In Defense of the Layperson

My latest book was published on July 1. Its title is Epistemological Foundations of the Free Society: Ayn Rand’s Theory of Universals Applied to Science, Sigmund Freud’s Psychology, and Ludwig von Mises’s Economics.
 
As the title suggests, the book applies Ayn Rand’s theory of concepts to the correct understanding of science and illustrates the theory with the scientific work of Freud and Mises, concluding that, contrary to their critics, both are true scientists.
 
Out of curiosity, I recently searched my book for the word “layperson” and found that I used it twenty times! Hence, the title of this post.
 
Or, in other words, as I might also put it: I was an academic for thirty-six years, but please don’t accuse me of that! Or, again, figuratively speaking, I am a truck driver at heart (though I never drove trucks for any of my many part-time and summer jobs.)
 
The layperson—and I am including both skilled and unskilled workers, as well as anyone else working in a non-academic field—is usually a common sensical, practical, down-to-earth person trying to live life as best as he or she can.
 
The layperson in particular does not take seriously the minutia that many academics spend their time on and they certainly dismiss out of hand the philosopher’s claims, due especially to Immanuel Kant, that true reality can never be known.
 
What I emphasize in my book is that academics or scientists perform the same cognitive processes as any layperson, namely conceptualization, the formation of new concepts and application of known ones to identify concrete instances of those previously formed concepts, which in turn are used to guide our choices and actions.
 
Concepts are the ideas or abstractions that stand behind words. For example, the words kitty, minou, Kätzchen, gattino all symbolize the same abstraction. Concepts are mental units—“file folders,” as Ayn Rand calls them metaphorically—that children learn initially from their parents, later from teachers in school and reading. A concept once learned is then applied when we come upon new instances or concretes that constitute the content of the concept’s file folder.
 
Mental and physical skill, whether driving a truck, teaching or raising children, wiring a house or commercial building, or conducting a scientific experiment, requires, first, the accumulation of knowledge—concepts—relevant to the nature of the skill and its performance, then practice in applying that knowledge to accomplish the defined goal.
 
Kitty, ball, chair, table, and bed are concepts that we learn early in our lives and then apply them when we see a new furry thing that goes “meow,” or a flat thing that holds other objects. At first, we may confuse kitty with those other furry things that go “woof, woof,” but eventually we learn to differentiate the two as distinctly different animals.
 
After we have observed enough cats and dogs, or chairs, tables, and beds, we learn that these concepts, when put into a new file folder, can be called, respectively, animals and furniture, which often are our first abstractions from abstractions. Learning, subsequently, becomes a series of identifications—concept formations—of concrete objects and abstractions from abstractions.
 
Conceptualization is the process of generalization to form concepts and application of our formed concepts to recognize or identify the specifics of our daily lives and to guide our behavior.* Application is what most of us do, including scientists in their laboratories, most of the time in our lives.
 
The formation of concepts is an inductive process, application is deductive. Ayn Rand’s theory of concepts can readily be understood by the layperson, though it may take slow, concentrated reading and rereading.
 
Skilled and unskilled laborers, to bring back my laypersons, learn more concepts of concrete objects than college professors do, who work with broad abstractions, but laborers, too, learn broader and broader abstractions related to their professions.
 
Scientists, as I discuss in my book (and as identified by Francis Bacon, following Aristotle) focus on forming correct concepts that are universal, by defining their essential distinguishing characteristics. Citing an example I have used before, from science historian John McCaskey, Robert Koch identified the comma bacillus as the essence and cause of cholera, dispensing with the competing but correlational hypotheses of foul water or season of year.
 
The mental processes of generalization and application used by both scientists and truck drivers are the same.
 
For example, a plumber reportedly said to a professor, “You pay me for what I know, not what I do,” meaning the plumber and the professor were fellow professionals. “Like hell we are,” was the professorial response, which included a big laugh when I heard the story. But we do pay plumbers both for what they know, as well as what they do, just as we also pay professors for what they know and what they do in the classroom.
 
Mental and physical skill that is performed well, and that we pay for, can indeed be called professional, whether applied to a plumber or college professor. Unfortunately, there is no shortage of condescension toward laypersons among intellectual elites.
 
Conceptualization—valid concepts—is what keeps us in contact with “true” reality. After all, we live and act in true reality, and this reality includes our means of awareness, our consciousness. There is nothing “phenomenal” or “just appearance” about what we perceive.
 
This, of course, does not mean that we never make mistakes or cannot be deluded about reality. Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction is our guide to ensure that the in-here, the content of our consciousness, our concepts, correctly matches, corresponds to, or identifies the out-there, the world external to our minds. If not correct, we have a contradiction between the in-here and out-there.
 
Aristotle’s law also applies, in a more challenging manner, when we introspect to identify the contents and processes of consciousness, because we are using our mental processes to identify mental contents and processes.
 
Conceptualization, especially of broad abstractions, does take mental effort.
 
Perception gives us the data—entities and their attributes and motions. Concepts give us the cognitive expression (language broadly construed) of what we observe to give us bodies of knowledge and to guide us in the improvement of our lives.
 
Truck drivers, and laypersons in general, as well as scientists, perform the same mental processes. And I would add that I have met many a layperson who performs these processes better than some (many?) academics.
 
 
* Ayn Rand calls this process “conceptual identification” and does not include it in the concept of conceptualization. I believe application belongs in that “file folder.”

 

Preface to Epistemological Foundations of the Free Society: Ayn Rand's Theory of Universals Applied to Science, Sigmund Freud's Psychology, and Ludwig von Mises's Economics (available July 1 in print and ebook forms at Amazon.com and others)

A sound theory of universals is fundamental to the defense of a free society.

 

    Plato said that universals, which he called forms, are located in another dimension of reality and only certain people can know them. Hence, his advocacy of a near-communistic society of philosopher-kings who would rule. Thomas Hobbes advocated a theory called nominalism, which says universals are conventional, arbitrary names, not sound or objective concepts that are true. This made him a relativist in ethics and advocate of a strong “public sword,” or monarchy, to keep the peace in society.

 

   Karl Marx did not have a theory of universals, though we might say it was implied in what Ludwig von Mises calls Marx’s polylogism, a theory of many logics that rejects the notion of only one fundamental logic based on Aristotle’s three laws. Thus, Marx claimed that the bourgeoisie have their logic, while the proletariat have theirs, which means the two classes cannot talk to or understand each other. Hence, his advocacy of the  dictatorship of the proletariat to establish that Garden of Eden called communism—or socialism—he considered both terms synonymous. Today’s postmodern Marxists say something similar: “You have your truth; I have my truth.” As consequence, what they advocate in political philosophy is a repressive society, with the so-called victim classes taking the place of the proletariat.

 

   Underlying any theory of political philosophy is a theory of human nature, also called philosophical psychology. A sound theory of universals is required to form and define the concepts that identify and define the essentials of human nature. Do human beings possess the capacity to reason, the word “capacity” meaning we do not reason automatically but must choose to exercise that capacity, which means we have an active consciousness with which we control our lives? Or are we determined by genes and environment with illusions of consciousness and free will? The illusion of consciousness is called materialism and the illusion of free will is called determinism. Both are advocated by Hobbes and Marx. If we do possess a volitional consciousness, however, the idea of a free society—capitalism—follows from basic concepts of rights, freedom, the moral validity of the pursuit of self-interest, and, in particular, a sound theory of universals that explains how objectivity and truth are possible.

    The significance of a correct theory of universals is that our knowledge, with the exception of proper names, is entirely in the form of universal concepts. If those concepts are not valid, they mean nothing when we move from epistemology to ethics and politics, and to all the special sciences, including psychology and economics. That is, we must be able to use and apply the theory of universals to validate science, especially our concept of human nature—to establish the foundations of psychology, to validate the concept of value to establish a theory of ethics, and to validate many other concepts to define the proper function of government. This last includes rights and freedom, along with such additional concepts as the nature and meaning of healthy and unhealthy motivation and behavior and the production of wealth in a social setting.

    A correct theory of universals means our minds are competent to know reality and thus can guide us in our choices and actions to grow, thrive, and prosper.

    Ayn Rand’s theory of concepts, which I will argue is a sound theory of universals, is her most important and significant contribution to philosophy, especially to epistemology. Only by making the theory widely known and understood can the free society be properly defended.

    The present work is not a defense of capitalism per se. Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises provide unanswerable moral and economic justifications.[1] The subject of this book is epistemology and its importance in identifying the nature of science, basic and applied, with emphasis on the human sciences of psychology and economics. Its theme is that the essence of science is observation, not exact measurement, and that science employs as its primary and fundamental method the mental process of conceptualization: generalization from observation of particulars to identify universals, then application of previously formed universals to understand new particular cases. The issue of universals, based on Ayn Rand’s theory of concepts, runs throughout, providing the fundamental epistemological foundation for proper defenses of reason in philosophy, individualism in psychology, and capitalism in economics.

    My audience, as a result, is laypersons and academics interested in the underlying epistemology of science, especially the human sciences that, when integrated with psychology and economics, provide the ultimate vindication of a free society and answer to such ill-founded theories as those of Plato, Hobbes, and Marx.

    In chapter 1, using Rand’s theory of universals, or concepts as she calls them, I introduce her notion of measurement omission as the essence of abstraction to address the proper meanings of, and distinctions between, basic and applied science, theory and history, and the cognitive processes of generalization and application. Positivism—logical positivism or logical empiricism, as it is also labeled—and experimentation are discussed, followed by a presentation of what is called the problem of universals.

    In chapter 2, I elaborate Rand’s theory of concepts as an improvement on Aristotle’s theory of form and matter by identifying concepts and essences as neither intrinsic, in the thing, as Aristotle taught, nor subjective as the nominalists assert. Rather, concepts and essences are epistemological, in our minds, created by us and are valid and epistemologically objective if they correctly identify the metaphysical referents on which they are based. I further discuss Rand’s important explanations of abstraction from abstractions and concepts of consciousness. In concluding the chapter, I elaborate Rand’s usage of the terms “metaphysical” and “epistemological,” ending with a presentation of what I consider her radical theory of logic as non-contradictory identification.

    In chapter 3, I discuss several related philosophical issues using Rand’s theory to refute the bane of science, positivism, and to provide valid empirically-based explanations of Immanuel Kant’s allegedly innate “a priori” concepts—space, time, and causality—as well as a non-religious, non-Kantian empirical defense of free will. I continue with a discussion of the distinction between general knowledge, which we all possess to some degree and with some accuracy, and personal knowledge, which is unique to our own experiences. Finally, I conclude with a brief discussion of the role and importance of emotion in both science and our personal lives.

    In chapters 4 and 5, respectively, I apply Rand’s theory to my understanding of psychology and economics as human sciences, with emphasis on the work of Sigmund Freud and Ludwig von Mises. Both Freud and Mises have been criticized as pseudo- or non-scientific for using “literary” (Freud) or “non-quantitative” (Mises) methods to establish their theories. To the contrary, I argue that the methods of both are models of conceptualization, which I contend is the fundamental method of science.

    I became aware of the importance of conceptualization in science when I reread Edith Packer’s Lectures on Psychology after they had been made available as a Kindle book, in 2013, by her husband George Reisman. I realized after reading the book that conceptualization was what Dr. Packer was doing as a psychotherapist, and then realized that Mises, Dr. Reisman, Aristotle, and, when reading him later, Freud, were doing the same thing in their work. Masses of quantitative data and laboratory experiments, I realized, were not the essence of science.

    In chapter 6, I conclude the work with a summary of its thesis, elaborating on what I call thinking in definitions and clarifying the meanings of scientific law and principle. Finally, statements about Kant’s legacy and, subsequently, Ayn Rand’s complete the book.

    The significance of focusing on Freud and Mises is that they both provide fundamental concepts and principles for the foundation of a free society, Freud for the individual to pursue a healthy, happy, and psychologically independent life and Mises for individuals to cooperate with each other to achieve peace and prosperity. Both are experts on human nature, explicitly so for Freud, implicitly for Mises, and both, despite the comments of their critics, consider themselves to be scientists. This work aims to provide Freud and Mises a needed epistemological foundation.

    The meaning of free society that I am using is Ayn Rand’s concept of laissez-faire capitalism as a social system, presupposing an ethics of rational self-interest. That is, capitalism is not just the private ownership of the means of production, as economists, Mises in particular, define it, but a system based on the primacy of individual rights, especially property rights, with all property privately owned, allowing social cooperation to be achieved by voluntarily trading value for value. Rights are freedoms of action—deriving from human nature as a rational being—to speak and write openly and to work with others to pursue property, careers, relationships, hobbies, education, and happiness without the interference of initiated physical coercion, that is, physical force, by the government or criminals. Self-defensive coercion is delegated to the government unless involved in an emergency situation.

    The importance of defining capitalism as a social system is that it broadens the concept beyond economics alone. This is significant because totalitarian states are called such because they seek to and often do—in the name of an ethics of self-sacrifice—control every aspect of the individuals’ lives, not just their economic lives.[2] Totalitarianism means total control. Capitalism means total freedom—from direct or indirect initiated physical force of any type, economic or political.

    A further point about the meaning of Rand’s concept of capitalism. It is not what we have today or had in the late nineteenth century, though Rand acknowledges the United States came close in those earlier years. Her concept is a goal, a moral and political ideal, to work toward to achieve at some point in the future. It is not Marx’s utopia or creation of a “new man,” as Marx said communism would give us. Capitalism requires hard work and self-responsibility with no one expected to provide handouts. The problems with the apparent capitalism that we had in earlier days, and have today, is that many big businesses and governments have colluded with each other to gain favors and wealth for themselves, ignoring everyone else. This is not capitalism, but corporatism or, more precisely, fascism.

    For this reason, one of the best ways to describe capitalism is that it is a system in which business and state are completely separated in the same way and for the same reasons as we now have the (nearly) complete separation of church and state. And by “business,” I mean any organization that operates to earn a profit by offering value to paying customers. I include schools, roads, and utilities, today’s publicly owned and mixed institutions. I also believe that there should be no so-called nonprofit organizations. All societal institutions, business, church, or otherwise, should be privately owned and operated and expected to earn an excess of revenues or donations over expenses. If there is to be taxation to support the considerably limited government, it should be a flat tax applied to everyone, including to those so-called nonprofits. As Ayn Rand indicates, there are other options in financing government in a free society, but the issue is far removed from today’s problems. For the most part, it should be postponed for debate until we come closer to a truly free society.

    I did not come up with the theme of this book until recently, but the idea behind it was implanted in me during the spring quarter of my freshman year, 1966, at the University of Denver. I took the course “Modern Philosophy,” taught by Leonard Peikoff. The course covered Thomas Hobbes, the Continental rationalists (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz), the British empiricists (Locke, Berkeley, Hume), and Immanuel Kant—in ten weeks.[3] The issue of universals and political philosophy arose immediately because Dr. Peikoff’s lectures began with Hobbes and the consequences of Hobbes’s nominalism. The issue continued throughout the course, at least indirectly, when we came to John Locke’s inability to find a “something I know not what,” Hume’s failure to find a necessary connection between cause and effect, and, of course, Kant’s failure to find reality.

    An important note here is that Ayn Rand’s theory of concepts did not begin to be published until July of that year, and Dr. Peikoff’s teaching style was to present the best case he could for a viewpoint he did not accept, even bending over backwards to make it sound like he supported it. He knew Ayn Rand’s theory at this time but did not present it in the course.[4] Lively Q&A’s went on throughout the term, but no solution to the problem of universals was found. I concluded, reluctantly, that those of us most interested in the topic were left on the floor, desperately trying to find Aristotle’s intrinsic essences. After that quarter, Dr. Peikoff returned to New York City where he had lived for many years.

    When Ayn Rand’s theory was published, I memorized key definitions to think about them, for example, when waiting for my next class.[5] In the ensuing years, my interest in epistemology and the problem of universals never waned. It was a treat to read the discussions of epistemology by Ludwig von Mises and, though not exactly a treat, my knowledge of epistemology helped me in graduate school to fend off the assaults of that god called positivism.

 

     My relationship to Ayn Rand’s philosophy, which she named Objectivism, is that I am a follower of her philosophy, but do not describe myself as an Objectivist. I call myself a student of Ayn Rand, in the same way I call myself a student of Sigmund Freud and Ludwig von Mises. In 1968, in the aftermath of Rand’s break with Nathaniel Branden, she emphasized that Objectivism was her philosophy and that followers should take care not to speak for her, but to continue working as independent intellectuals in their own fields applying her ideas as relevant.[6] This is how I have viewed my scholarly work for many decades. In the present book, I emphasize that I am presenting and applying her ideas as I understand them. Elaborations and applications are mine.[7]

    My thirty-six-year academic career was spent in the applied science of business marketing, teaching and writing about fundamental ideas—Ayn Rand’s, as well as those of psychologists and economists—applying them to the business disciplines and education.

     The many references used in this book indicate a wide variety of influences on my thinking and writing. I endorse some, reject others or attempt to refute them, and some are neutral, providing important information as background and history. Aside from Ayn Rand, Freud, and Mises, my most significant influences are psychologist Edith Packer and economist George Reisman. My primary and permanent influence is my wife, soulmate, and editor, philosopher Linda Reardan. Her conceptions both of post-Kantian, modern Aristotelianism and of emotions as data for reasoning have influenced this book. Our daughter, a mechanical engineer, has also been helpful when challenging me to explain to her, in simple terms, the thesis of the work.

     The formatting, as with all my books, follows The Chicago Manual of Style, though not completely. I still prefer superscript numbers in the footnote reference, for example, as opposed to Chicago’s recommendation to use full-sized numbers followed by a period. Clarity and consistency are the criteria of formatting, which I learned from Carol Fisher Saller, The Subversive Copy Editor.

 

     For references to the internet, I have shortened most of the uniform resource locators (URLs) to their domain names. When searching for my reference, I recommend using what is called the “site operator,” for example, site:freud.org.uk private meaning or site:mises.org economic calculation. This will almost always, at the top of the search, return the words that follow the domain name. Digital object identifiers (DOIs), unique locators usually of academic journal articles, have not been shortened. Citations to print publications have been shortened after the initial reference. All sources are listed in the bibliography in full, including uniform resource locators.

 

   A final note on “self-plagiarism,” a term I believe to be a ludicrous contradiction in terms that has gained some notoriety in the academic world. I emphatically do not endorse the notion that a writer can plagiarize him- or herself, especially when acknowledgment is made about the so-called recycling of one’s own work. For the record, I have been writing and posting monthly blogs for nineteen years and more than twenty of the posts, since 2021, were written as drafts for eventual use, after editing, in the present work. A few excerpts from the draft of this work have also been posted as blogs.[8]

   Notes    

 

   [1] I must add George Reisman and his magnum opus Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics. Reisman is a follower of Ayn Rand’s philosophy and former student of Mises.

 

    [2] The ethics, especially today, is usually a variant of Kant’s duty-over-inclination maxim, imposed at the point of a government gun (or Hobbes’s public sword). The individual’s life belongs to the state and must be sacrificed to it when and as requested. 

 

    [3] The quarter system at the time was ten weeks plus a week of finals, and classes were five days a week, fifty minutes each. I took Professor Peikoff’s introductory philosophy course during the previous winter quarter, along with 160 of my closest classmates. The modern philosophy class consisted of about thirty-five students.

 

    [4]    In the introduction to philosophy course, Dr. Peikoff had nearly everyone convinced he was a determinist. In the modern philosophy course, I knew that he knew Ayn Rand’s theory because he taught it in a graduate seminar during the fall quarter of 1965. I even had the audacity to walk into his office, before attending a single college class, to ask him if I could audit his graduate seminar. He said “no,” because it would not be fair to others. He did, however, give me the telephone number of the local representative of the Nathaniel Branden Institute that presented lecture courses on tape of Ayn Rand’s philosophy.

 

    [5]    Rand’s theory of concepts was initially published in eight monthly installments in The Objectivist magazine from July 1966 to February 1967. One of the (non-epistemological) definitions I memorized was her notion of capitalism as a social system. When I mentioned it to a classmate, the classmate was surprised, and I was surprised that he was surprised—because I had assumed that Rand’s definition was self-evident and that everyone must have known it! 

 

    [6] Ayn Rand, “A Statement of Policy,” The Objectivist 7, no. 6 (June 1968): 7–9. 

 

    [7]    In the present work, I have concentrated on avoiding any tinges of moralism, a trait that unfortunately is sometimes present in Rand’s writing and in the demeanor of some of her followers. See my discussion of the anti-conceptual mentality in Jerry Kirkpatrick, Independent Judgment and Introspection: Fundamental Requirements of the Free Society (Kirkpatrick Books, 2019), 108–110, and below, chap. 3, the section titled “Defensive Habits and Free Will,” pp. 67–69.

 

    [8] See jerrykirkpatrick.blogspot.com for the blogs. I have always considered my blog posts to be drafts of whatever I might later publish. See Richard Posner, The Little Book of Plagiarism (Pantheon, 2007), for his discussion of the legal and moral issues involved in plagiarism and “self-plagiarism.” The term “self-plagiarism” likely applies more correctly to students who turn in the same paper for two different classes. 

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.

Freud as Scientist

As I have written before (1, 2), the essence of science and 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 and is called basic science, the latter a process of deduction (1, 2) and is called applied science. Most scientists perform both types in varying degrees, some spending most of their time on basic science, others on application.
 
Scientific method, which seeks to identify the distinguishing characteristic of a physical or mental entity under study and the causal relations between an entity’s attributes and other entities and their attributes, always involves experimentation—testing and trying one’s ideas against the real world. It may or may not be controlled experimentation. Statistical methodology and exact measurement (Applying Principles, 322-24) do not constitute the essence of science, but they can be adjuncts to the formation of universals and both may be helpful in applying those universals.
 
The present post rests on Ayn Rand’s theory of concepts (chap. 1-2), which emphasizes measurement omission in the formation of concepts and therefore in the identification of universals. Looking at an individual concrete instance of a concept means considering all of the concrete’s characteristics. These include quantitative ones that are typically measured by a precise unit, as is the physical sciences. And it includes qualitative characteristics that are typically measured approximately, as in the human sciences.
 
Basic sciences are fundamental sciences, such as physics, biology, and psychology, on which applied sciences rest, such as, respectively, engineering, medicine, and psychotherapy.
 
Sigmund Freud is an excellent example of both a basic and applied scientist of human nature, of the human science of psychology. Psychoanalysis is the basic theory, while psychoanalytic therapy is the applied science or practice of the basic theory. Freud called psychoanalysis the “science of the unconscious,” or depth psychology, while psychology in general, according to Freud, is the science of the soul, which consists of three parts: our conscious reasoning mind and seat of emotions (the I—see last month’s post on English translations), our conscience (the upper I), and unconscious (the it). Freud was an atheist his entire life, as well as a determinist, so the soul for him is not immortal nor do we have free will.
 
Freud as scientist, we might say, is a post-Kantian, modern Aristotelian (see especially chap. 3).“Post-Kantian” means that consciousness has an active, creative nature or identity, while “modern Aristotelian” means that an active, creative consciousness can, guided by Aristotelian logic, accurately perceive reality. A modern Aristotelian in this sense rejects Aristotle’s naïve realism that the essence of a thing is “out there” in the thing but retains his premise of the primacy of existence. Consciousness does not create or distort reality, as Kant and many other philosophers say, or reflect or mirror it, as the naïve realists think. The modern Aristotelian holds that consciousness creates—note the different meaning here of “create,” as opposed to how the Kantians and other primacy-of-consciousness philosophers use the term—concepts and principles based on what it has correctly recognized or identified of reality.
 
As a student, Freud attended the lectures of Aristotelian scholar Franz Brentano and was influenced by him. This is indicated in particular by Freud’s frequent use of the words “nature and essence,” often followed by “origin” (cause) of a mental process that he was trying to identify. He never went looking for Kantian noumena or so-called intrinsic essences or Newtonian algebraic equations. (Freud in fact rarely mentions Kant in his writings.) He does, however, recognize that both normal and abnormal psychologies exhibit quantities of emotional energy that are measured approximately on an ordinal or qualitative scale of less and more.  
 
In Independent Judgment and Introspection (78-79), I point out how Freud spent many years working out the correct meaning of repression as distinguished from the more general concept of defense, clarifying the two in 1926 (97-99, 110-12). In those earlier years he had considered the two synonymous. He recognized finally that repression is a response to anxiety and attempt to allay it, not a cause of anxiety, as he had earlier thought. It is neurotic anxiety that gives rise to the neurotic need for repression.
 
This is conceptualization, and it is how science works.
 
Or as Freud wrote in An Outline of Psycho-Analysis (31), “Every science is based on observations and experiences arrived at through the medium of our psychical apparatus” (that is, our mental processes), though psychology differs from physics in that psychology uses its mental processes to study and make inferences about mental processes, where physics uses the mental processes to make inferences about the external world. Both sciences often infer what is not directly perceivable. This last Freud describes as unrecognizable or invisible—“unerkennbar” in scare quotes in Freud’s German. The standard translation is “unknowable,” but Freud’s meaning clearly is not Kantian. He means that gravity and molecules are no more directly perceivable than the processes of our subconscious minds.
 
In addition, Freud points out, our awareness (through sense perception) of the physical world, provides “insight into connections and dependent relations which are present” in that world, reproduced in our minds as thought and knowledge that enable us not just to understand external reality, but also to anticipate and change it. And because the procedures of the science of psychology are “quite similar” to those of physics, says Freud, our awareness (through introspection) of the mental world provides similar insight about “connections and dependent relations” of the conscious and subconscious mind, to understand both and to anticipate and change (that is, treat through introspective analysis) their mental functioning (Outline, 83).
 
The “thought and knowledge” that accumulates in our minds, whether of physics or psychology, consist of concepts and principles, and the process of forming and applying concepts and principles is conceptualization. To put this in Ayn Rand’s terms, science is the mental process of identifying the nature of entities and their attributes—physical or mental—including in particular the motions of the entities caused by those attributes. This last is Aristotelian causality based on formal causation, or as Rand puts it, causality is “identity in action.”
 
Science thus identifies entities and their attributes and causes and effects (connections and dependent relations) by constructing and defining concepts that identify the nature and essence of those entities and attributes.**
 
To add one more point, Freud as scientist, in the words of philosopher Walter Kaufmann (80), often considers “objections and alternatives,” many of which we still hear today, but were addressed and answered by him in his time, the accusation of “pan-sexualism” just being one example. As Kaufmann writes, considering objections and alternatives is the “essence of critical thinking.”***
 
Let me conclude this post with a description of science and scientific method, especially as it applies to psychology, written by Freud in partial answer to the religious dogmatism of his critics.

This is the way of science: slow, groping, laborious. . . . Through observation one learns something new, now here, now there, and at first the pieces do not fit together. One formulates surmises and makes auxiliary constructions that one takes back when they are not confirmed; one requires a lot of patience, readiness for all possibilities, renounces early convictions lest under their compulsion one should overlook new and unexpected factors; and in the end all this exertion proves worthwhile, the scattered finds do fit together, one gains an insight into an altogether new piece of psychic processes, is done with the task and ready for the next one. Only the help that [controlled] experiments provide for research has to be dispensed with in analysis. (Kaufmann translation, 79-80; see standard translation in New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, 215-16).

This is conceptualization.
 
Next month: “The Basic Science of Psychoanalysis.”
 
 
* And, to emphasize, scientists are not the only ones performing these mental processes. We all perform them, generalization especially in our younger years of parental and formal education, application every day using our acquired knowledge to guide our lives.
 
** As this post demonstrates, Freud was most emphatically a scientist, which means he and  his theory of psychoanalysis are in no way “pseudo-science,” as the positivists and, especially, Karl Popper (1, chap. 1; 2, 74-75), like to say.
 
*** I would say that the essence of critical thinking is the formulation of concepts and principles that correctly recognize or identify, that is, not contradict, the facts of reality. It is the ability to perceive reality through unfiltered or discolored lenses. Considering objections and alternatives is one of the main ways we test and try our ideas against reality, that is, remove contradictions.