She didn't say that you have to conceptualize entities in order to perceive them or to accept the perception as real. You have to perceive individual entities before you can isolate their similarities and differences in a field of other entities in order to classify and conceptualize them. Perceptual awareness is the base of all knowledge and is required before forming concepts.

Perception, not sensation, is the conscious starting point of your conceptual awareness grasping the world: It is an automatic integration of sensations you are not aware of in isolation; you are not aware in the form of isolated, unintegrated sensations, each unretained beyond the immediate moment.

Immediately before the sentence you quoted as a seeming contradiction of perception as the self evident base, "The knowledge of sensations as component of percepts it not direct, it is acquired by man much later; it is a scientific, conceptual discovery", she wrote:

"Although, chronologically, man's consciousness develops in three stages: the stage of sensations, the perceptual, the conceptual—epistemologically, the base of all of man's knowledge is the perceptual stage."

"Sensations, as such, are not retained in man's memory, nor is man able to experience a pure isolated sensation... Discriminated awareness begins on the level of percepts."

"A percept is a group of sensations automatically retained and integrated by the brain of a living organism. It is in the form of percepts that man grasps the evidence of his senses and apprehends reality. When we speak of 'direct perception' or 'direct awareness,' we mean the perceptual level. Percepts, not sensations, are the given, the self-evident."

There is no contradiction. Starting with perceptions you build up a hierarchy of concepts through a process of further abstraction (see for example chapter 3, "Abstractions from Abstractions"), building concepts on top of concepts in accordance with essential facts in order to understand ever increasing distinctions as you increase the scope and depth of your knowledge in the form of conceptual awareness. Perception is the conscious base of the whole hierarchy of concepts. That is the structure of conceptual knowledge, not a "perceptual chain".

To observe that "percepts, not sensations, are the given, the self-evident" does not contradict the necessity of later discovering as, scientific conceptual knowledge "sensations as components of percepts":

Once you have sufficient conceptual knowledge and have begun to think scientifically you can discover the physical and biological components and causes of the perceptions themselves and conceptualize the underlying nature of perception as composed of stimuli of the sense organs in the form of sensations that are integrated into perception.

The perception of something as elementary as a pin prick is not, without further observation, enough to perceive the pin as the entity. Restricted to touch alone, you would have to at least feel the rest of the object or you could not distinguish it from needles, staples, etc. If it were your first experience of that kind you wouldn't know what the object is. You only perceive one aspect of the object from the prick alone and that isn't enough to identify a pin in contrast to other similar entities. But it is more than a pre-conceptual sensation because the sequence of a sustained prick across time is automatically integrated into a perception of the unknown entity in terms of one characteristic.

David Kelley's book Evidences of the Senses discusses this in detail.

I think his answer would be that you perceive a prick. Then you deconstruct the prick to discover it is a pin instead of say a thorn or shard of glass.

He was trying to apply his knowledge by classifying the orangutan in terms of his existing concepts of living beings, not yet realizing that there are more than the three. He seems to have been guessing that it was more similar in some way to a bird than cats or people (maybe by being in a tree). Yet he wasn't sure, showing that he saw something was wrong, implicitly recognizing that something essential was missing but not yet quite aware of the need for further subdivision of his preliminary concept of animal or living thing.

Chapter 3 in IOE describes how abstractions from abstractions are formed through subdivision and chapter 5 describes how definitions change as new knowledge of more facts requires changing definitions in order isolate essential characteristics within a wider field of knowledge.

lol. yea. we don't do that here...LOL

Perception means through your sense organs.

Some measurement tools enhance what we can perceive directly, as in seeing through a microscope. Others provide information indirectly, which allows us to infer the existence of things that we cannot perceive, like electrons or electromagnetic waves in the non-visible spectrum, and which we conceptualize with theoretical concepts based on all the evidence that can be accumulated.

The concept of physical reality does not change, we learn more about it and form new concepts for new aspects that are discovered. The referents of a concept are everything it refers to in the present, past and future, known and unknown at the time.

"what is it?" might be asking for an explanation of something the e-prime folks try to avoid --- existence--- by removing any form of 'to be' from English. Perhaps the best that can be done is to recognize that which exists and discover the identities and interactions. 'what is it?' for an existent would be as hard to discover as is the 'what is it?' for consciousness. Might be best to just stick with 'what it is' as with discovering the identities of that which exists in terms of attributes and laws of action.

We observe behavior and from that we can conjecture what is responsible for that behavior. In normal experience water behaves like a true fluid but when we look closely enough we see that water is made up of tiny particles called molecules. If we break these molecules up into their constituent elements we no longer have water. If we are designing a pump viewing water as a smooth fluid is not only acceptable it is preferable. However, if we are designing an electrolysis vessel we must employ a different model. Neither of these models tell us what water is but they do tell us how water behaves under different circumstances. We can gain some understanding of reality by observing behavior and then by constructing a testable model of what the underlying mechanism might be that is responsible for that behavior. If the test of the model produces the expected results then we can say that the model is strengthened. That does not mean that we have gained understanding of the underlying mechanism but that we have obtained a more complete understanding of its behavior. In that way the model bears a useful relationship to reality. But it is not reality, it is only a model.

The Mayans were pretty good at measurements and numbers. They had a year at 365.2422 days
and the nuclear clock scientists say has the year at 365.2420 plus or minus .0005!

Ayn Rand did not equivocate on her observation that "it is not an accident that man's earliest attempts at measurement ... consisted of relating things to himself -- as for instance ... adopting the decimal system, which is supposed to have its origin in man's ten fingers as units of counting."

She didn't diminish it as "unnatural", she included it as an example of her principle. She didn't use the word "natural" at all. What would it mean for the decimal system to be "natural" versus "unnatural"? All number systems and methods of calculating with them have to be invented; the ideas are not innate just because we have 10 fingers, but neither is conceptual thought "unnatural" to man.

She observed that man's earliest units of measurements were related to himself because measurement allows us to expand our awareness in conceptual form to the realm beyond our direct perception through the use of a unit we can perceive and are familiar with. Our ten fingers are one such familiar unit. The decimal system did in fact originate with the number of fingers we have. There is a large history of finger and toe counting and calculating both in primitive times and in primitive societies found in more modern times. It resulted in counting in 5's, 10's and 20's. Base 10 number systems were used in ancient Egypt, Greece, and India in their progressively more sophisticated numerical records. Babylonia used both 10 and 16 simulataneously.

But there is a big difference between consolidating numbers for mental unit economy with a specific numeral to avoid repetition of smaller units versus the decimal system we have today. That required the conceptualization of the base as opposed to just using it as a device to write numerals, the conceptualization and development of the positional (place) system for both whole numbers and fractions -- including the concept of zero and its use in this context, the open-ended size of exponents for numbers of any magnitude rather than a fixed size with the early distinct symbols for specific groupings, and development of methods of calculation based on rules for using powers of the base.

The mathematical methods used by those early cultures for the kind of arithmetic that we regard as simple was extremely convoluted and complex by today's standards, which is one reason that algebra was slow to develop and geometrical methods were more common in theoretical mathematics. Some cultures used base 12, 16 or 60, which allowed more divisors.

This is why Stevin is credited for today's decimal system as late as about 1600 for his advocacy of the concept of decimal fractions as part of his project to unify and systematize the entire system of measurements with a decimal base. Europeans had already been printing tables of numbers in decimal notation. The first published general theory of positional systems (including the binary system) was by Liebniz about a century later.

But the choice of 10 as the base came from our 10 fingers in the original finger counting.

I could not follow your link, but I looked up Stevinus and found him interesting. Base-10 math is a lot older than Stevinus, though. The Egyptians used it (if you do not mind occasionally using pictures of toads for numbers) http://discoveringegypt.com/egyptian-.... What we think of as base 10 place-value system was used by Hindu mathematicians in about the 4th C AD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu%E.... The Bablyonians counted base-12 and many other lands retained some of their traditions, as we do with the degrees in a circle and hours of the day - both of which are base 12. That does not mean that we do not use a decimal system for other calculations, though.

Jan

The decimal appears to have roots in our digits. I think that is based in nature, so I would say it is natural.