San Diego Objectivist Study Group

“The debate is not over,” with respect to the cause of global warming. That is John Stossel, reporting in his recent “Give Me a Break” segment on 20/20 at ABC television. His is a reply to Mr. Al Gore’s mantra to the contrary. Mr. Gore commits the fallacies of appeal to the majority and of appeal to repetition—as if repeating the same thing said by many people over and over will somehow, by the enchantment, make it true. But the highlight in Mr. Stossel’s report is this fallacy-buster: the many rises in the level of CO₂ have lagged behind, not preceded, the rises in global warming periods in geological history, according to ice core records. The evidence shatters the political environmentalists’ claim even to a post hoc fallacy.

Below is the eight-minute videoclip. You can read Mr. Stossel’s report here. Also, Willisms has a close-up of the datagraphs of the gas-to-temperature lag on his site here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uO9laiUXS1o

I found the following exercise to be especially difficult to work through. Here it is for those inclined to firm up on axioms.

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Exercise on Axioms

What are the relationships among the following statements regarding axioms? Which ones depend on which? [Diagram the dependencies, with arrows going from independent to dependent, and state your reasons.]

1. Axioms are fundamental truths.
2. Axioms cannot be proved.
3. Axioms need not be proved.
4. Axioms are self-evident.
5. Axiomatic concepts must be defined ostensively.
6. Axioms cannot be denied without self-contradiction.
7. Axioms are inescapable.
8. Axiomatic concepts identify primary facts of reality.
9. Axioms are implicit in all knowledge.
10. Axiomatic concepts cannot be analyzed.
11. Axioms can be analyzed.

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It has been over a year since I last looked at this exercise, so I pretty much forgot everything about it. By posting it, I plan to reintegrate my understanding of axioms, and I hope that others will participate in this effort.

Here are some highlights from Sunday’s discussion of Ayn Rand’s 1961 Ford Hall Forum speech “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business” (CTUI 44-62):

• As Rand expounds, there is unjust persecution in society. The target of persecution is businessmen as a group. This is the fact to be explained by her theory; this is the explanandum.

  Cause: the existence of gangs whose method is oppression of minority groups.

  Hypothesis: Whenever there isn’t some gang that has something to gain from injustice, then there isn’t a persecution against some minority group.

  Implication 1: Every persecuted minority group serves as a scapegoat for some movement that does not want the nature of its goals to be known.

  Implication 2: Every movement that seeks to enslave a country needs a scapegoat to blame for a nation’s troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers.

  Three test cases: bourgeoisie in Soviet Russia, Jewish people in Nazi Germany, businessmen in America. On this theory, power-hungry gangs are the necessary cause of persecuted minorities.

• Scapegoating is “successful” in a society because the vast majority of the people in it have already accepted the doctrine of fistism. So, they are not opposed to the use of force against the disarmed. This makes them ready to accept the social system of statism. They believe that they can somehow be immune from state control, so long as their gang is in power.

• Aside from criminals in any society, which constitute a very tiny minority, bureaucrats are primarily to blame for the troubles in a non-free society.

  Below is a shortened version of the table of characteristics contrasting businessmen and bureaucrats:

  businessman: a producer of wealth by means of capital. (CTUI 51c, 47d)

  bureaucrat: a government agent enforcing rules of conduct. (CTUI 51d, 47b)

  swapping blame and credit (46a)	businessmen	bureaucrats
  definitional term	businessman	bureaucrat
  genus (51c, 51d)	producer of wealth	government agent/official
  differentia (47d, 47b)	by means of capital	enforcer of rules of conduct
  contrasting object (45a, 47a)	worker (by means of labor)	judge, soldier
  species (60)	executive, manager, supervisor	politician, policeman, commissar
  wielder of (46a)	economic power	political power
  entity of power (46c)	enterprise (individual, private group, private organization)	government (municipal, state, federal)
  nature of entity’s action (46b, 46c)	voluntary action	coercive action
  nature of power (47c, 46c)	to produce and to trade what one has produced	to force obedience under threat of physical injury-the threat of property expropriation, imprisonment, or death
  exercise of power by (48a)	offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value	threatening punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction
  procedure for getting result (47c, 46d)	by the voluntary choice and agreement of all those who participate in the process of production and trade	[by the] orderly, legally defined enforcement
  psychological tool (48b)	values	fear
  ideal version (48d-49a, 51b)	self-made men who earned their fortunes by personal ability, by free trade on a free market	protectors of rights by objective laws, objective procedures, objective rules of evidence
  corrupt version (49a, 51d)	the products of a mixed economy, the men with political pull, who made fortunes by means of special privileges granted to them by the government	the scheming publicity-seeking statists, the men of envious mediocrity, who feel a yen to destroy lives by “fluid” laws and arbitrary procedures
  growing scale of entity (54c)	big business	big government
  means of entity’s growth (54d)	productive achievement (in a free economy); political pull (in a mixed economy)	using physical force to take over realms of activity in society

• What is the distinction between the legal power to initiate the use of physical force (46c) and the right to initiate the use of physical force (46d)? Does anyone or anything have this legal power? And this right?

  This question boils down to the distinction between the legal power to do X and the right to do X, which boils all the way down to the distinction between a legal power and a right.

  While a right is a principle, which is a unit of reasoning or a mental thought, a power on the other hand is a physical embodiment for action, based on some mental thought. And a legal power is an institutional embodiment in a political context. In short, a right is a moral principle; a legal power, if it is legitimate, is the political embodiment of a moral principle. To be sure, legitimacy is a moral term. Legalizing a power for the government to do immoral acts does not make it legitimate.

  For example, as human beings, we have the right from coercive taxation, but this right is not embodied. (ARA 7d) We are not protected. In fact, the government violates this right; it has immorally arrogated legal power to tax coercively.

  Returning to our present question, since no man has a “right” to initiate the use of physical force against other men, there can be no legitimacy to an embodied agency with this power, if it is a moral agency. “A government holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force.” (46c, emphasis in original) So, although all governments have the power to use physical force for retaliation, as delegated to them by their peoples, no moral government has the power to initiate its use.

• Greed is irrelevant in a free market. It is only relevant in the personal, moral context. Here is my attempt at defining it.

  greed: an abundant desire to pursue material or spiritual values.

  Just as “selfishness” is a neutral term, meaning “a concern for one’s own interests” (TVOS “Introduction” 7c), but is a package-deal in vernacular usage, combining one’s concern with brutish rapacity; so similarly, “greed” is a neutral term, but is a package-deal on the altruist standard of popular usage, admixing it with the envy for the unearned. (See Harry Binswanger’s editorial against Alan Greenspan’s comment of August 2002 about “infectious greed.”)

  Rand pairs the term “greed” with “need” (CTUI 47c) to emphasize that they are both states of established nature and are neither good nor bad. One does not say that a man’s need for food is good, nor does one say that his need for sex is bad. It is human nature that men have these needs. Accordingly, the natural desires arising from such needs as hunger and lust, and the desire of greed arising from established value-judgments are neither good nor bad. It is only men’s actions to fulfill these desires that may be judged morally. Morality applies to human, volitional actions, not to automatic needs and derivative desires. So, Rand is purposeful in pairing greed with need in making the case that the mechanism of a free market is subject only to the volitional decisions of men.

• In the “democratic” voting process of wealth creation, how is fraud to be addressed? Why is it that no one has the power to decide for others or to substitute his judgment for theirs? Shouldn’t there be someone to protect others from unsafe products, dishonest advertisements? (47d-48a)

  Because every man is an independent individual, and because thinking can only be done by an individual for that individual, no one but himself can think for himself or decide for his own interest. If he makes an error in judgment, the consequence is his and no one else’s. As a rational, volitional being, he has the right to act on his judgments, whatever they are, and no one can force him to do otherwise; no one has the power to decide for him, against his judgment.

  The free market does not tolerate fraud, and the mechanism of a free market, which comprises the sum of human decisions and choices, will justly deal with both incompetence and competence in ability, with the worst and the best of products and services.

  The question then is, does an individual participating in the free market trust his own faculty of reason to provide him with the best judgment, the best decision, the best choice? Just as no one but himself can think for him, no one but himself is responsible for the consequence of his judgment, decision, and choice. If he bought unsafe products or was taken in by dishonest advertisements, no one but himself was responsible for his decisions and for his moral judgments of men. He should either learn from his mistakes or else come to distrust his mind. The reasoning is his and no one else’s. If not his own mind, whose mind is it to be delegated to protect him from the choices of life? Again, the reasoning is his and the responsibility is inescapable. And the man who evades the responsibility to think for himself is unfit it live in any society.

• The relationships of bribery and of blackmail are identical; it is the transaction between the party with the power of physical coercion and the other party with the power to produce and trade. The difference is that, in bribery, the one with no political power initiates the transaction; whereas, in blackmail, the one with political power begins it.

  In both case, it is the one with political power who is the contemptible one, for his power is that of the government’s, with him merely as its agent. Since all government actions are prescribed actions, permitted only by law. His actions to accept bribes or to blackmail are therefore illegal. So he is the one who ought to be punished.

• Where in the Constitution does it forbid ex post facto laws? (50c)

  The Constitution twice forbids them in Art. 1 § 9 and Art. 1 § 10.

On a point someone asserted from Sunday night’s discussion that Ayn Rand’s generalizations are overly generalized and hyperbolic, I disagree.

One of the prescriptions of rationality is to think in principles, and principles are generalizations at the highest level. A generalization is not something formed lightly, without care in the integration of the available inductive evidence. A principle is even stricter in its formulation.

To say that Rand over-generalizes is to say in essence that her generalizations are unwarranted, hasty, and perhaps context dropping. This to me isn’t characteristic of Rand’s essays, particularly the one [cited] “The ‘Conflicts’ of Men’s Interests” (TVOS 50-56). The particular principle at the end of the essay has for its context the whole essay: “In a nonfree society, no pursuit of any interests is possible to anyone; nothing is possible but gradual and general destruction.” To me, it would be context dropping to assert the generalization without integrating the contents of the essay; moreover, it would then be unwarranted and indeed hasty to declare it as an over-generalization.

Rhetorically, Rand finishes the essay by stating the principle concerning society and men’s interests, and she does so with a negative, but vehemently strong, ending. As it is logically, her summation is the contraposed obverse of the conclusion enthymematically stated in the essay: All pursuits of any interests are possible to men in a free society.

If anything, we need more such principles to guide our lives. For observe the various political and grass-roots movements—such as the free-state movement and the anti-war movement—in civil society today. They are guided by sundry doctrines. Whether theirs are rational or dogmatic, it is from them that the individuals in the movements derive and affirm their convictions about their actions.

To say, therefore, that one should not take generalizations and principles seriously, but merely as hyperboles, is, in a sense, to cut off one’s foundation for moral, principled actions.

Taking this position reminds me of yet another essay of Rand’s, in which she criticizes the hesitancy toward taking a black-and-white attitude in morality and politics—why go to such extreme, why not just settle for a fuzzy sort of gray. At root, this attitude accepts the premise that knowledge requires omniscience. (Again, this was also covered in the [above] essay.) For how can any mortal, even a Rand, have the ability to scan the whole world in order to integrate and arrive at a categorical generalization, one that admits no exception? So goes this argument: no one can make such generalizations. One can only accept the half-integrated, the situational, the semi-truths, the shades of gray. But then I ask you. If that is all we have for “knowledge,” how can anyone take what he “knows” to form any rational conviction in life or any loyalty to any value at all?

On the contrary, Ayn Rand’s generalizations are neither overly generalized nor hyperbolic. A rational mind inculcates a disposition of finesse for its instruments of thought. Rand, par excellence, measures her words precisely. Rather than discounting them as mere verbiage, we would find no better model than hers to cultivate this disposition in ourselves.

The Ayn Rand Institute has made available online The Ayn Rand Lexicon, edited by Harry Binswanger. Here is the newsclip from ARI:

Through a special arrangement with the publisher, the editor, and the Estate of Ayn Rand, ARI has received permission to present The Ayn Rand Lexicon—now available in its entirety, free of charge, to Web visitors. Edited by Harry Binswanger, and with an introduction by Leonard Peikoff, this important book presents all of the key ideas of Ayn Rand’s philosophy, in an encyclopedic reference of stunning breadth and depth.

Check it out at http://www.aynrandlexicon.com/.

I would like to add another comment to our discussion of Ayn Rand’s “The Roots of War” (CTUI 35-43). The dialectical method that Rand uses at the end of the essay is the same as in Francisco’s speech “The Meaning of Money” (FTNI 88-94; AS [pb 1960] 387-391).

Near the end of the essay, Rand lays out an argument:

If peace were the goal of today’s intellectuals, a failure of that magnitude—and the evidence of unspeakable suffering on so large a scale [(three dictatorships and one-third of the world’s population in communist slavery)]—would make them pause and check their statist premises. Instead, blind to everything but their hatred for capitalism, they are now asserting that “poverty breeds war” (and justifying war by sympathizing with a “material greed” of that kind). But the question is: what breeds poverty? If you look at the world of today and if you look back at history, you will see the answer: the degree of a country’s freedom is the degree of its prosperity. [CTUI 42b]

Clearly, Rand is generalizing a causal connection between freedom and prosperity. In saying that there are degrees of each to be seen in history, she is laying out an inductive argument by the method of concomitant variations: that the degradation from freedom to coercion causes the degradation from prosperity to poverty.

But at a deeper level, Rand is showing us readers a method for philosophical detection, of taking an opponent’s argument, questioning his premises, and reducing them to the inductive fundamentals. Whenever one is faced with “If X causes Y, and since you don’t want Y; therefore you don’t want X“; Rand nudges us to ask “What causes X?”

The same method is illustrated in Francisco’s speech:

“So you think that money is the root of all evil?” said Francisco d’Anconia. “Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tools of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?
…
“But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires. Money is the scourge of the men who attempt to reverse the law of causality—the men who seek to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind.
…
“Money will always remain an effect and refuses to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money?”
[FTNI 88d-89a, 90c, 91c]

If we look at the world of today, we hear that “poverty breeds crime” and that “poverty breeds Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism”; Rand’s question is still relevant: what breeds poverty? And the answer is still the same: it is the absence of freedom; it is the presence of coercion; it is the presence in men’s minds of fistism.

[Yes, I have decided to name the as-yet-named doctrine at the root of war. It is “fistism,” as embodied in political and economic institutions, that is also at the root of poverty and other problems in the world.]

I have looked through the latest logic textbooks (Copi-Cohen, Hausman-Kahane-Tidman, Hurley, Salmon, Gensler, Walton, etc.), and they steadfastly contain the analytic-synthetic dichotomy. A spot reading of these popular textbooks in the collegiate market shows the dichotomy to exist in the following variations: They all deprecate any standard of goodness in logical arguments. They all claim that anyone can call himself logical without having the facts, or factual without being logical. And they maintain the so-called distinction between a sound argument and a cogent argument.

For the modern logicians, it is problematic to call an argument good or bad. They dare not say they have a normative standard for judging arguments in this manner. Accordingly, they can only say an argument is logical, based strictly on its form. For deduction, they sneak in something called “soundness.” Allegedly, a sound argument is a valid argument which just happens to have true premises. (An unsound argument is a valid argument whose premises are false.) They sneak in similarly for induction something called “cogency.” On their view, the basic division is not between good and bad reasoning but between the form and the content of reasoning, on the basis of ontology. And logical forms, for them, are devoid of ontology, which is why the mere mention of “goodness” is inappropriate.

By contrast, from our perspective, the classification is false. Logical forms do indeed have an ontological basis. Their protestations to the contrary, how logicians analyze propositions into subjects and predicates is determined by how they view the basic structure of the world. (See Bertrand Russell’s revealing analysis about “the ultimate furniture of the world.” [Cf. Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy]) Observe the mess that is called predicate logic; without realizing it, these logicians have assumed that universal functions (classes, operators, and quantifiers) and subject particulars are in the world. Is this not an ontology? (See Henry Veatch’s Realism and Nominalism Revisited.) What is the better classification? How about arguments being divided into logical ones and illogical ones, on the basis of truth? Under illogical arguments are those with false premises (zero factual strength), invalid structure (zero logical strength), or both. And if we combine the fallacies of relevance (psycho-epistemological, rhetorical, contextual, grammatical), the classification is a tripartite: good argument, zero-strength argument, and irrelevant “argument.” The logical is the good.

Soundness and cogency have dichotomous qualities for modern logicians. Because soundness is an attribution of deductive arguments with true premises, these modern logicians claim that a sound argument is not reflective of the real world. They have two reasons for this: First, soundness depends on the notion of validity for assessing logical strength. But this is an either-or attribute, yet it seems the world admits gradations. Second, they claim sound arguments reach their end in axioms—that is, all series of asking the whys of the premises of the premises of the premises of arguments end with some finite set of axioms—and axioms for the moderns are conventional, arbitrary starting principles that have no contact with reality. So a sound argument may be logical but may not be factual.

Only a cogent argument, they claim, can make that factual claim, but at a great cost: it can have no certainty. Because cogency is an attribution of inductive arguments with concrete facts for premises, it cannot claim to establish anything universally true; for how can a being of limited capacity, such as human beings, be able to examine all the facts in order to be assured the generalization holds for all instances. Omniciently, how can a sampling of concretes reaches a conclusion covering a population of them? So, because cogency depends on facts from experience, cogent arguments can never have the status of logical certainty, the logical certainty that sound arguments have.

From the Objectivist perspective, by contrast, this is a division by nonessential. There is no false alternative. The means to ascertain knowledge of the world cannot be the factor said to inhibit ascertaining knowledge! And it is human knowledge, not godly knowledge, that we care to seek. Knowledge can only be gained through perceptual experience and through reflective reasoning. Perception without reflection yields an animal-level of awareness. And reasoning without experience yields groundless abstractions. As for the series of whys of the premises, the endpoint is actual perception, not axioms. [TAOR 454d] The false alternative rests on the Kantian premise, according to Rand: “Man is limited to a consciousness of a specific nature, which perceives by specific means and not others, therefore, his consciousness is not valid; man is blind, because he has eyes—deaf, because he has ears—deluded, because he has a mind—and the things he perceives do not exist, because he perceives them.” [FTNI, 32a] For the modern logicians, because a person studies logic, his logical thinking does not help him to live on earth.

Now, aren’t you glad that logic can be studied under Objectivist tutelage?

Bob Bidinotto wrote up a progress report on the preproduction of Atlas Shrugged the movie. It’s going to be a movie of about 2.5 hours long, to be released in early 2009. You can read more of the spoilers here.

The report came out of a larger event in Washington, D.C. to celebrate Ayn Rand’s book. He also reported it here.

Our Frank has the videos of the C-SPAN2 broadcast and will make them available at the next meeting. Four memorable tidbits from what I saw: Mimi Gladstein talked about the “masculine gaze” in Ayn Rand’s cinematic writing style; David Kelley talked of scholarly advances in Objectivism as a system of ideas. Ed Hudgins of TAS reported a recent meeting with ARI’s Yaron Brook to discuss possible future ventures; Ed Crane of Cato admitted that he and everybody in his organization are Objectivists.

Logan Darrow Clements in L.A. commissioned Zogby International to conduct a national poll this past weekend. Logan wanted to ask the question: “Have you ever read the book Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand?”

The result from a random sample of 1,239 people: 8.1 (± 2.8)% of American adults have read the book.

Logan plans to ask this and similar questions yearly. His press release is here, and Zogby’s is here.

Starting today, News Corporation launches its Fox Business Network and an accompanied stock index the Fox 50 (Fox50). FBN aims to compete against CNBC on cable and satellite television, and Fox50 aims to outshine the DJIA as a barometer of American business.

How many of the companies in the Fox 50 do you have a business relationship with? I count 35 for me.