a verboten slip, or pretended slip, many more trackers may be assigned to gather ammunition for the kill.

The Ethics and Epistemology of Peer Review

In a previous post, I argued that academic peer review is a gatekeeping process brought about by the post-World War II growth of government involvement in research and scholarship. Though it may control quality in a narrow, conventional sense, one significant consequence of this process is the suppression of innovation. The present post takes a look at the underlying ethics and epistemology of peer review.

Medical researcher David Horrobin, whom I quoted in the previous post, says that critics of peer review “are almost always dismissed in pejorative terms such as ‘maverick,’ ‘failure,’ and ‘driven by failure.’” Lest those epithets be ascribed to me, I hasten to say that I have had some success in the process and that I am not denigrating anyone who uses it to advance his or her career. The process nonetheless does have serious flaws.

Most significant of its flaws is the view that peer review must be blind in order to maintain objectivity, that is, to prevent bias from entering the process. However, as the British Medical Journal, which has not used blind peer review since 1999, points out, “A court with an unidentified judge makes us think immediately of totalitarian states and the world of Franz Kafka.” Objectivity is the fallacy-free perception and communication of what the object of cognition is, and bias means that some other factor, such as irrelevant preconceived notions, whether formed by emotion or by reason, interferes with this perception and communication. Lack of objectivity stems from a failure to perceive reality accurately.

Neither blind nor open peer review can guarantee this accuracy. Indeed, anonymity removes the need for care and responsibility when commenting on someone else’s work. How many ill-mannered or ill-thought-out remarks would be made about submitted papers if reviewers knew that the papers’ authors will know their names and how to contact them? Being allowed to hide behind anonymity is an invitation to scurrilous behavior. This is why the objectivity of legal systems in free societies demands that witnesses, whether supporters, accusers, or expert testifiers, be identified. Contrary to the conventional wisdom of peer review, objectivity requires at minimum that the process be open.

Objectivity, at root, is an epistemological concept and the failure to perceive and communicate accurately is a function of how one uses one’s mind in the processes of perceiving and communicating. Neither anonymity nor openness will improve this. The most important requirement of objectivity while reviewing someone else’s work is a constant awareness of one’s preconceived notions. The most significant one to watch out for is “This is not how I would have written the paper; it should therefore be changed to . . .”

As one journal editor said, no doubt with some exaggeration, all of his reviewers of so-called empirical papers recommend rejection and those of theoretical papers insist that the papers be “recreated in the reviewers’ own images.” And another editor complained that reviewers have turned into wannabe co-authors, requiring extensive revisions and writing comments that are sometimes as long or longer than the original articles. Clearly, decentering, to use Piaget’s term, meaning the ability to consider other points of view or to appreciate the perspectives of others, is needed by some, perhaps many, reviewers.

Once it has been established that a paper meets a journal’s editorial guidelines and philosophy, that is, that the topic of the paper is appropriate for the journal, then it is the author’s objective that should guide evaluation. Decentering in reviewing, or editing or criticism, means accepting the premises of the author and recommending improvements in execution. The reviewer’s personal preferences on the topic, including agreement or disagreement with the author’s basic premises, should be set aside. The author’s paper is the reality to be adhered to in the reviewing process; interference from irrelevant, previously formed emotional associations and intellectual beliefs destroys the objectivity of the process.

A reviewer, of course, may strongly disagree with the editorial guidelines and philosophy of a journal or with the objective of a paper, but then such a reviewer should either decline to be a reviewer or come to terms with the principle of objectivity. Much suppression of innovation in the peer review process probably stems from the failure of reviewers to distinguish their personal philosophies and preferences from those of the authors they are reviewing. When reviewer and author disagree, the reviewer either demands conformity or recommends rejection.

The issue of objectivity in reviewing (or editing or criticizing) is similar to the so-called problem of taste in art. Is this work of art bad art or is my reaction to it just my taste? Artists have an aim for their art and their execution of that aim makes it either good or bad art. Whether one likes a particular work of art, though, depends on many other factors, including emotional associations and intellectual beliefs. Therefore, as Ayn Rand points out, it is not a contradiction to say “This is a good work of art, but I don’t like it,” and vice versa. The same can be said in reviewing scholarly work, namely, “I don’t like or agree with this paper, but it is well done.”

The reviewer, editor, or critic who can make this last statement is one who exhibits objectivity. When looked at from the standpoint of epistemology, whether the process is blind or open is beside the point.