Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology: Expanded Second Edition

What some of Ayn Rand's enemies recognize but many of her friends don't is that because this book is easy peasy it is dangerous.Because of my own first hand experience I know this to be true.That is, this book is easy peasy IF you understand that it was written for the man-in-the-street-human being not man-in-the-ivory-tower-philosophy student.For example, who besides me hasn't had a dream where your dream circle swooshed in on a red cup and in the same dream scene also on red painted fingernails from a long, slender hand dangling in the scene and then the next day on your 4th birthday woke up thinking about red as-a-thing?And then why some decades later when they read this on the first page of Chapter 2 of ITOE and [inserted] their own first hand experience while doing so: ...2. Concept-FormationA concept is a mental integration of two or more units [cup & fingernails with something same about them] which are isolated according to a specific characteristic(s) [same look] and united by a specific definition [this cup and those fingernails look the same].The units involved may be any aspect of reality: entities, attributes [same look], actions, qualities [same look that is different from the rest of the stuff--hand and table cup sits on--in the circle], relationships, etc.; they may be perceptual concretes [fingernails, cups] or other, earlier-formed concepts. The act of isolation involved is a process of abstraction: i.e., a selective mental focus [dream circle] that takes out or separates a certain aspect of reality from all others (e.g., isolates a certain attribute [color] from the entities [fingernails attached to a hand and a cup standing by itself nearby in an otherwise all black & white dream] possessing it, or a certain action from the entities performing it, etc.). The uniting involved is not a mere sum, but an integration, i.e., a blending of the units into a single, new mental entity .... [red!!!] ...... why they didn't end up keeling over from way way way too many multiple (mental) orgasms as the foreplayful Ms. Rand connected the dots--dot after dot after dot--for said individual such as myself, I'll never know--actually I do know, that is, actually, internally speaking I did keel over. That is, a self who suffered greatly from the rampant Kantian abuse shoved down his throat by the mere fact of the fact that he took education seriously and was educated in the Kantian driven American Public Education School System as same existed from 1951 to 1987 wherein he was "educated". (Granting that the first half of this period contained enough Classical Education influence to prevent total and complete mind destruction, in balance it still required a big dudette coming along at exactly the half way point in my education to save me.)All's I can say is, "Thank god for Ayn Rand."The dangerous part is both theoretical and factual.Theoretically, that is, IF ONLY I could now go back to my 10th grade high school class and have the teacher-lead-whole-class laughing at me for ME saying in response to the teacher's question, "of course there is a sound when the tree falls in the woods without anyone around" and they all laughing in unison at me and saying you just don't get it do you Deering, you can't know this THAT'S THE POINT would I ever have a thing or two to tell them.Thing 1: if you too want to know that you can know then read Ayn Rand's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.Thing 2: Not all teachers are rational.Thing 1a: If you want to know HOW you know then read Ayn Rand's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.Factually, if after your sixth or seventh read through of this book where each time around the part just above last time's easy peasy parts that you didn't get then but now all of a sudden these new parts seem easy peasy too then welcome to the world of the knowers.It is a fun world, but as I said it is not without danger ... as the following letter of mine sent to a local editor attests to:Dear Editor The Minneapolis Star:[Not reprinted here][I have to stop here because of amazon's limitations--it can't differentiate between swear words used inappropriately (profanity--that is, swear words as substitutions for appropriate abstract concepts that the user does not know and is too lazy to learn) and ones used appropriately (emotional end-state descriptors). Since my letter-to-the-editor (lte) has two appropriately used swear words in it and since I accept amazon's rules about me qua "reviewer/commentator" on their website not making them differentiate I can't put this lte here. However, for those aforementioned friends who are still interested you can read the full "review/comment" at my degageblog.]I sometimes think that "Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology" is the greatest book Ayn Rand ever wrote.But then of course other times I think it is "Atlas Shrugged".Either way, if you like thinking about thinking then there is a really good chance you will like ITOE.If on the other hand you love knowing and knowing that you know then there is a really really good chance you will love ITOE.PS: here's a small tip on how to help you make this book be easy peasy(ier) for you if it already isn't,1. Buy the original non-expanded version first (my 4th Printing copy--Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, pub: The Objectivist, Inc.--was printed in 1973) and read and study it first because it is physically a littler book (quarter inch thick) that can seem less daunting then this FOUR TIMES BIGGER (one-inch thick) Expanded Version. Also, some of the material in the Expanded Version's expanded section prevents you from learning the material on your own without having to rely on more experts to give you the answers. (You will end up relying on them only after you have to--see more following).2. Read it and re-read it as required for the next year or so as you give yourself a chance to learn on your own all you can about epistemology in general and objectivist epistemology in particular (which ultimately--if both match reality--are the same thing).3. When you get to the point where you can't easily continue your understanding of the book's ideas by simply re-reading it (and thinking about the book's ideas in-between these re-reads) then get this expanded version and read it's expanded parts and4. then continue on as required to learn all you can about epistemology in general (and in particular, eventually, your own personal epistemology, i.e., psycho-epistemology, i.e., your own personal thinking modus operandi as herein resides your biggest source of self improvement you'll ever find) and5. then, voila! after several years you too can conclude: "...this stuff is easy peasy ..." (notice, when you are 3 years old several years is a lifetime but when you are thirty it's only about 10% of a lifetime ... voila, easy peasy/piece of cake are teleömetric--that is, relative--terms ... ).PPS1. If you can't get a copy of the original non-expanded version then buy two copies of this the paperback Expanded Version and2. put one copy away for future use, and3. take the other copy, turn to page 88 and tear off the rest of the book from pp 89 to the end and throw it away and4. cross off page 88 (title page for Dr. Peikoff's Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy article*) with a giant X and then5. what's left is the original non-expanded version for you to read and study and reread and continue studying for the first year or so ... then go to number 3 in the PS above and continue on your way to easy-peasy ville ...FPSObjectivism can be intimidating or at least it was to me but I refused to let this intimidation stop me and I highly recommend that you persevere also as the reward of ... knowing and knowing that you know is ... invaluable.-----------------* I can't remember for sure if I read this article before or after ITOE (since for me it was just under a half a lifetime ago when I read it) but I think I did and so since it was an invaluable article for me--or as I've published elsewhere: "[the] Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy article ... single handedly uncrooked well over half of my 17 years worth of American-Public-Education-induced, intellectually twisted, psycho-epistemology"--it might prove to be the same for you so you can read this as a standalone thing independent of its inclusion here in ITOE.

A critical reviewer writes:"Either universals exist outside the mind or they do not. If they exist outside the mind, there remains the question of where and how they exist, despite the changing nature of all particulars we experience, and how they get into the mind, since we experience only transitory particulars. If they exist only inside the mind, we have to confront the problem that knowledge is disconnected from reality."This is an excellent summary of the historical dichotomy Ayn Rand sets out to overturn in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Philosophers have long assumed that if there are no universals "out there" in external reality, in some sense existing independently of human cognition, then our abstractions or concepts represent some kind of fiction, and our conceptual knowledge is fundamentally cut off from reality ("I have seen many men, but I have never seen man.").In ITOE, Ayn Rand rejects this assumption and proceeds to offer the alternative no other philosopher had been able to conceive. No, there are no such things as universals, she answers; there are only particulars. But that does not mean our concepts are in any way a distortion of what exists. Concepts are our FORM of grasping reality. We group concretes together into abstract concepts, but we do not do so arbitrarily, nor does doing so prevent us from knowing that in reality all that exists are particulars, and that when we think, we are merely using concepts to think about particulars. Why are our conceptualizations not arbitrary? Because they reflect the factual, mathematical relationships among concretes. We group together concretes that are similar, and similarity is a quantitative relationship.Initially, this relationship is given in perception (recognizing it does not, as some reviewers have claimed, require any already held concepts): two concretes are perceived as similar when they differ significantly less from each other along some axis of measurement (e.g., shape) than they do from some third thing. For example, one does not need to possess the concepts 'chair,' 'table,' or 'shape' to perceive that the shapes of two chairs are similar in comparison to that of the table they're next to. Infants can perceive that, and so can animals (which accounts for the associations they're are able to form). In this way, Rand solves the difficult problem of how human beings are able to rise from the perceptual level of awareness to the conceptual. From there she moves on to higher-level "abstractions from abstractions," and explains that as we move up the conceptual chain (that is, further and further from the perceptual level) the possibility of error increases. That's right, Rand holds that one's concepts and definitions can be WRONG. A major reason for the need of a theory of concepts is that we need guidance in forming our concepts. To this end, Rand offers several conceptual and definitional rules. The reader comes to see what she meant in saying that concepts are OBJECTIVE.Her writings on this topic do not, as various reviewers have claimed, encroach on what ought to be the province of child psychology. Her discussions of the concept-forming processes of infants and young children are based on an understanding of (1) the mental processes that are implied by the learning of language and (2) the logically necessary order of learning concepts.(1) A scientist can observe how children behave when they're learning to speak, but only through "arm chair," philosophical reasoning can a thinker come to grasp what it is that is going on when a child reaches the ability to identify the tree in the front yard, the tree in the backyard, and the Christmas tree in the living room as all "trees." What is it about those three objects that enables one to call each a "tree," and what implicit mental processes must therefore be occuring? There is a reason no cognitive psychologist has ever solved the problem of universals.(2) Rand is able to infer a lot about how children form concepts from her understanding that concepts must be learned in a specific, logical order (which is not to say there are not options within the logical restrictions). It is logically impossible, for example, to grasp the concept "living organism" before one has grasped such concepts as "animal" and "plant." It is logically impossible to grasp the concept "orphan" before one has grasped the concept "parent." That does not mean a child can't parrot those words in the opposite order, but if he did his meaning in using the word (if any) would not be the same as ours. He would have the word but not the concept.ITOE is a rich philosophical tour de force, containing the solution to the problem of universals.

Ayn Rand is influential to Libertarian philosophy. Although I disagree on some things, as per readings you can do further than just this book, it sets up for understanding philosophy on objective standards.The only points I disagree on is the need of a coercive government and Intellectual Property. Ideas can't be excluded like how Friday may use a stick for fishing, but Crusoe wants to stoke a fire. A stick has to be excluded for the use of fishing, but the idea of fishing can't be excluded.