Posted on 08/30/2002 10:31:06 AM PDT by thinktwice
And your's is ... ?
In light of all religious wars, I disagee.
Do you think it might lead to bloody, butchering, mad-bomber war?
I'd start with chapter one in "Philosophy; who needs it?" It's her "Thayer Award" speech delivered to the 1974 graduating class at West Point, and West Point subsequently made that speech chapter one in their in-house philosophy textbook. It's a speech that I think transformed the US military from what it was in Vietnam into what it was in the Gulf War and is today.
After that, I'd go to a novel or two. I understand that Rand's Atlas Shrugged is number two on the "Most influential book I've ever read" list, second only to the Bible.
Alan Greenspan was among the small group surrounding Ayn Rand as she wrote Atlas Shrugged. He was a disillusioned young man when he met Rand, and later he was among a group that would meet weekly to review and discuss her drafts as Atlas was being written.
Happy reading.
And you, obviously, didn't read all of post 37.
When you say you must repair to a "determining force" in order to know what is right and what is wrong, you admit that you are unable to prove what right and wrong is. By that "reasoning," you have made yourself susceptable to anyone's assertions of what is good or evil, since "yours is not to reason why, but to do or die."
Of course a supreme being/entity is thought to have stipulated that there is good and there is evil. That is required to make the argument that the God/Entity addresses (man's questions about right and wrong.) People who think for themselves, those individuals who are not afraid to ask any question, run up against the lack of evidence for a supreme being, and must devise a code of morality from the evidence of their senses (from reality.)
If the above statement is not circular and false reasoning, then -- given time and acceptance of the warm feelings therein -- you will eventually claim it as proof for the existence of God.
When it settles, truth remains. That's the rational way.
Conflicts between religious truths, however, is usually seltled with massive bloodshed and terrible misery.
When that settles, some sort of miserable life might continue. That's the irrational way.
See the difference?
Perhaps you should direct your clarification towards a different matter, to wit: And that contradiction is evidence of serious flaws in religious moralities.
If contradiction is evidence of serious flaws in one domain, it should be evidence of serious flaws in another domain, regardless of the means used to settle differences.
If Randian and Aristotelian rational ethics contradict each other (or any other rational ethics systems) logical consistency would require you to either modify your assertion above, or confess to serious flaws in rational ethics in general.
And do you actually believe that we live "in a rational world"? Your rosy picture of intellectual progress towards "truth" does not appear to describe the passions and shortcomings of even the rational ethicists. (Think of the way that Ayn Rand dealt with opposing views.) Perhaps rational ethics would work well for a society of robots.
There is no need to put "truth" in quotation marks. Alfred Tarski gave a good definition of truth back in 1944, when he said "The sentence 'snow is white' is true if and only if snow is white." And here is the problem with the search for truth. We are like a bunch of blind men trying to determine the true color of snow. We can sit and argue with each other, imagining that we are approaching the truth more and more closely, as we pass from "snow is blue" to "snow is green" to "snow is yellow" (don't eat it) to "snow is orange" to "snow is red" to "snow is purple" and finally back to "snow is blue." But we may be just going around and around, never getting any closer to the truth. Or we can choose one color to have faith in and never change. If that color is white, we have the truth. If it is any other color, then we have a lie that never gets better. When the question concerns right and wrong (morality or ethics), I suspect that the philosophers--including rational ethicists--are arguing around the color wheel but never really drawing nearer to white. The religions each have a different color staked out, and perhaps one of them is white.
I will conclude with this: internal consistency is no guarantee of truth. We can eliminate all contradictions from a theory without any part of the theory corresponding to the real world. If all you do is reconcile contradictions, you may end up with a theory that is false but not provably false. And by this you just might begin the worst religion the world has ever seen...
Man possesses a rational faculty capable of making some sense from perceptions of what seems to be an irrational universe.
Arguments concerning God's creation, however, focus on "order" evident in the universe as a proof for the existence of a rational God, who by implication of that "proof," may well have created a rational universe that is so extensively complex that we still have myriads of discoveries to make.
Your words are well written and I want to examine them more tomorrow. Meanwhile, I thank you for the interesting thoughts and I'm wondering if you are a philosophy major or professor, and if your posted thoughts evolve from Kant's work.
I approach by way of mathematics (foundations and logic) rather than philosophy. Hence my reference to Alfred Tarski. Although some would say that the line between math and philosophy is blurred at that point.
In the interest of full disclosure, I am also what you would probably call a religionist, although religious "ritual" has but a small place in my life. Still want to talk?
Ayn Rand's 164 page book "Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology" is packed to the brim with explanations of how we know what we know. And here's what she wrote about things like Tarski's bad definition of "truth."
Page 62, paperback edition .... The nominalists of modern philosophy, particularly the logical positivists and linguistic analysts, claim that the alternative of true or false is not applicable to definitions, only to "factual" propositions. Since words, they claim, represent arbitrary human (social) conventions, and concepts have no objective referents in reality, a definition can be neither true or false. The assault on reason has never reached a deeper level or a lower depth than this.
Page 63 ... Truth is the product of the recognition of reality. Man identifies and integrates the facts of reality by means of concepts. He retains concepts in his mind by means of definitions. He organizes concepts into propositions -- and the truth and falsehood of his propositions rests, not only on their relation to the facts he asserts, but also on the truth or falsehood of the definitions of the concepts he uses to assert them, which rests on the truth or falsehood of his dsignations of essential characteristics.
Pages 63 and 64 ... A definition is the condensation of a vast body of observations -- and stands or fails with the truth or falsehood of these observations. Let me repeat: a definition is a condensation. As a legal preamble (referring here to epistemological law), every definition begins with the implicit proposition: "After full consideration of all the known facts pertaining to this group of existents, the following has been demonstrated to be their essential, therefore defining, characteristic ..."
Considering Tarski's "snow is white" as "a good definition of truth" with reference to the above paragraph, would you consider whiteness to be an essential defining charisteristic for snow?
An observation ... Ayn Rand produced a 164 page document explaining her Objectivist Epistemology.
What other philosophers have produced works regarding their philosophy's epistemology? ....
I'd say that the contradictions I see as evidence of serious flaws in religious domains is NOT evidence of serious flaws in non-religious domains.
If Randian and Aristotelian rational ethics contradict each other (or any other rational ethics systems) logical consistency would require you to either modify your assertion above, or confess to serious flaws in rational ethics in general.
I've written before that Rand built upon Aristotle's simplistic rational ethics. In so doing, Rand presented a unified, non-contradictory rational ethics in a 144 page document titled "The virtue of selfishness."
I'd like to know if any other philosopher has presented any logical, rational ethics that contradicts Rand's work.
You have obviously never read Ayn Rand. No one makes a better case for the cause and existense of evil than Rand, and no one makes a clearer case for the necessity of moral values. Ayn Rand was an Athiest.
Hank
Reference ... "Philosophy," James L. Christian, 6th edition
Spinoza ... " ... published only two works during his lifetime."
Regarding Spinoza's "Ethics" -- not published during his lifetime -- his "opus" according to Christian -- "... publication of his work was banned and religious opposition to his ideas were so virulent that he put his manuscript back into his desk, where it remained until after his death."
Part one -- "On the Nature of God"
Part two -- "... concerns psychology, the science of understanding"
Part three --Mentioned by Christian, but only in these words ... "The Ethics is divided into three parts."
Looks to me that Spinoza's Ethics, covering things like "The Nature of God," is at best -- semi rational.
You are certainly entitled to your opinion; however, if you want anyone to agree with you, you have more explaining to do. Why is one domain singled out for a higher standard than any other? This smacks of bias, and unless your reader already shares your bias, this will require more argument.
And here's what she wrote about things like Tarski's bad definition of "truth."
I am having difficulty seeing how the quotes you used address Tarski's definition of truth. I doubt she had anything like Tarski's work in mind when she wrote that. Tarski certainly did not consider the definition of truth to be arbitrary. In the context in which he worked, in fact, it was so non-arbitrary that none of the definitions tried before had given satisfactory results. If the definition had been an arbitrary one, then any of the earlier definitions would have been just as good. They weren't. In fact, the more I examine your samples of Rand's thinking, the more I am inclined to believe that she would approve of Tarski's work. So, since I can't see Rand calling Tarski's definition of truth "bad" it must be you calling it a "bad" definition. This is actually easier to deal with, because while Rand is unavailable for discussion, I can ask you to explain what is so "bad" about Tarski's definition of truth. Would you, please?
Considering Tarski's "snow is white" as "a good definition of truth" with reference to the above paragraph, would you consider whiteness to be an essential defining charisteristic for snow?
First, note that Tarski was defining truth, not snow. That is, what does it mean for an assertion (in general) to be true? And his answer (ignoring the necessary distinctions between the language and the metalanguage) was that if snow really is white (in the real world) then the sentence "snow is white" is true, and conversely. In other words, in order for a sentence about the real world to be true, the real world must actually be as the sentence asserts. I'm not sure why you think Rand would dispute this.
Now as far as whiteness being a defining characteristic of snow, I would venture to say, no. To define snow, I would simply say that snow is the result of water vapor freezing into crystals in the atmosphere. The observed whiteness of snow is a derived characteristic based upon the way that light scatters through it, and may be observed in shaved ice. However, if snow is illuminated with monochromatic light, such as laser light, instead of polychromatic sunlight, the snow will not be white.
But back to the definition of truth. If I point to snow in the real world and say, "That snow is white right now," then the truth (or falsehood) of my assertion is to be found in the real world: is the snow white, or not? It does not need to be a defining characteristic; just keep it simple: is the snow white, or not? If it is, then my assertion is true. If it is not, then my assertion is false.
Bear in mind that the groundbreaking nature of Tarski's work was not the observations that I have made above. Rather, it was the careful application of this seemingly self-evident definition to mathematical logic and model theory (in a way that correctly separated the language from the metalanguage so as to avoid the famous "liar paradox") that made Tarski's work so notable.
P.S. As much as I could glean from the quotes you gave, I believe that I would agree with Rand on the matter of definitions. But that leaves me far from being a Randian.
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