I thank Dr. Binswanger for commenting on the post, Modal Confusion in Rand/Peikoff. His stimulating comments deserve to be brought to the top of the page. I have reproduced them verbatim below. I have intercalated my responses in blue. The ComBox is open, but the usual rules apply: be civil, address what is actually said, argue your points, etc.
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Leonard Peikoff writes, "Is God the creator of the universe? There can be no creation of something out of nothing. There is no nothing."
Peikoff is arguing that God cannot be the creator of the universe because creation is creation of something out of nothing, and there is no nothing. Is this a good argument or a bad argument? Justify your answer. Be clear and concise.
Here we find:
rand, n. An angry tirade occasioned by mistaking philosophical disagreement for a personal attack and/or evidence of unspeakable moral corruption. "When I questioned his second premise, he flew into a rand." Also, to attack or stigmatise through a rand. "When I defended socialised medicine, I was randed as a communist."
Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, 2nd ed., p. 299, Rand speaking:
What do you mean by "necessity"? By "necessity," we mean that things are a certain way and had to be. I would maintain that the statement "Things are," when referring to non-man-made occurrences, is the synonym of "They had to be." Because unless we start with the premise of an arbitrary God who creates nature, what is had to be. We have to drop any mystical premise and keep the full context in mind. Then, aside from human action, what things are is what they had to be.
The alternative of what "had to be" versus "what didn't have to be" doesn't apply metaphysically. It applies only to the realm of human action and human choice."
First of all, 'Things are' and 'Things had to be' cannot be synonyms since they obviously have different meanings as anyone who understands English knows. But let's be charitable. What Rand is trying to say is that every non-man-made occurrence is such that 'had to be' applies to it, and every man-made occurrence is such that 'did not have to be' applies to it. Charitably construed, she is not making a false semantic point, but two modal points. The first is that nothing non-man-made is contingent or, equivalently, that everything non-man-made is necessary. The second modal point is that the man-made is contingent. I will discuss only the first modal point. It is not obvious and is denied by many philosophers both theists and atheists. So it is legitimate to demand an argument for the thesis.
Continue reading “Ayn Rand on Necessity, Contingency, and Dispositions”
This is a follow-up to yesterday's Rand and Existence Again. The following is by Leonard Peikoff:
Every argument for God and every attribute ascribed to Him rests on a false metaphysical premise. None can survive for a moment on a correct metaphysics . . . .
Existence exists, and only existence exists. Existence is a primary: it is uncreated, indestructible, eternal. So if you are to postulate something beyond existence—some supernatural realm—you must do it by openly denying reason, dispensing with definitions, proofs, arguments, and saying flatly, “To Hell with argument, I have faith.” That, of course, is a willful rejection of reason.
Objectivism advocates reason as man’s sole means of knowledge, and therefore, for the reasons I have already given, it is atheist. It denies any supernatural dimension presented as a contradiction of nature, of existence. This applies not only to God, but also to every variant of the supernatural ever advocated or to be advocated. In other words, we accept reality, and that’s all.
In this passage we meet once again our old friend 'Existence exists.' And we note the sort of linguistic mischief that Rand/Peikoff engage in. It cannot be denied that existing things exist, and only existing things exist. This is entirely trivial. Anyone who denies it embraces a contradiction: There are existing things that do not exist. We should all agree, then, with the first sentence of the second paragraph. So far, so good.
But then Peikoff tells us that to postulate something supernatural such as God is "to postulate something beyond existence." Now it may well be that there is no God or anything beyond nature. It may well be that everything that exists is a thing of nature. But the nonexistence of God does not follow from the triviality that everything that exists exists. Does it take a genius to see that the following argument is invalid?
1. Existence exists, ergo
2. God does not exist.
One cannot derive a substantive metaphysical conclusion from a mere tautology. No doubt, whatever exists exists. But one cannot exclude God from the company of what exists by asserting that whatever exists exists. Now it is not nice to call people stupid, but anyone who cannot appreciate the simple point I have just made is, I am afraid, either stupid, or not paying attention, or willfully obtuse. Here is an example of a valid argument:
3. Nothing supernatural exists
4. God is supernatural, ergo
5. God does not exist.
For Peikoff to get the result he wants, the nonexistence of God, from the premise 'Existence exists,' he must engage in the linguistic mischief of using 'existence' to mean 'natural existence.' Instead of saying "only existence exists," he should have said 'only natural existence exists.' But then he would lose the self-evidence of "Existence exists and only existence exists."
Conflating a trivial self-evident thesis with a nontrivial controversial thesis has all the advantages of theft over honest toil as Russell said in a different connection. It would take a certain amount of honest philosophical toil to construct a really good argument for the nonexistence of any and all supernatural entities. But terminological mischief is easy. What Peikoff is doing above is smuggling the nonexistence of the supernatural into the term 'existence' Now if you cannot see that that is an intellectually dispreputable move, then I must say you are hopeless.
It is like a bad ontological argument in reverse. On one bad version of the ontological argument, one defines God into existence by smuggling the notion of existence into the concept of God and then announcing that since we have the concept of God, God must exist. Peikoff is doing the opposite: he defines God and the supernatural out of existence by importing their nonexistence into the term 'existence.' But you can no more define God into existence than you can define him out of existence.
There are other egregious blunders in the above passage. But if I were to expose every mistake of the Randians, I might attain the age of a Methuselah and still not be done. Or perhaps I should liken it unto a Sisyphean labor, one of endless and futile toil. Futile, because the Randians I have so far encountered seem quite unteachable.
One of my Rand posts has inspired some vigorous discussion at Triablogue. My nominalist sparring partner 'Ocham' over at Beyond Necessity comments here on part of the Triablogue discussion:
Tennant points out the 'Existence exists' is incoherent – existence is commonly regarded as a second-order property. Not by everyone, I should point out, but certainly Frege's view that existence is a second-order predicate is accepted by nearly all those in mainstream analytic philosophy. Nor is Donohue's restatement, "whatever exists exists" in any way useful, because it is either merely tautological and doesn't tell us anything, or it is equally incoherent (for it dubiously assumes that existence is a first-order predicate).
Let me try to sort this out. Neither Tennant nor 'Ocham' understand what Rand is saying. Donohue may understand it, but he doesn't see what is wrong with it.
. . . I should point out that there are professional philosophers who take Rand's work seriously. See The Ayn Rand Society. Some years ago I read something by Douglas Rasmussen, one of the members of the society, and I found it quite good.
I suppose one could compare Rand with Nietzsche on the score of professional respectability. There are philosophers who have utter contempt for Nietzsche and deny that he is a philosopher at all. In the early '90s I had a conversation with the late Gregory Fitch, then chairman of the Arizona State University Philosophy Department. I asked him if anyone in his department had an interest in Nietzsche. He snorted that that no one there was interested in "that junk." But not all analytic philosophers are narrow Fitch-style bigots. There are other analytic philosophers who find Nietzsche's ideas worthy of study and reconstruction.
Like Nietzsche, Rand is untrained in philosophy, rants and raves, argues in an abominably slovenly fashion when she argues at all, is supremely confident of her own towering significance, is muddled and idiosyncratic — Existence exists! — , expresses contempt for her opponents, all the while psychologizing them and making little attempt to understand their actual positions. And like Nietzsche, she is immensely attractive to adolescents of all ages. Still, there are ideas there worth discussing, if only to show how one can go wrong. Same with Nietzsche: he goes wrong in very interesting ways.
Recall what got me started on this current Rand jag. It was 'Ocham's' question whether Rand counts as a professional or an amateur. I have been making a case that she and Peikoff are amateurs. (This is consistent with their ideas being worth discussing.) But it is no surprise to me that amateurs fail to appreciate the merits of my case. More to come.
A tip of the hat to Paul Manata of Triablogue for a clever link entitled A = A: Rand = Hack Philosopher. One might pedantically raise a quibble over an identity sentence sporting a proper name on one side and a general term on the other. But you catch the drift, which is similar to 'CNN = News.' Other examples that might be fun to analyze: the loony Left's 'Bush = Hitler' and Chrysler's 'Drive = Love.'
Comments are on. If you have something intelligent and civil to contribute, please do. But I have zero tolerance for cyberpunks. If you fail to address what I actually say, or thoughtlessly spout the Rand party line, or show the least bit of disrespect to me or my commenters, then I will delete your comment.
Ayn Rand's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology includes an essay by Leonard Peikoff entitled "The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy." The section "Necessity and Contingency" concludes with the following paragraph:
Truth is the identification of a fact with reality. Whether the fact in question is metaphysical or man-made, the fact determines the truth: if the fact exists, there is no alternative in regard to what is true. For instance, the fact that the U.S. has 50 states was not metaphysically necessary – but as long as this is men's choice, the proposition that "The U.S. has 50 states" is necessarily true. A true proposition must describe the facts as they are. In this sense, a "necessary truth" is a redundancy, and a "contingent truth" a self-contradiction. (Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, 2nd ed., eds. Binswanger and Peikoff, NAL Books, 1990, p. 111, emphasis in original.)
I have no objection to part of what is being said in this passage, in fact I heartily agree with it, namely, that facts determine truths. The non-man-made fact of the moon's having craters makes-true the proposition expressed by 'The moon has craters.' And similarly for the man-made fact regarding the 50 states cited by Peikoff. So I cheerfully agree that "if the fact exists, there is no alternative in regard to what is true." We can put the point as follows given that there is a fact F and a proposition p that records F:
Richard Neuhaus, who recently died, reports a near-death experience in his essay Born Toward Dying:
It was a couple of days after leaving intensive care, and it was night. I could hear patients in adjoining rooms moaning and mumbling and occasionally calling out; the surrounding medical machines were pumping and sucking and bleeping as usual. Then, all of a sudden, I was jerked into an utterly lucid state of awareness. I was sitting up in the bed staring intently into the darkness, although in fact I knew my body was lying flat. What I was staring at was a color like blue and purple, and vaguely in the form of hanging drapery. By the drapery were two “presences.” I saw them and yet did not see them, and I cannot explain that. But they were there, and I knew that I was not tied to the bed. I was able and prepared to get up and go somewhere. And then the presences—one or both of them, I do not know—spoke. This I heard clearly. Not in an ordinary way, for I cannot remember anything about the voice. But the message was beyond mistaking: “Everything is ready now.”
That was it. They waited for a while, maybe for a minute. Whether they were waiting for a response or just waiting to see whether I had received the message, I don’t know. “Everything is ready now.” It was not in the form of a command, nor was it an invitation to do anything. They were just letting me know. Then they were gone, and I was again flat on my back with my mind racing wildly. I had an iron resolve to determine right then and there what had happened. Had I been dreaming? In no way. I was then and was now as lucid and wide awake as I had ever been in my life.
Tell me that I was dreaming and you might as well tell me that I was dreaming that I wrote the sentence before this one. Testing my awareness, I pinched myself hard, and ran through the multiplication tables, and recalled the birth dates of my seven brothers and sisters, and my wits were vibrantly about me. The whole thing had lasted three or four minutes, maybe less. I resolved at that moment that I would never, never let anything dissuade me from the reality of what had happened. Knowing myself, I expected I would later be inclined to doubt it. It was an experience as real, as powerfully confirmed by the senses, as anything I have ever known. That was some seven years ago. Since then I have not had a moment in which I was seriously tempted to think it did not happen. It happened—as surely, as simply, as undeniably as it happened that I tied my shoelaces this morning. I could as well deny the one as deny the other, and were I to deny either I would surely be mad.
“Everything is ready now.” I would be thinking about that incessantly during the months of convalescence. My theological mind would immediately go to work on it. They were angels, of course. Angelos simply means “messenger.” There were no white robes or wings or anything of that sort. As I said, I did not see them in any ordinary sense. But there was a message; therefore there were messengers. Clearly, the message was that I could go somewhere with them. Not that I must go or should go, but simply that they were ready if I was. Go where? To God, or so it seemed. I understood that they were ready to get me ready to see God. It was obvious enough to me that I was not prepared, in my present physical and spiritual condition, for the beatific vision, for seeing God face to face. They were ready to get me ready. This comports with the doctrine of purgatory, that there is a process of purging and preparation to get us ready to meet God. I should say that their presence was entirely friendly. There was nothing sweet or cloying, and there was no urgency about it. It was as though they just wanted to let me know. The decision was mine as to when or whether I would take them up on the offer.
Continue reading “Near-Death Experiences: Do They Prove Anything?”
Explanatory rationalism is the view that there is a satisfactory answer to every why-question. Equivalently, it is the view that there are no brute facts, where a brute fact is a fact that neither has, nor can have, an explanation. Are there some truths which simply must be accepted without explanation? Consider the conjunction of all truths. Could this conjunctive truth have an explanation? Jonathan Bennett thinks not:
Let P be the great proposition stating the whole contingent truth about the actual world, down to its finest detail, in respect of all times. Then the question 'Why is it the case that P?' cannot be answered in a satisfying way. Any purported answer must have the form 'P is the case because Q is the case'; but if Q is only contingently the case then it is a conjunct in P, and the offered explanation doesn't explain; and if Q is necessarily the case then the explanation, if it is cogent, implies that P is necessary also. But if P is necessary then the universe had to be exactly as it is, down to the tiniest detail — i.e., this is the only possible world. (Jonathan Bennett, A Study of Spinoza's Ethics, Hackett 1984, p. 115)
Bennett's point is that explanatory rationalism entails the collapse of modal distinctions.
The world-proposition P is a conjunction of truths some of which are contingent. So P is contingent. Now if explanatory rationalism is true, then P has an explanation in terms of a Q distinct from P. Q is either necessary or contingent. If Q is necessary, and a proposition is explained by citing a distinct proposition that entails it, and Q explains P, then P is necessary, contrary to what we have already established. On the other hand, if Q is contingent, then Q is a conjunct of P, and again no successful explanation has been arrived at. Therefore, either explanatory rationalism is false, or it is true only on pain of a collapse of modal distinctions.
That is a cute little argument, one that impresses van Inwagen as well who gives his own version of it, but I must report that I do not find it compelling. Why is P true? We can say that P is true because each conjunct of P is true. We are not forced to say that P is true because of a proposition Q which is a conjunct of P.
I am not saying that P is true because P is true; I am saying that P is true because each conjunct of P is true, and that this adequately and noncircularly explains why P is true. Some wholes are adequately and noncircularly explained when their parts are explained. Suppose three bums are hanging around the corner of Fifth and Vermouth. Why is this theesome there? The explanations of why each is there add up (automatically) to an explanation of why the three of them are there. Someone who understands why A is there, why B is there, and why C is there, does not need to understand some further fact in order to understand why the three of them are there. Similarly, it suffices to explain the truth of a conjunction to adduce the truth of its conjuncts. The conjunction is true because each conjunct is true. There is no need for an explanation of why a conjunctive proposition is true which is above and beyond the explanations of why its conjuncts are true.
Suppose the three bums engage in a ménage à trois. To explain the ménage à trois it is not sufficient to explain why each person is present; one must also explain their 'congress': not every trio is a ménage à trois. A conjunction, however, exists automatically if its conjuncts exist.
Bennett falsely assumes that "Any purported answer must have the form 'P is the case because Q is the case'. . ." This ignores my suggestion that P is the case because each of its conjuncts is the case. So P does have an explanation; it is just that the explanation is not in terms of a proposition Q which is a conjunct of P.
I conclude that Professor Bennett has given us an insufficient reason to reject the Principle of Sufficient Reason.
I apply a similar critique to Peter van Inwagen's version of the argument in my "On An Insufficient Argument Against Sufficient Reason," Ratio, vol. 10, no. 1 (April 1997), pp. 76-81.
I thank our old friend Ockham for adding links to two of my Rand posts to the Wikipedia Ayn Rand entry. (See note 4.) I am about to repost a slightly emended version of the more technical of the two posts, the one on existence. This is from my first weblog and was originally posted May 28, 2004. But first I refer you to Ockham's post Ayn Rand and Wikipedia in which he reports a disagreement at Wikipedia ". . . about whether the article about her should qualify her as a 'popular' or 'commercially successful' philosopher, or an 'amateur philosopher' (as Anthony Quinton did in his article on popular philosophy in the Oxford Companion to philosophy), or whether she is a philosopher without qualification."
Is Rand a philosopher? Yes. But she is not very good if among the criteria of goodness you include rigor of thought and objectivity of expression. No reputable professional journal or press would publish her work. So in one sense of the term she is not a professional, which makes her an amateur philosopher. But then so is Nietzsche. Both are well worth reading by amateurs and professionals alike. Both are passionate partisans of interesting and challenging ideas. If nothing else, they show pitfalls to avoid. If you seek respite from the buttoned-down prose of dessicated academicians, they provide it.
Since I am about to lay into Rand, let me begin with something nice about her. In the 20th century, she brought more people to philosophy than Immanuel Kant, let alone John Rawls. That can't be bad. She came to our shores, mastered our difficult language, and made it her own way by her own efforts. She understood the promise and greatness of America, and did it her way, celebrating the traditional American values of self-reliance and rugged individualism. She gave leftists hell.
So what's my beef?
Continue reading “Is Ayn Rand a Good Philosopher? Rand on the Primacy of Existence”
Required reading from the pen of Victor Davis Hanson. Since I cannot do better than him, I will simply provide excerpts of five key points he makes. Be sure and read the whole piece. Here are Hanson's Gaza rules in his words but with material omitted:
First is the now-familiar Middle East doctrine of proportionality. Legitimate military action is strangely defined by the relative strength of the combatants. World opinion more vehemently condemns Israel's countermeasures, apparently because its rockets are far more accurate and deadly than previous Hamas barrages that are poorly targeted and thus not so lethal.
Second, intent in this war no longer matters. Every Hamas unguided rocket is launched in hopes of hitting an Israeli home and killing men, women and children. Every guided Israeli air-launched missile is targeted at Hamas operatives, who deliberately work in the closest vicinity to women and children.
Third, culpability is irrelevant. The "truce" between Israel and Hamas was broken once Hamas got its hands on new stockpiles of longer-range mobile rockets — weapons that are intended to go over Israel's border walls.
Yet, according to the Gaza rules, both sides always deserve equal blame. Indeed, this weird war mimics the politically correct, zero-tolerance policies of our public schools, where both the bully and his victim are suspended once physical violence occurs.
Fourth, with instantaneous streaming video from the impact sites in Gaza, context becomes meaningless. Our attention is glued to the violence of the last hour, not that of the last month that incited the war.
Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 to great expectations that the Palestinians there would combine their new autonomy, some existing infrastructure left behind by the Israelis, Middle East oil money and American pressure for free and open elections to craft a peaceful, prosperous democracy.
Fifth and finally, victimization is crucial. Hamas daily sends barrages into Israel, as its hooded thugs thump their chests and brag of their radical Islamic militancy. But when the payback comes, suddenly warriors are transmogrified into weeping victims, posing teary-eyed for the news camera as they deplore "genocide" and "the Palestinian Holocaust." At least the Japanese militarists did not cry out to the League of Nations for help once mean Marines landed on Iwo Jima.
Companion posts: Weakness Does Not Justify, Hezbollah Disproportionality
I wrote the following in the summer of 2006 in response to the Left's asinine and morally obtuse bandying-about of such phrases as 'disproportionality' and 'asymmetry of power,' but it is relevant to current events. Substitute 'Hamas' for 'Hezbollah' and make minor factual adjustments as necessary. Of course, I don't mean to suggest that Hezbollah plays no role in the current aggression against Israel. See here.
1. Hezbollah hides their fighters and their installations among the civilian population using them in effect as human shields. Israel does not do this.
2. Hezbollah attacks indiscriminately and without warning, lobbing rockets into population centers with the aim of killing as many civilians as possible. Israel does not do this. Instead, it gives advance warning and aims to target only combatants and their materiel.
3. Hezbollah's avowed aim is the destruction of the State of Israel. It is not Israel's aim to eliminate any state.
4. Hezbollah uses suicide/homicide bombers. Israel does not.
5. Hezbollah is a proxy of Iran whose president since June 2005, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has repeatedly called for the destruction of Israel. Israel, by contrast, though supplied by the USA, is not a proxy of the USA: the USA is not attacking Lebanon or any other country via Israel. There is a clear difference here. The USA arms Israel so that it can defend itself, not so that it can attack other countries; Iran arms Hezbollah so that it can attack Israel with the aim of wiping it off the face of the earth.
A curious fact about Ahmadinejad is that, while he prepares a holocaust for Israelis, he denies the Holocaust.
6. Hezbollah loads its warheads with ball bearings so as to cause maximum damage to human beings. Israel does not.
7. Hezbollah and Islamic terrorists generally hate life and seek death. Israelis and Jews generally love life and seek to avoid death, their own, and other people's. The following from a TNR article says it all:
As Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, once said: "We have discovered how to hit the Jews where they are the most vulnerable. The Jews love life, so that is what we shall take away from them. We are going to win because they love life and we love death."
I had friends in graduate school who belonged to the class of those we jokingly referred to as graduate student emeriti. They were the perpetual students who were "not hung up on completion," to borrow a memorable line from William Hurt's character Nick in The Big Chill (1983). Free of the discipline of undergraduate school, they took incompletes in their courses and then spent years completing them. Some never completed them. Others finished their course work and actually wrote dissertations and won the degree — some fifteen years after they started. They supported themselves with adjunct teaching and odd jobs, loans and parental hand-outs.
One fellow in particular sticks in my mind. I’ll call him Mel. Mel never finished and dropped out of sight. With Mel, the problem was three-fold: unrealistically high standards, performance anxiety, and an obsession with the board game Go. His performance anxiety manifested itself mainly as an obsessive fixation on getting his tool box in order. What I mean is that he felt he could not get down to the business of writing any good philosophy until all his tools were in place. So he had to have a complete library stocked with all the classics, in the original languages. He once unloaded a copy of Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony on me on the ground that it was in English, when he wanted to read everything in its original language. Many an hour did he spend on foreign languages. But to do philosophy, one has to be able to think correctly, so logic was also on his agenda. Time was spent acquiring an impressive logic library, and somewhat less time on actually reading his acquisitions.
The physical act of writing required, Mel thought, the very best of tools. Since those were the days before word processing, he had to have the very latest IBM Selectric electric typewriter, the model with an erase key! That erase key was a big deal in those days. Luckily, Mel’s father worked for IBM which fact translated into a substantial discount. Mel once showed me his typewriter’s different ‘balls’: different ones for different character sets. Of course, he had one for Greek since he planned to write on Aristotle.
But no office is complete without all the peripherals: wastebasket, organizers stocked with various sizes of paper clips, etc., staplers of different sizes, staple extractors, paper, pencils, pencil sharpeners electric and manual, pens ballpoint and fountain in different colors, magic markers, erasers, all accomplices of his evasion of beginning the dissertation. A psychologist might refer to this as evasion of an anxiety-producing task by displacement activity. I suppose we all displace, but some of us are much better at it than others.
Somewhere Schopenhauer quips, "Forever reading, never read." Apropos of Mel, I would say: Forever preparing to write, never read.
As an actual Objectivist philosopher, let me attempt to address Bill's critique of Peikoff's article.
First, there's a significant typo in the first line of his reproduction of Peikoff's last paragraph. Peikoff did *not* write: "Truth is the identification of a fact WITH reality." (As someone pointed out, that is nonsensical.) The actual sentence is: "Truth is identification of a fact OF reality." (emphasis added by me)
(For the merely connotative difference between "fact" and "fact of reality," see _Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology_, p. 243).
BV: Guilty as charged. I apologize for the unintentional typographical error.
Now on to the main point. The Objectivist position is twofold: