>As far as squirrels go. . .

I *get* it. I really do.

But (to repeat) to grasp a tree with claws is not the same thing as grasping a truth about the tree with intellect.

>A perception is, necessarily, a perception of something that exists.
>In that respect, perceiving something is, implicitly, to perceive that it exists.


I prefer this:


"A percept is a percept."
"To perceive something is to perceive something."


Period. Nothing is implicit in the percept. Not knowledge, not concepts, not additional assertions. Nada.


Furthermore,


"A is A"


Period. Nothing is implicit in that statement. Not, "Well, if A is A, then it necessarily follows that to grasp 'A' is to grasp that 'B' must be the next letter."


No it doesn't. If you *later* discover that "B" follows "A", hey, that's great. The only proviso is that the statement "B follows A" NOT CONTRADICT the original assertion that "A is A." And, of course, there is no contradiction involved here. But that "B follows A" is consistent with "A is A" does NOT mean that it is "implicit" in that original tautology.


Same with perception.


To perceive something is to perceive something.
To perceive something that exists is to perceive something that exists.


If *later*, upon adult philosophical reflection one concludes that one ONLY perceives that which exists, it doesn't mean that the statement "one only perceives that which exists" is implicit in a percept, and certainly not in a pre-conceptual consciousness (such as a human infant's), and most definitely not in a non-conceptual consciousness (such as a squirrel's).


>One cannot have a perception of the non-existent


By your logic, that last statement — "one cannot have a perception of the non-existent" — must itself be implicit in a percept, along with all other knowledge that only later becomes known; e.g., "to perceive something is implicitly to acknowledge and grasp that it is composed of matter and energy", and "to perceive something is implicitly to acknowledge and grasp that it is composed of atoms", etc. According to Miss Rand, then, all knowledge — e.g., all of quantum physics and quantum chemistry — is implicit in merely perceiving something.


As I posted earlier, that's an inverted Platonism. Instead of knowledge being innate and accessed through a mental act similar to remembering something, knowledge for Rand is exterior to man, carried along in the exterior stimuli itself, and accessed (i.e., converted from "implicit" knowledge to "explicit" fully-conscious knowledge) by means of logic.


It's an odd view of knowledge.


>man grasps it implicitly on the perceptual level---i.e., he grasps the constituents of the concept 'existent' . . . "


Gibberish. There is nothing to "grasp" in a percept except the percept. A percept is pure explicitness. That's why you *perceive* it. "To grasp" something is an act of *intellect*, not perception.


The confusion in ITOE is part of the price Rand paid for paying lip-service to Aristotle and St. Thomas but not really studying them deeply. The dichotomy between "perceiving a thing" (using one's senses) and "grasping a TRUTH ABOUT a thing" (using one's intellect) was fundamental to their system. Rand asserts that merely to perceive something is ALSO to grasp a truth about it, an absurdity she tries to soften by claiming that the truth is grasped only "implicitly", which then (I suppose) is acknowledged "explicitly" when one reaches a conceptual level of consciousness and decides to introspect.


"Metaphysical truth is perceptually grasped, even without a conceptual level of consciousness, because metaphysical knowledge is buried inside percepts!"


It's weird, but that's what it amounts to. More than weird, it's actually a species of mysticism.


>Now, "to perceive a big rock is implicitly to grasp that it is composed of granite," is to be guilty of an unwarranted assumption; namely, the "big rock" in question could just as easily be a large nugget of gold, be composed of quartz or iron, or any number of other elements or compounds.


Now you're claiming that conditional statements linked disjunctively — i.e., "The big rock could be gold; or the big rock could be quartz; or the big rock could be iron; or the big rock could be some other element" — are ALL implicit in a 1-month-old human infant's perception of a big rock, when it has no knowledge of rocks, gold, quartz, iron, or elements. I'm not even confident that it has any knowledge of what "big" means.


I'll sum it up for you:


Miss Rand's idea of "implicit knowledge" — as she is using it — is pure stolen concept. Rand is guilty of the same transgression in logic that she has so often (and so justifiably) accused others of committing. The concept of "implicit" only makes sense in reference to the "explicit." First comes explicitness, then comes implicitness. It is only after one reaches the conceptual stage of consciousness where knowledge is held in explicit form that one can ferret out things one hadn't noticed before and claim, "Aha! These little truths were implicit in something else I already knew explicitly!" Nothing wrong with that. But that sort of statement doesn't suggest that the implicit truths were "tucked away, inside" a mere perception.


>Regarding Joe and Mary, it isn't "[y]ou're not perceiving correctly", it is "you are not correctly evaluating that which you perceive."



"Evaluate"? I don't understand what it means to "evaluate" a perception. To "evaluate" means to form an idea of the amount, number, or value of some bit of knowledge. Perceptions aren't knowledge. Perceptions are subjective experiences of an individual consciousness. You don't evaluate them. You experience them.



No, if Miss Rand is really asserting that there's a certain species of conceptual knowledge that lies dormant, implicit, within simple percepts, then the upshot would have to lead to disputes over whose perceptions are "normal" (i.e., those claiming that the implicit knowledge they have uncovered and made explicit is true) vs. whose perceptions are accused of being distorted in some way.



>Even the squirrel can GRASP that the tree exists.



Except that squirrels (as far as we can tell) lack the faculty of *intellect* and can therefore grasp nothing ("grasping" is an act of the intellect, not the senses). It was just a bit anthropomorphic of you to assert that. Next thing you know, you'll be claiming that squirrels potentially have a benevolent sense of life and are potential Objectivists.

>when Rand says that existence is implicit in the perception, she means. . .

She didn't say that existence is implicit in perception; she said that the notion, the idea, the concept, of *existent* (not *existence*) was implicit in a percept.

I claimed that was, at best, a kind of inverted Platonism. Concepts are not implicit in percepts. Nothing is implicit in a percept. A percept is an irreducible datum of the senses (it can, of course, be broken down into sensations — nerve impulses, etc. — but we don't experience something called a "nerve impulse", which is discovered inferentially; the name of the primary datum we experience is called a "percept").

And a percept simply *is*. Nothing is implicit "inside" of it; no notions, ideas, or concepts, are carried along with it.

If, as Miss Rand claims, the concept "It is an existent" is implicit in the perception of a big rock, then why shouldn't other concepts be implicit in that percept, too; e.g., "It exerts a weak gravitational pull on other masses" or "It's composed of granite" ("to perceive a big rock is implicitly to grasp that it is composed of granite"), etc.

It's an odd view of knowledge as somehow being wrapped up, whole and complete, inside — "implicit in" —a percept.

The upshot of her position is that it leads not just to an Objectivist Theory of Knowledge, but also to an Objectivist Theory of [other people's] Ignorance. If Joe Objectivist perceives an entity, asserting all kinds of things about it which he claims are implicit in his perception; and if Mary Christian perceives the same object and claims otherwise, Joe Objectivist will respond in one of two ways: "You're not perceiving correctly" (which would include not using reason correctly, since reason and perception are tightly linked in Objectivism); or, "You're perceiving what I'm perceiving, and you jolly well grasp all those implicit truths that I grasp, but you are claiming otherwise in order to promote some other agenda. Since you are attempting to alter or deny reality, you are guilty of a moral transgression."

I'd say those two responses sum up most of the discussions many people have — or try to have — with Objectivists.

>Do you believe that the wavelengths of the photons exist?

Sure. But wavelength measures the *length* of something, not the color of something. Only through lots of processing (first by the retina, then by the optic nerve, then by the visual cortex) is a quantity of length subjectively experienced by an individual consciousness as a quality called "blue."

The relation between the input quantity of length and the output quality of subjective experience is called *correlation*, and not "unit measurement."

Two more points:

1) As mentioned earlier, there is no necessary connection between a wavelength of 475 nm and the visual experience of the color blue. Edwin Land (inventor of the Polaroid camera, among other things) proved experimentally — and explained theoretically — that using only blue light diverted from a prism and black-and-white slide film, he could project a full-color image on a screen, complete with reds, oranges, yellows, greens, etc.

2) Even if we accept that a length of 475 nm is one unit of blue (for the sake of argument), it would have to follow that to get two units of blue we would multiply by two, i.e., 475 nm x 2 = 950 nm. Under the usual conditions, a length of 950 nm is in infrared territory. So your logic of using wavelength as a unit of color leads to the conclusion that 1 unit of blue = blue, but 2 units of blue = infrared (instead of simply "more" blue).

ITOE pages 5-6:

"Since it [i.e., 'existent'] is a concept, man cannot grasp it explicitly until he has reached the conceptual stage. But it is implicit in every percept (to perceive a thing is to perceive that it exists) . . ."

A human consciousness doesn't grasp the idea of "implicitness" until, again, it has reached the conceptual stage. So her suggestion that a concept is "implicit" in a percept *even before* one has reached the conceptual stage, is (among other things) concept-stealing: a human consciousness at the conceptual stage can grasp the notion of "implicitness" and claim that, upon perceiving something, the concept "existent" or "it exists" is implicit in its perception of it; one cannot, however, take one's existing consciousness — including ideas about "implicitness" — and turn back the clock to infancy, a time when one did not have a conceptual consciousness — and still claim that any idea or concept is "implicit" in a mere percept.

"Percept" and "implicit concept" are mutually exclusive. nothing is "implicit" in a percept qua percept. A percept merely *is*.

When you look through a camera at an object — a tree, for example — and carefully focus and adjust your exposure, you — the adult photographer with the conceptual consciousness — might implicitly realize that to see the tree is to also admit that "it exists"; but the camera itself — as an analogy to a human infant who, presumably, only perceives — has nothing to do with "implicitness." Whether the lens of a camera, or the lens of a human eye, "perceiving", per se, is all about the explicitly given of the perception; there's nothing implicit about the percept, per se.

If, as Miss Rand asserts, the concept "existent" is implicit in the simple perception of a tree, qua percept, then it must also be so for a non-conceptual consciousness, like a squirrel's. A squirrel perceives the tree, just as the child perceives the tree (how the image of the tree appears in a squirrel's mind is, of course, an unknown, but it most certainly perceives the tree on which it climbs up and down). Would Miss Rand claim that the concept "existent" is implicit in the percept of the tree in a squirrel's mind?

If she is indeed claiming that an "implicit concept" is carried along with a percept, but only in a human pre-conceptual mind, such as the mind of an infant, it must be because the child is *potentially* capable of grasping concepts at a certain point in its growth. So, is Miss Rand saying, therefore, that to a potentially conceptual consciousness (such as an infant's) concepts as such are implicit in percepts as such? If so, is this true for all of its percepts, or only some of them? If true for only some of them, why? If Rand is going to assert that the concept "existent" is implicit in every percept of a not-yet-conceptual human consciousness, then why not other concepts as well? Why not the concept, "generates a gravitational field"? That's a sophisticated higher-order concept — the idea that all masses have the attribute of gravitational attraction — and, of course, we wouldn't expect any consciousness to grasp that concept until it was both conceptual and had received a good deal of training in physics and mathematics. But since it is true, is it not also true that it is implicit in the infant's perception of a tree?

I can't tell if this is what Miss Rand is really claiming. If so, then it's a kind of inverted Platonism: instead of his doctrine of "innate ideas," in which actual knowledge already pre-exists inside one's mind at the moment of birth, and the act of bringing that knowledge to full conceptual consciousness he likens to an act of remembering, Rand seems to claim that conceptual knowledge automatically resides "implicitly" inside percepts, and since the source of percepts is some physical stimulus starting outside one's body and mind, it seems that the act of bringing implicit knowledge to full conceptual consciousness she likens to mere perception.

This may or may not be what she's aiming at. In any case, at worst it is just plain incorrect; at best, it is confused and badly expressed.

>Good application of Aristotelian Logic.

Thanks!

>The real question is are the major and minor premises true.

I agree that's a *different* question, but not necessarily the *real* question. A syllogism establishes the validity of an argument, not its truth. "Truth" is correspondence to reality; "validity" is internal coherence.

>The minor premise is also an axion .

Miss Rand merely provided a definition of "unit" (an incorrect one, in my view). I don't see where she ever claimed that her notion of "unit" was an axiom.

>If these two were not stated as axioms, you would have to show both to be true,

I disagree, and I think that misapprehends the purpose of deductive logic. Aristotelian logic — sometimes called "predicative logic" and sometimes called "minor logic" — is strictly concerned with correct form, not substance. As long as the form of an argument can be compressed into a syllogism such as,

Every Y is X;
(A) is Y;
Ergo, (A) is X,

then it doesn't matter what you substitute for the variables Y, X, or (A).

Conversely, you could have a syllogism in which every proposition is true, but which is nevertheless invalid as an argument because the conclusion cannot validly be inferred from the premises. For example,

MAJOR: Every deeply profound subject is often difficult to master;

MINOR: Advanced differential and integral calculus is often difficult to master;

CONCLUSION: Therefore, advanced difference and integral calculus is a deeply profound subject.

I suppose there might be some differences of opinion regarding the truth of those statements, but most educated people who have studied mathematics and intellectual history would agree that the calculus is, indeed, a profound subject, full of original insights into the nature of motion and change.

Yet, in the above syllogism, the conclusion cannot be validly drawn from the premises; so even though we might agree that the premises and the conclusions are true — i.e., they correspond to reality — the reasoning by which we drew the conclusion is faulty, and the argument, as such, as invalid.

(It's an example of a formal fallacy called "The undistributed middle term", e.g., "Every (A) is X; Y is X; ergo, Y is (A)." Or, "Every man is mortal; Lassie is mortal; ergo, Lassie is a man.")

Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, Expanded Second Edition, Edited by Harry Binswanger and Leonard Peikoff," published by Meridian in 1990.

pages 5-6:
"[An] 'existent' [is] something that exists, be it a thing, an attribute or an action."

pages 6-7:
"A unit is an existent"

MAJOR PREMISE:
An existent is something that exists, be it a thing, an attribute, or an action."

MINOR PREMISE:
A unit is an existent.

CONCLUSION:
Therefore, a unit is something that exists, be it a thing, an attribute, or an action.

In other words, a unit is either a thing, or it's an attribute of a thing, or it's an action of a thing.

This is what I posted earlier, and what I looked at critically.

>Objectivism is good

I said nothing about "good" or "bad." I said the epistemology was the weakest part of Objectivism.

I'm glad you brought up C. S. Lewis, as he was a great scholar and a careful thinker, especially about language and the history of words.

>The wavelength of the photons which we call blue cluster around 475 nanometers (nm).

Only sometimes. Not necessarily.

>If I take a picture of a blue object, are you asserting that the object has no color until it is observed?

No. I'm saying it isn't "blue" until it is experienced by an eye-brain-mind system as being "blue." The wavelength of 475 nm is an objective component of light that *correlates* — in some contexts but not all — with the perception and conscious experience of something called "blue."

Wavelength and color CORRELATE, but they are not the same thing.

>Or is it the case that 475 nm and blue are merely two different expressions of the same objective unit?

Color has no objective unit since it's a subjective experience. Color qua color exists in consciousness.

Some "ad hoc" units of color have been created for various practical purposes, but one adopts them in ad hoc fashion, i.e., for immediate practical purposes. I'm thinking of the various color-swatch systems such as the Munsell system and the Pantone color matching system.

Inventor and physicist Edwin Land proved not only that color perception is much more complicated than originally assumed, but — more startlingly — that color is not so much "perceived", but literally *computed* by the retina/cortex system, which he dubbed the "Retinex" theory of color computation.

It appears that there is no *necessary* connection between a wavelength of, e.g., 475 nm and the perception of the color "blue."

And in a famous experiment (which was first published in 1958 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and later published as a more popular summary in a 1958 edition of Scientific American) Land proved that it was possible to photograph a full-color scene (red tomatoes on a green vine, for example) USING BLACK & WHITE FILM for creating slides, and using either white light or monochromatic light diverted from a prism, to pass the white light or the monochromatic light through the black & white slide transparencies, and project the original, full-color image on a screen.

It wasn't an illusion; it wasn't some retinal "after-immage"; it was real color projected on the screen from white light passing through black & white slide transparencies.

In fact, the cover of that 1958 edition of Sci. Am. was a photograph of the image Land projected onto a blank screen to an amazed audience.

I bring all this up to support the point I made earlier: the objective phenomenon called wavelength and the experience in consciousness we call color are *correlates*; the former is not in any way a unit of the latter.

Again: a "unit" OF something must itself partake of the attribute one wants to measure. A gram is itself a mass (which is why we can choose to call it "1" and use it to compare to other masses). A wavelength, however, is a unit of length and is not itself a bit of color, so it cannot be a unit of color.

Think of it this way:

Joe is a summer associate at a law firm. His office has 48 square feet of floor space. His salary is 48K (4K/month). Mary is a long-time senior partner in the same law firm. Her corner office has 150 square feet of floor space. Her salary is 840K (70K/month).

Is there some sort of "correlation" between the amount of floor-space each has, measured in units of "the square foot", and each one's salary? Yes. Square-footage at this firm certainly correlates with income. Could we therefore say that the "square foot" is a unit of wealth, or a unit of salary? No.

The relation between square-feet and salary is one of correlation, similar to the relation between wavelength and color perception.

The scale used to identify the intensity also known as strength of a color is the % reflectance. Different colors have their highest reflectance at different wavelengths. Here is an example note there are two colors plotted on the graph the color higher on the graph is a stronger color. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ReflCu...