As a philosopher, Ayn Rand is a good typist.
I should have known that there wouldn't be a single idea of any importance, depth, weight or real substance in her Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. But I guess hope springs eternal -- that can be my only rationale for once against subjecting myself to Rand.
In short, Rand is a moron. She is a dogmatic crypto-facist whose pseudo-religion is on the same level as scientology. But whereas L. Ron Hubbard's pseudo-religion hung its hooks on techno-babble, Rand hangs her pseudo-religion on philoso-babble. The end results are much the same: small groups of highly loyal followers who never bother to seriously question the gaping holes of logic, sense and decency which riddle their movement.
But make no doubts about it, Rand is involved in pseudo-religion. How many philosophers, modern or otherwise, have their own "foundation?" Most do not need it. Their works can stand the rigors of time without prostelyzing -- or, and most other philosophers understand this, their work likely deserves to be relegated to the dust-bins of history.
Furthermore, Rand during her own lifetime struggled to control the lives of those around her, using "rationality" as a justification for emotional cruelty and power over the people she called friends. She did things like arrange the marriage of Barbara and Nathaniel Branden tho', according to Barbara, they had no attraction towards each other. Rand believed they should have an affair that was "rational," like John Galt in Atlas Shrugged. Likewise, when Rand learned that Murray Rothbard's (an economist) wife was a devout Christian she demanded Murray divorce his wife because it wasn't rational to love a Christian -- Murray, to his credit, cut Rand and her psychopathic movement.
"Rationality," the catchword of Objectivists, really means mind control. Rand was the ultimate arbiter of what was right and what was wrong. Failure to live up to her ideologies resulted in that person being expelled from Rand's circle, whatever that might be. She was a ideologue of the first order, reifying words (such as "rational") to her own twisted perceptions and projecting them on people who were susceptible to such demagogery.
Rand also engaged in the classic activity of ideologues the world over: hypocrisy. I'm not talking run of the mill, pedestrian hypocrisy which it seems everyone engaged in from time to time. Rand engaged in serious, heavy duty hypocrisy.
For instance, her hatred (rational emotion, huh?) of the Soviet Union was well known. Okay. I can see that.
However, in America, she was a proponent of radical levels of personal freedom which has, in many ways, made her the philosopher of choice for Libertarians. Nevertheless, this didn't stop her from attempted censorship along with the House Un-American Activities Committee. The idea that freedom is best served via censorship is absurd because freedom of speech and the press is one of the very reasons she claimed she left Russia in the first place. But because she opposed the ideology of communism, she felt it justified in doing anything to stop them from "spreading their propaganda" -- even if it meant destroying people's freedom of expression.
Rand, alas, was about using a bunch of words to control people. She is no different than any other master of the verbal dodge, be it Hitler or Stalin or Jim Jones. The meaning of these words was never very important so long as they created the proper emotional effect. Rand's use of "rational" is just one case, as is her use of the word "freedom." Her rationality means finding conclusions Rand already possesses and her freedom is the freedom to believe as she does. Furthermore, she was willing to use the government to force people to comply to her definition of freedom -- which is a hypocritical counterexample of her moral philosophy.
This synop of Rand is pretty important to her Epistemology because she does some pretty philosophically unconscionable things. She simply ignores counterexamples which cannot be rightly ignored because the questions posed have not been answered to anyone's satisfaction. Specifically, she ignores the work of Descartes, Kant and Hume. This is simply another example of the way she twists information to support her own biases and support her own sense of infallibility. She's right and if Kant refutes her, well, she can just ignore Kant, can't she?
Alas, she does.
In fact, she ignores the accumulated wisdom of every epistemologist between Aristotle and herself. She does not hide her intentions, really, if you know what to look for. When introducing the various common epistemological stands she mentions in a numbered list extreme realists, moderate realists, nominalists and conceptualists. Then, as a parenthetical aside, she mentions the "extreme nominalist position," which she calls that modern one. Odd, isn't it, that the very position she mentions as being the modern one she relegates to obscurity. It is also the Kantian position and the one taken by people from quantum physicists to many people in the field of simulated and artificial intelligence -- not to mention a considerable number of philosophers.
To her, this is an aside. Which is consistent with her whole life. Things which she doesn't agree with, she ignores regardless of how relevant the information might be to whatever she is discussing.
She also makes vast sins of logic and sense. She says that the accuracy of the sense must be taken for granted! How can this be? Our senses are manifestly inaccurate, obscuring information which is easily deducible while hiding facts that are actually evident. There has not been an epistemologist of weight for five hundred years who has just said, "Oh, yeah, let's just take the senses for granted as being, y'know, evident." Particularly in such an exotic field as epistemology, when most of what you do talk about -- ideas, knowledge, etc. -- are things completely private and hidden from any sense perception outside of the individual. Or, as Rand says: "Existence exists -- and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving what exists."
Neat and a childlike tautology.
She also appears absolutely ignorant of the science of her time. She talks about the absoluteness of measurement after Einstein? Even as quantum physicists alive both during the writing of her Epistemology and today were struggling with such matters as how time breaks down on a quantum level and the truly bizarre things which photons do observed and unobserved -- after Heisenburg's Uncertainty Principal, she could say these things? Because, really, the converse of her beliefs is true: accurate measurement is simply not possible much less immediate and certain.
Indeed, when she talks about measurement and mathematics, it seems that she's desperately wants to believe the universe is a fundamentally rational place. Despite entropy and chaos, she wants to believe in hard and fast rules of existence which are discernable to the human consciousness. So, of course, she must ignore Kant because he describes limits of knowledge, boundaries past which our rules of thought simply do not apply. This thought, in some way or another, has been echoes by most epistemologists since then, and most scientists, from Kitcher and his "brute facts," which defy additional reduction or logical classification to Quine's social epistemology which takes the extreme nominalist point of view, to Heisenburg's uncertainty to Feynman saying, "This is this way because it is."
Too bad she ignored all that, too bad she ignored the science of her own time and every philosopher of the post-Renaissance era.
Her theory of concepts isn't so much flawed as . . . derivative. It was as if I was reading Aristotle's Metaphysics again. Which is, ironically, another part of her problem as a philosopher -- she neither illuminates Aristotle in this regard or builds upon him. It is simple regurgitation. For those who don't know Aristotle, she takes the moderate realist view that an object's classification exists because of the traits inherent to it which we organize with similar objects possessing the same traits.
She also overtly supports the correspondence theory of language. Better logicians than Rand have attempted this and universally failed -- whereas Wittgenstein and Russell tried to defend the correspondence theory of language only to fail, Rand claims its truth without bothering to prove anything.
She likens language to algebraic equations, saying
The relationship of concepts to their constituent particulars is the same as the relationship of algebraic symbols to numbers. In the equation 2a = a + a, any number may be substituted for the symbol "a" without affecting the truth of the equation. For instance: 2 x 5 = 5 + 5, or: 2 x 5,000,000 = 5,000,000 + 5,000,000. A concept is used as an algebraic symbol that stands for any of the arithmetical sequence of units it subsumes.
Let those who attempt to invalidate concepts by declaring that they cannot find the "manness" in men, try to invalidate algebra by declaring that they cannot find the "a-ness" in 5 or 5,000,000.
The correspondence is clear (she is more clear in other places, but this provides a clear example of how she believes language to be a system like mathematics). However, whereas truly great philosophers had to bow their collective heads in defeat when trying to prove the correspondence theory of language, Rand merely dismisses the problem by referring to an example in mathematics. Which would be fine if language were a system of formal logic -- alas, too much communication occurs outside the rules of language for that to be the case. Likewise, people who follow the rules of language to a "t" often fail to make any point at all. By simply ignoring the problem it does not go away.
In as much as Rand would like for language to be (at least potentially) logically perfect, she also seems to think the faculty of introspection is transparent -- that by studying our own hearts and minds we can infinitely reveal ourselves to ourselves.
I suppose the rationale for an Objectivist is consistent in this regard -- Rand was obsessed with "rationality." A language which exists as a game played for the fuzzy goal of communication makes the world a murkier place. Likewise, a mind which is made up of complex parts, of competing drives, of hidden recesses, of lurking traumas makes the possibility of Rand's rationality a virtual impossibility. Nevertheless, in order to make that sort of statement one has to ignore the entirety of psychological research. But since she finds it easy to ignore Kant, I wasn't surprised when she ignored Freud.
The issue I take with all of this is that Rand believes that everything that exists can be measured else it does not exist. In one sense she is right. You can invent yourself any yardstick you want to measure anything at all. If you define the measure of love as how much time a person does a specific thing then by measuring the amount of time a person spends doing things you can tell how much that person loves them. However, what Rand seems ignorant of is that no measurement is now nor will ever be completely accurate. They can be highly accurate, but the facts of quantum uncertainty make completely accurate measurement impossible. The logical certainty of knowledge that Rand desires simply is not possible.
Furthermore, speaking of emotions, even if it is possible for a person to internally measure their emotions the standardlessness of individual emotions and preferences makes that measurement useless in a scientific sense. The fact I might hate chocolate does not tell anything "real" about chocolate generally. Rand, when she attacks folks who say that "emotions can't be measured because I can measure them!" fails to recognize the meaninglessness of the measurements in question. They do no one any good at all even were we able to create "standard units of preference." The whole section where she talks about emotions is a boondoggle, an attack at mystics -- which isn't necessarily bad. What makes it bad is that it's a poor attack at mystics which misses any point at all.
It is forgivable that someone in the 18th century, flush with the Enlightenment, might adduce from science at the time that, someday, absolute certainty of measurement will be possible. However, for someone in 1966 to hang their epistemology on the notion of measurement is absurd. It does exactly what Rand says her philosophy doesn't: it runs in contradiction with the observable data. When physics, the most highly accurate of the natural scientists, writes as one of their laws that absolute certainty about anything is impossible due to an impossibility of accurate measurement, for Rand to ignore that while being an Objectivist cheerleader of the scientific method is patently stupid.
Likewise, her defense of the correspondence theory of language. By the time she wrote, brilliant people who deeply, profoundly, wanted a logical certainty to knowledge if not a physical certainty (all of whom, by the way, were aware of modern development in quantum physics) had laid correspondence to rest. The logically perfect language, to which all things which are have a symbol which accurately describes them, is as impossible precisely measuring a length of cord or the position of a photon. All knowledge is, alas, an approximation. Much knowledge is merely a transient relations we use for convenience and then discard when that convenience is gone.
By the time Rand wrote, this was all common knowledge to any undergraduate philosophy student. All of the issues she discusses, including their clear refutations -- refutations she doesn't address -- were common. She, furthermore, brings nothing new to any of the discussions. Most of her epistemology is simply a rehash of Aristotle, which is hardly a justification for an Objectivist epistemology.
Ironically, one of the goals of Rand's epistemology is justification for her morality. If she can prove, if only to herself, that the world operates according to discernibly rational principals on all levels, from the physical to the emotional, then there can be made a moral calculus. To wit, if the universe is rational, someone can be right about issues of morality -- therefore, her hideous attacks on anyone who thought differently than her can be justified on the grounds of being true. Why this is ironic is because that's Kant's categorical imperative and the book oozes a frequent loathing for Kant.
I could go on about more details of how Rand's epistemology is bad philosophy . . . but I hope I've made my point. Her epistemology is nothing more than a vehicle to justify her ideology -- her dogma. Like L. Ron Hubbard dressed up Scientology with a bunch of pseudo-scientific terms (stolen, mostly, from Freudian psychology and general semantics) to steal the validity of science for his dogma, Rand dresses up her dogma with pseudo-philosophical terms. However, from reading her epistemology it seems to follow that she is ignorant of actual epistemological studies that any junior in college would have had drilled into their head -- she adds nothing new, she refutes nothing at all, while creating a justification for her ideology. I class Objectivism in the same category that I place Scientology -- justifications for one person's ego swell to grotesque proportions and to justify their prejudices.
Am I the Only Person Who Notices Rand is an Idiot? - Ayn Rand - Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology - Epinions.com
really long text book definition of projection if I ever saw one.
A voluntary review by someone who we can only identify as CPXD. You'll have to pardon me if I don't lend a lot of credibility in someone who tries to mask nothing more than disdain in some feigned objective educated critique.
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