You deny that a body can be so massive that light cannot escape from it? (I hate to break the bad news, but that was Immanuel Kant's reductio ad absurdum to Newton's theory. He rejected it because it led to the idea of a "black hole" a body so massive that Newtonian corpuscles of light would be unable to leave it. Apparently, that seemed "anti-conceptual" to Kant.)

Astrology has explanatory power. They can explain anything and everything about you. You are a nitpicker because you are a Virgo. ("I was born in December.") Ah, you have a Venus rising and Venus is the contrary aspect of Virgo. On and on… And population statistics will show to whatever precision available that people born at some time are different from people born at some other time.

Freudian psychology has the same power: Id-Ego-Super Ego… Oedipus Complex, Electra Complex… suppression, repression, neurosis,… avoidance complex… Lots of explanations…

Moreover, modern astrologers acknowledge astronomy as the science in support of their art. For good astrology, you need good measurements.

That speaks to the pragmatist fallacy of measuring without a conceptual basis.

Yes, I read all of that in Harriman, the same as you did.

At what step in the Scientific Method would you add
"Form a concept."
or
"Abstract a concept from the relevant percepts."
or
"Differentiate the essential distinguishing characteristic and integrate it to a relevant, established truth."

You might as well insist on subject-verb agreement, because like good grammar, thinking conceptually is fundamental to any rational and productive endeavor.

Thanks, again, for taking up the cudgel. The basic problem with arguing to find truth goes back to the ancient Greeks. The Sophists worked from the implicit assumption that if words have meaning and refer to objective entities, then the best argument is the truth (or closest to it). That, of course, led to a lot of arguing, and not much fact-finding.

Myself, I believe that you cannot rationally argue someone out of an opinion that they were not rationally argued into in the first place. (I think that Heinlein said that.) I believe in "sense of life Objectivism." In other words, the works of Ayn Rand "resonate" with some people - 24 million or more, apparently - and many of them pursue philosophy deeper and more formally. Most people, especially adults, only accept what they agree with already and fail to integrate the rest.

My perception is that those with the best understanding came to the philosophy of Objectivism as teens or young adults.

As for the others, I try to look for agreements. I understand "the universe playing fair" as a sense of life statement. You certainly would have a lot more to say (or maybe nothing at all) to someone who claimed that science is hard work because the universe perniciously hides the truth from us and it is just our rotten luck that most of it is unknowable "dark matter."

Rather than continue to talk about you as if you were not here, let me ask: where are you ethically and politically? We have very, very many discussions here about politics, mostly because the vast majority here are not students of Objectivism, but only political conservatives who are distressed about current events.

In fact, an objective political science suggests solutions. As you can see here, though, many deny the validity of political science, which makes it hard to achieve progress in that area. My favorite example was Commander Denniston of Bletchley Park who believed the German ciphers to be unbreakable. Hard to achieve success with that assumption…

It is not just that he "believes" conventional modern philosophy. He never deeply questioned it by integrating what he read of Objectivism into the deeper foundations of philosophy. He probably would respect your rights.

(I do not know why, but our society has a folkway or maybe a taboo against speaking about someone in the third person while they are present. Because I do not know why, I tend to do it more often than most other people around me.)

(And I really do believe that Dr. Peikoff has better things to do with his time. It was a quip, actually a doff of the hat.)

And yet, he has read AS three times and much else as well and the Professor apparently works or worked in a scientific endeavor. You might say that we can lead a horse to water and all that. It is the same problem that Christians face in their own cruelties. I am not speaking of the impossibility of altruism, I am just referring to the simple fact that they cannot even be nice to each other, no turning of the other cheek, loving their enemies, or forgiving of trespasses. And, here, too, we have someone who seems fully cognizant of Objectivism and yet whom you - and I (see my comment) - find "diametrically opposed to Objectivism."

Meanwhile, we want to convert the whole world by getting them to watch a movie.

"It is a sin to write this." If you do not record your thoughts, then you are not civilized. Numeracy led to literacy. Literacy led to the creation of self-awareness. It is the very same psychological and epistemological revolution socially that is reflected in the fact that you do not need to be thinking in order to choose to think.

Reading the words for understanding of what they objectively say, and in this case ask, rather than speculating and psyching people out as you try to 'home in' on some hidden meaning is much better. I write what I really mean, and try to be precise.

The facts that necessitate ethics are that we must use our rational faculty to think and choose in order to live. A right is a moral sanction of freedom of action in a social context. All that is a lot more than "volition".

Ethics as invention versus discovery is a false alternative. The science of ethics isn't an arbitrary invention, it is based on the nature of man and his requirements to live. Those requirements must be discovered, but ethical principles as such are not discovered as intrinsic to reality. Ethics is the objective formulation of principles required to live based on the facts of our nature. As always, the objective is distinguished from both the intrinsic and the subjective. Principles are identifications of facts of reality as formulated in our specific form of conceptual consciousness.

A science is an organized body of knowledge about some general aspect of reality. It has content. It is not method or process alone. It is understanding by appropriate epistemological method. Each science requires methods for valid formulations and validations of its theories, dependent on their subject matter. What they have in common is, like any knowledge, all science must be conceptual, objective, non-contradictory, and rationally obtained and formulated. Concepts and principles have content. Knowledge is knowledge of something. That is much more than prescribed procedures of process. Its systematic and precise nature is also much more than just how a competent rational person lives, but both require commitment to objectivity in principle.

Logical Positivism was a result of Hume's anti-conceptual Empiricism and has a lot in common with Pragmatism. It's not a faulty kind of Objectivism. It isn't anything like Objectivism, which has radically different basic positions on the basic questions of philosophy. Perhaps your sympathy with Logical Positivism and the idea of science as "method" stem from being influenced by the Positivists more than you think. See Leonard Peikoffs lectures on the British empiricists, Kant, Pragmatism and Logical Positivism the second part of his history of philosophy series.

We haven't been discussing the ethics of the Pragmatists and Analysts in this thread, it's about the epistemological nature of science. But the anti-conceptual nature of Pragmatism, Positivism and the varieties and emphasis in Operationism and Popper in the philosophy of science and in the name of science are very destructive of the ability to have knowledge of the world and provide a very bad philosophy of science.

Knowledge being finite does not mean that you can't learn more. Whatever it is, it is that and only that at that time. Knowledge does not mean omniscience. Everything is limited to what it is: it is definite and specific to its own identity. It is not unlimited or without identity. Knowledge is no different in that respect. Things being what they are does not mean that they can't change over time.

We do know what gravity is. It is an attractive force between masses dependent on the amount of the masses and the distance between them, all in the usual form. And you all kinds of instances of it from the Cavendish experiment to apples falling from trees to what happens when you stand on your bathroom scale to the solar system. That we don't know how it works in more detail by what mechanism, or more about mass, does not mean that we don't know what gravity is. Knowing something is not and does not require omniscience. You know what you know. Not knowing more or knowing everything does not mean that you don't know anything.

Newton not liking 'action at a distance' means that he didn't like not knowing or being able to account for what happens throughout the distance or what may be happening at some other distance somewhere else where there is no mass. But that something happens and the force acts on each mass at the distance is a fact. It's not good to not like facts qua facts.

The mathematical gravitational field is a higher level abstraction in our hierarchy of knowledge. (Refer to Chapter 3 on "Abstractions from Abstractions" in IOE for an elementary explanation of levels of abstraction.) It isn't a floating abstraction, it's related to other concepts, integrated within a theory.

You know the relations between gravitational field, gravitational force, and gravitational acceleration, all of which require other concepts to relate them, such as mass, velocity, distance, time, derivatives and gradients. It requires both concepts of mathematical method and concepts of things. (Refer to Chapter 4 on "Concepts of Consciousness" in IOE.)

It isn't a physical entity, like a chicken that you can't see directly. And it isn't like a flow field in the Euler or Navier Stokes equations for a fluid that refers to velocities of regions of matter. As a higher level of abstraction it allows you to identify what the gravitational force would be anywhere on another mass if it were there.

Understanding it depends on a great deal of prior knowledge, ultimately based on perceptions at the base of all your knowledge, but not a perception of the gravitational field as such: It is a theoretical entity whose existence is inferred through conceptual knowledge of other observations. Objective abstractions must not be reified into 'things' intrinsic to existence, as if they were all some kinds of chickens, but neither are they subjective fantasies. They are our objective means of knowing reality through a complex abstract hierarchy of concepts, provided that the concepts and theories are objectively formulated in accordance with reality.

That is how you know what a gravitational field is. That you don't know more about it, and don't know of something like a hidden chicken to which it refers, or some kind of blob with no identity but characteristics and behaviors tied to it, does not mean that you don't anything about it or don't know what it is, i.e., what the concept means. We understand physics through abstract concepts mathematically formulated. Understanding of more complex phenomena is indirect, through higher levels of abstractions: Again, that is our means of objective conceptual awareness of the universe through abstraction when done by valid means.

The same goes for Einstein's theory of gravity except that it is far more complex than simple Newtonian physics. Space-time represented mathematically as 4 dimensions relates spacial dimensions with time in the form of the distance traveled by light in the time. The 4 dimensions are mathematically independent, not 4 directions in a reified 4D universe somehow extending 3D space.

Space is itself an abstraction as a relation between entities, not a 'thing' as Newton thought of it as big container. Time refers to a periodic measure of change, also an abstraction. If human beings disappeared -- if there were human no consciousnesses to think of space and time, the facts of entities and change (like the vibrations in an atomic clock) that give rise to our concepts would still exist, but not the concepts of space and time.

The concepts are our means of understanding the universe conceptually in a relation between existence and consciousness, not things intrinsic to existence (like Aristotle's version of Platonic forms), but also not subjective figments of imagination trapped in a consciousness unrelated to existence. Don't reify space-time.

Einstein's equations of general relativity are the form of the mathematics relating space, time, and mass through the mathematical concept of curvature -- "curvature" in the form of a higher level of abstraction generalized to 4 independent mathematical dimensions, not a simple attribute of an object having a curved surface.

The mathematics is similar to the differential geometry used to describe a curved surface like the earth or the Navier equations for an elastic shell, but the mathematical generalization does not refer to a simple object or a Newtonian 4D container reifying the abstractions. It refers through the chain of abstractions built on abstractions in the conceptual hierarchy to something about the universe, but it does not mean that space and time are an object, let alone a 4 dimensional object, that is physically curved like a chicken. Mathematics is a science of method. The mathematics of differential geometry is used because it allows for relating measurements in space and time in a certain mathematical form providing conceptual economy of thought. Don't reify abstractions.

You can say that "space-time has curvature" (if Einstein's theory is correct), but you have to know what that means at the appropriate level of abstraction and not reify it into giant 4 dimensional warped chicken.

everyone uses words uniquely. . knowing what you
actually mean is a process of looking from different
points-of-view in your conversations to learn more
precisely what you really mean. . further, reading
between the lines gives another context. . example:::
I have come to think of you as a mature male, someone
who has a dual background in philosophy and science,
someone who probably grew up in one of the northern
States and who has spent lots of time alone. . this
estimation lets me look at what you say from the point-
of-view which you might have when saying it. -- j
.

Newton's theory is based on concepts that do not include 'event horizons of black holes'. His theory not only did not predict them, it cannot be discussed in terms of it.

Science being ever expanding knowledge does not fail with astrology. Astrological predictions and "explanations" are not knowledge. Who cares how advanced some astrologer or other mystic thinks he is?

Trying to equate science with "falsifiability" and "testable" does not explain conceptual knowledge and adds nothing. Conceptual knowledge already has principles of objectivity and of truth as correspondence with reality based on observation. But Popper is worse than that because it is itself anti-conceptual and a form of philosophical skepticism as a result.

You haven't said what the term "triangulation" means in this context and why you use it.

All the words have meaning. Using a bunch of them talking around something doesn't say what it is.

What does systematically calculating and estimating potentially significant stresses to see what is important have to do with "triangulation", and what does that have to do with lots of words in Galt's speech to "home in" on a "real" meaning as if it were something else? Ayn Rand wrote what it really means.

It doesn't make a clear statement about anything. When literally used to mean the distinction of gods behaving one way or another then it's worse.

You did not address what I wrote about your first post. If it's supposed to be 'only' philosophy it's very bad philosophy.

"The universe playing fair" makes no sense no matter how you try to stretch it.

Principles that apply to different entities in different places when they are the same kind of entity. If some planet somewhere else behaved differently it would be because it is a different kind of entity. That is no great mystery and does not require an "assumption" of a "cosmological principle".

Concepts do not bear an only "useful" and "so far" "consistent relationship to reality". Valid concepts are based on reality and are our way of grasping it through our hierarchy of knowledge.

He writes in a thoroughly conventional way diametrically opposed to Objectivism because he believes conventional modern philosophy. It's deeper than vocabulary.

As for your personal suspects about me: no.

Your statements endorsing Pragmatism, confusing knowledge of something with how it is measured in the manner of Positivists, inability to "have a clue" let alone know what something is because you are not omniscient, and confusing knowledge of reality with a "subset" of it, are all diametrically opposed to Objectivism.

Publication is not a requirement.

Thanks

Thanks. I also have a pretty good Ayn Rand library including the January 1944 Reader's Digest with her essay "The Only Path to Tomorrow." It is just that you do not write in the same vocabulary as the rest of us. You write like a mainstream person. That said, I recognize that much of what I write here is also not always Objectivist creole. For that, look to ewv, who I suspect is really Leonard Peikoff. She has her Objectivism very well integrated. I actually look to her for clear statements of Objectivism where most others will substitute personal viewpoints for canon. I keep to canon, but I write in my own voice.

Science is indeed a process, and conceptualization is fundamental to that, as it is to every human endeavor, including fine arts, romance, and parenting. And, as I said (and as I trust you agree), that "scientific method" is not limited to laboratory practice, but, in fact, describes how a fully competent person, a fully rational person, lives.

I do not have a lot of moral problems with logical positivists or pragmatists. If you know what positivism is, then you must appreciate that logical positivism was an attempt to bring together again the rational and the empirical. Logical positivism is just a faulty kind of objectivism. Similarly, physicist Alan Sokal has been doing yeoman's service in asserting science over post-modernist "fashionable nonsense." Sokal calls himself a political leftist; he does not like being called a Marxist. You can disparage his politics. You and I would agree that if he believes what he writes about science, then he is harboring severe contradictions relative to this political philosophy. But that's his problem. His defenses of science are still cogent.

(I don't know who you pissed off with that ideological summary, but I put your Zero back to One.)

"It has been found that the study represented in the article was not conducted in reality." - from Retraction Watch here: http://retractionwatch.com/2016/03/18...