Cognition and Measurement
from "Introduction to Objective Epistemology" http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Ob...
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Rand says, "Percepts, not sensations, are the given, the self-evident." But she seems to contradict that when she continues: "The knowledge of sensations as component of percepts it not direct, it is acquired by man much later; it is a scientific, conceptual discovery."
I understand the second part. I understand the first part. I do not perceive an empirical link between the two.
Nothing is more directly perceptible than a pin-prick. You do not need to conceptualize "pins" in order to accept the perception as real.
It is true that much later along the perceptual chain, it can be done to understand that percepts are the abstraction of sensations. But that is a very deep and conceptual identification itself.
Can you clarify?
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.
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.
You said that twice.
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.
Txs for posting.
Jan
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.
Jan
We don't perceive measurements, we perceive entities. A measurement is a relation between an entity and a unit regarded as a standard. You have to perceive entities and abstract their characteristics and relationships to be able to do that.
Einstein pointed out that Newton's model is incomplete. He showed that under extreme conditions of velocity or matter density Newtonian dynamics becomes increasingly inaccurate. Einstein's formulation of general relativity was an attempt to resolve the inadequacies of Newton. He did this by showing that gravitation can be thought of as a distortion in space and time that is caused by the presence of mass. This model satisfactorily resolved the issue of the anomalous behavior of the orbit of Mercury and was further verified by observations of gravitational bending of light rays during an eclipse. However, Einstein him self realized that his theories were also incomplete and this was the motivation of his quest for a unified field theory. We now realize that special and general relativity have boundaries where, like Newton, they begin to break down. These boundaries are the very small and the very large. Relativity theories, being examples of classical physics models, are difficult to reconcile with quantum mechanics. This is because when things get very small or very large the classical theories fail to predict behavior. Thus the search for a "Theory Of Everything" or TOE, that unifies classical and quantum physics. The problem is that while both theories predict behavior with exceptional accuracy they appear to be in conflict with one another. The key word here is "behavior". These theories describes how reality behaves they shed little light on what reality is! In this sense, there is a barrier between physics and philosophy. It may be that the question "what is it?" is meaningless and the only valid question is "what does it do?"
Changing the topic to how experiments are designed and conducted, as you wrap yourself in the virtue of experiment and condescendingly write off anyone else as opposed to it, is not a defense of your philosophical pronouncements. It's a bad package deal. My understanding of science, mathematics and engineering, which is considerable, is not your philosophy.
Unraveling the problem is not going to be done overnight especially because of the physics police who are worse that the PC speech police. But a good start would be to take Schrodinger's equation seriously and treat electrons etc as waves and not point particles.
If we think everything in that realm must be either a "particle" or a "wave" as known in the macroscopic world, then we have a contradiction. But if you recognize that in new realms outside our perception they need not be like what we experience in the macroscopic world, and that a thing is the totality of its characteristics, then there is no contradiction as long as it is not something and its opposite in the same respect at the same time, which has not and cannot occur. There is no clash with the law of identity or non-contradiction -- unless we create a false one by trying to dictate what reality must be.
You claimed "that scientists 'understand' reality in terms of models and that most of these models are behavioral rather than existential. By this I mean that these models describe how things behave not what things are" and "It may be that the question 'what is it?' is meaningless and the only valid question is 'what does it do?'"
That is not science, it is what some people echo from the conventional bad Kantian philosophy. Repeating conventional, stale bromides is not an answer to Ayn Rand.
To get there, he had to 'model' what he couldn't directly perceive with his senses, and from that 'model' invent both the means and the experiments to determine the 'cause' of the effect that he knew happened to him, and must exist by reason. There are countless examples of this throughout the history of mankind.
Einstein utilized 'mental models' exclusively to provide his theories that explained various phenomena that were effects of not directly observable causes. That led to a hundred years of examination, invention, and experiments to prove/disprove the predictions of those 'models', and countless improvements of mankind's understanding of the Universe. It's also pointed to many other things to be identified, conceptualized, 'modeled'/theorized, examined/experimented, invented, and knowledge of gained.
This is science. This is man's uniqueness over all other known life.
We think in concepts to expand knowledge beyond the perceptual level. The hierarchy of concepts is based on perception. That has already been discussed in this thread. The thread links to the first chapter of Ayn Rand's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, which book cannot be ignored for this discussion, but is being replaced here by conventional academic slogans about "models".
Thinking in concepts is not the "model" mentality concocting mental images in parallel with a reality in which you can't ask "what is it", only imagine "models" that are somehow "useful" in "behavior". That is thoroughly Kantian, of the Pragmatist variety. It is not Objectivism. It is not and does not explain knowledge of the world, including science. Concepts are our means of grasping reality, not "modeling" it inside a subjective universe.
This could not be clearer in Objectivist epistemology (or Aristotle's), which shows what concepts are and how they are formed, in particular higher level abstract concepts. Ayn Rand's philosophy does not mean echoing Kant in the name of "reason". Rejecting the conventional bad epistemology does not mean denying man's nature and science, proclaimed in dramatic accusations employing floating abstractions with terminology stolen from Objectivism.
Without that step, I doubt we would have progressed in our understanding and knowledge of our Universe, much less our environmental reality.
Those thoughts are not Kantian, nor do they represent 'floating abstractions with terminology "stolen" from Objectivism'. Maybe we're discussing more the definition of 'knowledge' and how we obtain or integrate it, or the limits of what our knowledge can be at a certain point in time or development.
Are we seeking perfect knowledge similar to db's example of perfect competition in economics or are we seeking knowledge of reality through the best tools we know at this point understanding constraints and limitations and open to additions or subtractions as the process is carried out?
It is not about so-called 'perfect knowledge' by the false standard of omniscience. Knowledge is contextual and objective, not intrinsic or subjective.
More fundamental than the process of concept formation itself is the principle of knowledge as understanding of reality versus Kantian subjectivism holding that our mental processing is about a phenomenal world locked in our heads, not an understanding of the world that is declared to be unknowable. That is what Pragmatism and Positivism came from and is what the "model" mentality is: mental images locked in our heads struggling to be in parallel with an unknowable reality in some "pragmatic" way that is "useful".
The form this took in philosophy of science, "Operationalism", has spread everywhere. It has the gall to claim a monopoly on experiment and evidence, as if any other epistemology must by meaningless "metaphysics". In that it is a combination of Hume's radical empiricism of knowledge without concepts versus the Rationalists concepts without reality, synthesized into Kant. When you read that the meaning and definition of a concept in physics is "how you measure it" -- such as "there is no such thing as an electron, only ammeters" and that you only have an electron "model" in your head -- that is Operationalism.
The notion of cognitive methods as "tools" that "work", without concepts and principles, with meaning as "whatever works" "open" to change to anything, and truth as "what is true today may not be tomorrow", is full-blown Pragmatism.
Listen to Leonard Peikoff's lecture series on the history of philosophy, noting especially for this topic how it resulted in Kant, Positivism and Pragmatism. For Ayn Rand's alternative in epistemology listen to his lecture series on Objectivism and read Ayn Rand's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (for the theory of concepts) and the first five chapters of Leonard Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (for the broader metaphysics and epistemology). The appendix to IOE on Ayn Rand's workshops on epistemology includes a section discussing implications for philosophy of science, but that is not the place to start.
In engineering we created heuristic models all the time for systems that were too complex to analyze from first principles, but we were never confused that we were explaining how the system worked, we were just modeling it.
When someone tells you that something is true in your engineering model but not for the actual device you know what that means. But now consider what it means for the "model" mentality to tell you that something you say is "only true in your model", with actual "truth" meaning whatever "works" for someone's subjective purpose in a world that cannot be known as it is "really is". It's the shear evil of Kantianism.
Properly understood, constrained, and limited models are necessary to proper development of concepts and the progress of science.
Rand equivocates with "... which is supposed to have its origin..." She may have known that that decimal system is not "natural."
I understand the easy intuition, but the fact is that the decimal system was proposed about 1600 CE by Simon Stevin (see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_S...., I know from the works of Denise Schmandt-Besserat that the Sumerians did not have more than 5=1 1 1 1 1 for thousands of years after the invention of the first clay tokens for counting.
Moreover, the Romans counted by 12s as is evidenced by the ratios of the sestertius to the "denarius" -- admittedly "ten" but only as a debasement from 12.
Care to comment?
and the nuclear clock scientists say has the year at 365.2420 plus or minus .0005!
And then there's that decimal point!
The Mayans from 2000bc had a base twenty system they used three symbols for
Numbers a capsule shaped she'll was 0 a dot counted 1 each and a horizontal line equaled 5.
Therefore three dots with three lines under dots equaled 18 , two dots one line under dots 7.
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.
All I noted was that Rand's use of the word "supposed" indicated that she was not intending a literal interpretation of the history of arithmetic, but only offering an easy example. It was technically flawed. That does not change the truth of her assertions.
She did a lot of that, actually, taking "common knowledge" for granted in order to convey her ideas to those who were interested but uninformed. Her stories about the Dollar Sign being the initials US, and of Americans inventing the phrase "to make money" are other examples.
Ayn Rand did not write that all systems of measurement were based on having 10 fingers. It is a fallacy to argue that other systems of measurement not being decimal somehow undermines the origin of the decimal system of numbers. All early units were selected based on what could be easily perceived and duplicated as a standard, such as the "foot". See Klein, The Science of Measurement: A Historical Survey, which shows how complex the evolution of even simple measurements like length based on different local, perceivable standards has been.
The decimal system of numbers did not begin in 1600 and is not "unnatural". Decimal numbers in arithmetic were in fact in common use long before English currency and other physical units were converted. American units of length and other physical units still have not been changed to metric, but the decimal system of numbers have been in continuous use. Base 10 was in fact in used in ancient Greece, Egypt and India long before that, and finger counting and calculating has used before that in primitive societies. Obviously they did not start with that because they needed concepts of smaller numbers first. That does not negate the origins of a special place for 10. There are many scholarly books on this history. It is not correct to say that the decimal system first appeared in 1600 and is "unnatural".
Ayn Rand wrote about concept formation and its purpose in IOE. She referred to what "is supposed" by other specialists about the history of numbers without knowing the details herself. She did not "equivocate" with an unwritten private belief in decimal numbers as somehow "unnatural".
Jan
(https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post...)
Stevinus was like Copernicus in that he advocated for a system known to others, but not used widely in his own time. 12 pence to the shilling; 20 shillings to the pound. Even though Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton disagreed on much, they agreed on the need for a decimal currency - but they got the quarter dollar, not the fifth because that was a convenient "two bits" i.e., two Spanish reales. The real was an eighth of a crown or Spanish dollar, not a tenth, of course.
Similarly, the Hindus developed 10s after thousands of years of other counting methods. That Stevinus had to write a book to advocate for decimal arithmetic only underscores how incompletely "Arabic numerals" were integrated into our common conceptualizations of quantity.
I appreciate your pointing out Stevinus to me.
I will add that the earliest measuring systems (Sumerian/Akkadian) had a different method of measuring each type of thing. I include this list (from Wikipedia) for your diversion:
Sexagesimal System S used to count slaves, animals, fish, wooden objects, stone objects, containers.
Sexagesimal System S' used to count dead animals, certain types of beer
Bi-Sexagesimal System B used to count cereal, bread, fish, milk products
Bi-Sexagesimal System B used to count rations
GAN2 System G used to count field measurement
ŠE system Š used to count barley by volume
ŠE system Š' used to count malt by volume
ŠE system Š" used to count wheat by volume
ŠE System Š used to count barley groats
EN System E used to count weight
U4 System U used to count calendrics
DUGb System Db used to count milk by volume
DUGc System Db used to count beer by volume
Jan
I should have known about the Wikipedia entry.
I have Denise Schmandt-Besserat's books.
I happened to be rereading a book last night on Proto-IndoEuropean linguistics and migrattions (and genetics - yum!) and the first few chapters used the PIE word for 'hundred' as an example of regressing a set of modern words to a proposed PIE root."k'mtom". As an aside, the book mentioned that PIE and its daughter languages all had words for 10, 100, 1000, etc, and so evidently used base 10 for counting.
I did not know Denise Schmandt-Besserat, but now have looked her up. Do you have When Writing Met Art? Would you recommend it?
Interesting conversation. Thank you.
Jan
For PIE and IE shatam languages are to the east and "kentum" languages were to the west.
I did not know that IE languages were special in 10, 100, 1000. I do think it interesting that they all borrowed "seven" from the Semitic.
If you know IE or PIE, then you may know that the word "number" comes from "name bearer." Naming quantities was special. The name of quantities had its own name.
I have bought When Writing Met Art. I am looking forward to reading it.
Jan
I noticed that you wrote "have bought." That is a post-modern construction from urban American English ("Blinglish" or "Ebonics" unless you have a better name for it). They over-emphasis the past: "I had gone to the store." for "I went to the store." Languages change. By standard high school grammar of the 1950s, your "have bought" implies that you bought one now and perhaps will continue to buy more in the future.
Jan
I am coming down with 'what is going around' and I stayed up later than I had intended last night reading WWMA. Fascinating info and illos - wallow, wallow.
Jan
Jan
The ancient Greeks counted by ones to ten, then by tens to one hundred. But that came thousands of years later.
At the same time, however, the Greeks did not have a decimal monetary system. Everything was by halves and thirds (and thirds and halves of those). That continued into the 19th century: the German thaler was divided into 12ths. The Spanish dollar was divided into eighths.
The "foot" and "span" etc., speak to the human body as a standard of measurement. Literally, the word for "weight" was also the word for "king" -- mina, minos. "Worth his weight in gold," we still say. Even among the ancient Greeks, the mina was divided into 60 drachma.
(The innovator, Peisistratos, tyrant of Athens, solved a debt crisis by legally redefining the mina to 100 drachmas, thereby reducing the drachmon and allowing debtors to pay the old obligations with the new measure. He was wildly popular with the common folk.)
All indications are that we did not begin counting on our ten fingers. Base-10, positional arithmetic, and all the rest are the result of a long and arduous journey of discovery and invention.
She did not use the terms 'natural' or 'probable' at all, nor did she or anyone in this discussion use the terms "intrinsic" or "intuitive". There is no "implicit fallacy" there for you to "get past".
And Ayn Rand did not equivocate: She did not "obviously have an insight about the inherent problem of how numbering came about." She used it as an example of man relating early measurement to himself in a perfectly good brief discussion of how measurement and concepts are the means of extending knowledge beyond the perceptual level.
The decimal system did in fact arise out of 10 fingers on a hand. Your claim that it was proposed in 1600 is not true. There is a long history of finger counting in 10s going back thousands of years BC. Ayn Rand did not say that the full modern mathematical formulation sprung out of primitives in their first counting, nor was that necessary to count in tens as the historical origins of what became the decimal system as opposed to some other numerical base.
I cited the best expert on the origins of writing. Literacy developed out of numeracy. Counting came first. And it did not begin on fingers.
In this discussion, I put the word "natural" in quotes because it is too easy to accept ambiguously, equivocally, or colloquially. Is homosexuality natural? No more or less than Base-10. It depends on what you mean by "natural." Homosexual behavior and transgendering is found among animals. Base-10 is not. Social organization is "natural" but the Constitution of the United States is not. However, that is not to claim that the Constitution is "unnatural."
Ayn Rand said that Base-10 was "supposed" to have its origin in our digits because it was easy to accept, but she did not say "is known" or "certainly" or "must have." She was too deep and perceptive a thinker for that. In the same light, she was not sold on Darwinian evolution. Obviously, she did not believe that God did it in one day, but neither did she accept unquestioningly Darwin's uniformitarian theory of speciation.
You go to great lengths to defend the literal truth of the canonic works of Ayn Rand. I am always impressed by how integrated is your knowledge of Objectivism.
So, let me ask you: If it is natural that we use ourselves as the units of measure, why did she argue against Protagoras's "Man is the measure of all things?" She called that subjectivism.