In I989, the year the Berlin Wall fell, Leonard Peikoff issued a sweeping declaration about the nature of philosophy.
Contradicting an assertion by David Kelley, a former member of the Ayn Rand Institute, Dr. Peikoff pronounced unequivocally that Objectivism is a closed system and more significantly that every philosophy is immutable.
As I agree with the opening section of Fact and Value, in which Dr. Peikoff set out the relationship of facts to values, I won’t comment on that. I am interested here only in his pronouncement that a philosophy is immutable.
The following is an analysis of his arguments for that proposition. My first objection does not take long to state.
The essence of his position is a contradiction. He argues passionately that any philosophy, and particularly Objectivism, is an immutable system. But then he begs us not to mutate it. Towards the end he writes:
Let us not cohabit with or become alchemists in reverse, i.e., men who turn the gold of Ayn Rand into lead.
He can’t have it both ways. You can either transform Ayn Rand’s philosophy or you can’t.
Now I agree with him on one point. What Ayn Rand wrote is what she wrote (or said) and will remain so. As Omar Khayyam has it:
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
But that’s very different from claiming her philosophy is immutable. “Immutable” means “impossible to change” and “change” is a wide abstraction that includes variation, refinement and improvement.
If you claim her philosophy can’t be changed, how do you account for the fact that she varied, refined and improved it herself, by means of editing hundreds, if not thousands of times?
And at one level Dr. Peikoff knows we are perfectly capable of mutating it in a very real sense, or he wouldn’t beg us not to.
So he is equivocating on two applications of the term “immutable”: on one hand validly, to the writings of an author who can no longer edit her work and, on the other invalidly, to what we can—and should do—when there is an element in a philosophy we think can be improved.
See if you don’t agree. I have quoted the relevant parts of his article below. My comments are underneath each quote:
From Fact and Value
IN HIS LAST PARAGRAPH, Kelley states that Ayn Rand’s philosophy, though magnificent, “is not a closed system.” Yes, it is. Philosophy, as Ayn Rand often observed, deals only with the kinds of issues available to men in any era; it does not change with the growth of human knowledge, since it is the base and precondition of that growth.
Philosophy doesn’t “change with the growth of human knowledge”? Untrue: our growing knowledge changes our perspective. For example, as Ayn Rand pointed out, it took the Industrial Revolution to establish the evidence for her philosophic discovery that reason is man’s means of survival, not just his means of knowledge.
Every philosophy, by the nature of the subject, is immutable.
How can you say any theory—philosophic or otherwise—is immutable? What if the originator discovers an error? Is it beyond his power to correct it, i.e., to change it?
You might be able to say that once its originator dies, he has no more to say on the subject. But the philosophy itself is immutable? Any theory including Objectivism is highly mutable, as Dr. Peikoff himself proved with his major change to Ayn Rand’s theory of first-level concepts. She established that first -level concepts are simple concepts of entities, i.e., nouns. He stretched the category to include high-level verbs such as “cause”. For detail, see my Amazon review of The Logical Leap.
So a philosophy can be improved or worsened.
New implications, applications, integrations can always be discovered; but the essence of the system — its fundamental principles and their consequences in every branch — is laid down once and for all by the philosophy’s author.
This only has plausibility if you treat any given philosophy as a proper noun and not as a concept. But, as abstract ideas are what the originator has discovered, they can be corrected or surpassed when necessary—or the subject is a millstone around mankind’s neck.
If this applies to any philosophy, think how much more obviously it applies to Objectivism. Objectivism holds that every truth is an absolute, and that a proper philosophy is an integrated whole, any change in any element of which would destroy the entire system.
Did Ayn Rand destroy Aristotelianism by correcting its flaws? On the contrary didn’t she strengthen it? If there were a flawed element in Objectivism, wouldn’t correcting it have the same effect?
In yet another expression of his subjectivism in epistemology, Kelley decries, as intolerant, any Objectivist’s (or indeed anyone’s) “obsession with official or authorized doctrine,” which “obsession” he regards as appropriate only to dogmatic viewpoints. In other words, the alternative once again is whim or dogma: either anyone is free to rewrite Objectivism as he wishes or else, through the arbitrary fiat of some authority figure, his intellectual freedom is being stifled. My answer is: Objectivism does have an “official, authorized doctrine,” but it is not dogma. It is stated and validated objectively in Ayn Rand’s works.
Unfortunately, Dr. P just turned such a doctrine into dogma by declaring it immutable. The metaphysically given is immutable. But you can’t claim such a status for the man-made without making a dogmatic assertion.
“Objectivism” is the name of Ayn Rand’s achievement. Anyone else’s interpretation or development of her ideas, my own work emphatically included, is precisely that: an interpretation or development, which may or may not be logically consistent with what she wrote. In regard to the consistency of any such derivative work, each man must reach his own verdict, by weighing all the relevant evidence. The “official, authorized doctrine,” however, remains unchanged and untouched in Ayn Rand’s books; it is not affected by any interpreters.
This is perfectly plausible but ignores the fact that, if there are holes in its foundations or upper stories, they can and should be fixed.
THIS, I FINALLY SEE, is the cause of all the schisms which have plagued the Objectivist movement through the years, from the Brandens in 1968 on through David Kelley, and which will continue to do so for many years to come. The cause is not concrete-bound details — not differences in regard to love affairs or political strategy or proselytizing techniques or anybody’s personality. The cause is fundamental and philosophical: if you grasp and accept the concept of “objectivity,” in all its implications, then you accept Objectivism, you live by it and you revere Ayn Rand for defining it. If you fail fully to grasp and accept the concept, whether your failure is deliberate or otherwise, you eventually drift away from Ayn Rand’s orbit, or rewrite her viewpoint or turn openly into her enemy.
This is wishful thinking about the schisms. What about the human evil—such as envy and status protection—on the gatekeeper side of the wall?
Now I want to consider consequences.
How destructive is it to declare any philosophy immutable? Consider the following four questions:
Whose philosophy is it anyway?
Once a person learns a philosophy, he has the option of making it his own. It may be Ayn Rand’s philosophy, but it is now also his. If he then finds it inadequate to reality, integrity demands he makes any changes he sees fit.
Or doesn’t Dr. Peikoff grant him that right?
Is philosophy metaphysically given or man-made?
Dr. Peikoff implies that because Objectivism is true, it is beyond change, all the while insisting that there is no dogma in Objectivism. But as noted earlier he just introduced a dogma.
No matter how good a philosophy is, the assumption of perfection is a form of dogmatism.
Any philosophy is man-made. It must therefore be treated as such. To quote Ayn Rand:
It is the metaphysically given that must be accepted: it cannot be changed. It is the man-made that must never be accepted uncritically: it must be judged, then accepted or rejected and changed when necessary. (From her article The Metaphysical Versus The Man-Made.)
To exempt any philosophy from that rule is profoundly anti-Objectivist.
Does change equal destruction?
What Dr. Peikoff is actually arguing is that change in philosophy equals destruction. But change is far from synonymous with destruction. A change may be an improvement.
His argument about philosophy’s immutability is similar to his arguments about concepts. He decreed concepts don’t change once formed. His reasoning was that it would be destructive. Yet on page 25 of Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology Ayn Rand showed a child benefiting by expanding (i.e., changing) his concept “animal”.
The idea that change equals destruction is an arbitrary dogma.
What does a closed system imply?
One of the implications of a system being declared closed is that you can’t integrate the system with anything else. There is no way to make the connections. By definition the door is shut. That’s a serious mistake with philosophy. You should be able to integrate any philosophy with other philosophic ideas that are compatible. The result will be an expanded understanding.
It boils down to why we adopt a philosophy in the first place. We adopt a philosopher’s system because we think it will aid our thinking and our ability to act. But the intellectual freedom to make changes in that philosophy, if we think reality demands it, is paramount, or that system ceases to be a good servant and becomes a bad master.
Reality is the standard, not any philosopher’s ideas about reality, no matter how great the philosopher.
My conclusion is that the immutability and closed system doctrines are stifling to rational thought and will shrink the perspective of anyone who adopts them.
If a philosophy is not immutable, what about a concept? Is it immutable too, as Dr. Peikoff claims? In Objectivism the Philosophy of Ayn Rand he wrote, “a concept once formed, does not change”. Is that right and why does it matter?
The most crucial idea in human existence is reason. The best definition of reason was offered by Ayn Rand, who wrote that it is “the faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses.”
How do we retain the identifications and integrations reason makes? By means of concepts.
What are they? Are they mental entities or something else?
As I will show on this site, our understanding of these abstractions has just begun. I offer a new concept of what a concept is.
Why should you care? Because whether you know it or not, concepts are variables. If you don’t know it, you will be controlled by people who change them below your awareness.
Have you noticed how the meaning of the concept “peer-reviewed” has been corrupted in climate change subjects? If you haven’t, you’ll be taken in by fake science presented as fact.
But surely concepts have fixed meanings? Great thinkers like Aristotle and Ayn Rand thought so. That doesn’t make it true. Ayn Rand thought that the only alternative to fixed meanings was arbitrary meanings.
But there is another alternative. Consider the following:
How do you shoot down an ICBM? You integrate two variables with sufficient precision. You take the changing paths and acceleration of two missiles and coordinate them. What is my point? The human mind can deal with variables.
Huge progress was made when mankind learned to do it mathematically.
Here’s an example–a system where the variables of speed, direction and rail shapes are beautifully coordinated:
The discovery of how to coordinate variables has a bearing on concepts.
According to all previous theories, meaning is either fixed or arbitrary. My theory holds that it is neither. I hold that the meaning of a concept can vary and a concept is coordinated with its varying context to produce a precise shade of meaning. You can control it.
If a concept is an immutable mental entity, how is that possible? Well, to start with, a concept isn’t even a mental entity—not fundamentally.
What is it exactly? The next several articles will answer that in detail.
My curiosity began when I realised Ayn Rand had made a statement about selfishness that did not square with the evidence….
I have found only one instance of Ayn Rand making an assertion that did not take all the facts into account. She made it in her book The Virtue of Selfishness. (I might add that the four words in the title of the book represent a life-changing discovery for me. So my criticism is in the context of recognizing a great achievement.)
Here is the passage containing the error:
Introduction to The Virtue of Selfishness pb vii–xi
The title of this book may evoke the kind of question that I hear once in a while: ‘Why do you use the word ‘selfishness’ to denote virtuous qualities of character, when that word antagonizes so many people to whom it does not mean the things you mean?”
To those who ask it, my answer is: “For the reason that makes you afraid of it.”
But there are others, who would not ask that question, sensing the moral cowardice it implies, yet who are unable to formulate my actual reason or to identify the profound moral issue involved. It is to them that I will give a more explicit answer.
It is not a mere semantic issue nor a matter of arbitrary choice. The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word “selfishness” is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual “package‑deal,” which is responsible, more than any other single‑factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind.
In popular usage, the word “selfishness” is a synonym of evil; the image it conjures is of a murderous brute who tramples over piles of corpses to achieve his own ends, who cares for no living being and pursues nothing but the gratification of the mindless whims of any immediate moment.
Yet the exact meaning and dictionary definition of the word “selfishness” is: concern with one’s own interests.
This concept does not include a moral evaluation; it does not tell us whether concern with one’s own interests is good or evil; nor does it tell us what constitutes man’s actual interests. It is the task of ethics to answer such questions.
Is Ayn Rand correct that “the exact meaning and dictionary definition of the word “selfishness” is: concern with one’s own interests”?
If yes, then the claim, “This concept does not include a moral evaluation” in her next paragraph follows logically. If not, spreading her ideas becomes harder, as Objectivists are operating from a false premise.
As I wrote in my essay “Transforming a Concept” in The Intellectual Activist (available on the Concept Variation website), I give the benefit of the doubt that her particular dictionary may have had such a neutral definition of “selfishness”.
But I have been unable to find it replicated anywhere outside her quotation. And that strikes me as cherry-picking.
She did not say the “exact meaning and dictionary definition—as defined by the xyz dictionary—is as follows…” That would have been accurate but far less persuasive. She said instead “the exact meaning and dictionary definition of the word “selfishness” is…” as if it was a universal truth beyond dispute.
In fact, the exact meaning of the word “selfish” (and thus “selfishness”), as defined by all the generally reliable dictionaries, is completely different. Here’s a small selection of what I found typical:
WEBSTER’S NEW WORLD
selfish
adj.
1 too much concerned with one’s own welfare or interests and having little or no concern for others; self-centered
OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY
selfish, a.
a. Devoted to or concerned with one’s own advantage or welfare to the exclusion of regard for others. 1640.
NEW SHORTER OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY
1 Concerned chiefly with one’s own personal advantage or welfare to the exclusion of regard for others, deficient in consideration for others; actuated by or appealing to self-interest. M17.
Here’s another example from a popular source:
MICROSOFT ENCARTA
selfish
selfish [sélfish] adjective
looking after own desires: concerned with your own interests, needs, and wishes while ignoring those of others
demonstrating selfishness: showing that personal needs and wishes are thought to be more important than those of other people
It is worth remembering that the meaning of a concept is not intrinsic or subjective. It is a human choice, good bad or indifferent. A concept starts out with the meaning given by its originator and until the concept is varied, that is its meaning.
As I set out in “Transforming a Concept”, historically the concept “selfishness” was conceived as a negative one around 1643, subsuming only those instances of allegedly self-benefiting behavior that involved disregard for others.
So it is not true historically, or by objective survey of dictionaries, that the “exact meaning and dictionary definition” of the word “selfishness” is “concern with one’s own interests”.
And, although the definition from the dictionary Ayn Rand quoted doesn’t carry a moral evaluation, the definitions offered by all the other dictionaries do.
Selfish behavior is conceived as wrong, as evidenced by Webster’s definition beginning: “Too much concerned with one’s own welfare and interests” etc. That “too much” is nothing if not a negative moral evaluation.
Nor is it true that the villain is popular usage.
Immediately before citing what she claims as “the exact meaning and dictionary definition” of “selfishness”, she wrote:
In popular usage, the word “selfishness” is a synonym of evil; the image it conjures is of a murderous brute who tramples over piles of corpses to achieve his own ends, who cares for no living being and pursues nothing but the gratification of the mindless whims of any immediate moment.
But popular usage didn’t invent the original form of the concept. It simply exaggerated it.
In my opinion, Ayn Rand should have challenged the unsatisfactory original form of the concept as her opening move.
She should have proudly announced that she had discovered a moral form of egoism. Then she should have said right away what she said later in her essay:
If it is true that what I mean by “selfishness” is not what is meant conventionally, then this is one of the worst indictments of altruism: it means that altruism permits no concept of a self-respecting, self-supporting man—a man who supports his life by his own effort and neither sacrifices himself nor others. It means that altruism permits no view of men except as sacrificial animals and profiteers-on-sacrifice, as victims and parasites—that it permits no concept of a benevolent co-existence among men—that it permits no concept of justice.
She should have stressed that she had developed a new form of the concept that eliminates the deadly contradiction in its first version. What contradiction?
It is this: we know, from Ayn Rand’s ethical discoveries and confirmed by our own experience that behavior harming others’ interests is not rationally selfish: it will lead to bad consequences for the person doing it.
Studying the concept historically, I am impressed with the huge default that did not come up with a concept identifying what selfishness can be and ought to be.
Until she isolated rational instances of selfishness, we had no variant of the concept to identify a moral form of selfishness.
That is her superb achievement.
That discovery would gain far more credit if the failing of the original version of the concept was openly acknowledged.
No great cause is helped by a myth: in this case the myth of an initial neutral concept of selfishness.
I have since discovered a dictionary definition of “selfish” that comes close to the neutral one she spoke of for “selfishness”.
It is from Webster’s Daily Use Dictionary of 1933, a dictionary she possessed. The definition for “selfish” there reads:
adj. Attentive only to one’s own interests; influenced in actions from motives of private advantage; egotistical.–n. selfishness.
Note that this is more narrowly focused than the definition she gave. “Attentive only to one’s own interests” doesn’t sound like there is concern left over for anyone else’s interests. Her definition, “Concern with one’s own interests”, does.
The earliest form of this 1933 definition I can find is from Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language of 1828. It offers the following definition of “selfish”:
adjective Regarding one’s own interest chiefly or sole[l]y; influenced in actions by a view to private advantage
What to make of this discovery? It’s clear there was a neutral form of the concept “selfishness”. She reported accurately. But it is not the original form of the concept. As noted above, that dates back to 1643 and its meaning is:
regard for one’s own interest or happiness to the disregard of the well-being of others.
Oxford English Dictionary Second Edition (v. 4.0) by Oxford University Press 2009.
As to her claim that “concern with one’s own interests” is “the exact meaning and dictionary definition” of the word “selfishness,” that asserts too much. The meaning she gave is certainly not the predominant one, nor the original. A word can have more than one meaning.
But Ayn Rand did not think like that. Her explicit view was that there is only one form of a concept.
Let us move on to examine her view on that subject.
In her great book Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, Ayn Rand committed a fallacy that has taken me years to identify.
It is a fallacy that prevented her observing the variations that can occur in a concept.
Before stating that fallacy, here is what she herself said will happen with an uncorrected falsehood:
Observe that the history of philosophy reproduces—in slow motion, on a macrocosmic screen—the workings of ideas in an individual man’s mind. A man who has accepted false premises is free to reject them, but until and unless he does, they do not lie still in his mind, they grow without his conscious participation and reach their ultimate logical conclusions. A similar process takes place in a culture: if the false premises of an influential philosopher are not challenged, generations of his followers—acting as the culture’s subconscious—milk them down to their ultimate consequences.
The Ayn Rand LetterVol. III, No. 10 February 11, 1974Philosophical Detection–Part II
What false premises are there in ITOE? Only one: the idea that concepts, in the field of cognition, perform a function similar to that of numbers in mathematics.
Ayn Rand sets out her analogy here :
Since concepts, in the field of cognition, perform a function similar to that of numbers in the field of mathematics, the function of a proposition is similar to that of an equation: it applies conceptual abstractions to a specific problem.
A proposition, however, can perform this function only if the concepts of which it is composed have precisely defined meanings. If, in the field of mathematics, numbers had no fixed, firm values, if they were mere approximations determined by the mood of their users—so that “5,” for instance, could mean five in some calculations, but six-and-a-half or four-and-three-quarters in others, according to the users’ “convenience”—there would be no such thing as the science of mathematics.
Yet this is the manner in which most people use concepts, and are taught to do so.
Above the first-level abstractions of perceptual concretes, most people hold concepts as loose approximations, without firm definitions, clear meanings or specific referents; and the greater a concept’s distance from the perceptual level, the vaguer its content.
P 75 Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology8. Consciousness and Identity
What function does a number perform in mathematics? A number is a fixed quantity represented by a symbol of fixed value. There are no variants of a number and thus the meaning of its symbol does not change. It functions as a constant.
However, the meaning of a concept’s symbol varies. The number “5” cannot mean “five in some calculations, but six-and-a-half or four-and-three-quarters in others”—Ayn Rand is quite right about that. But the word “man” can mean “men, women and children” in some propositions, “an adult male” in others and “a chess piece” in others.
This fact wipes out Ayn Rand’s analogy, however you explain the phenomenon.
I say a word’s meaning changes because there are variants of the concept it represents. But even if you argue, as Harry Binswanger does, that a word stands for a number of different concepts, the similarity to a number is lost. A number does not stand for several different quantities.
Now, it may well be that only one meaning of a word—one form of a concept—is objectively appropriate to a given context.
But if you start insisting that a concept and a number perform the same function, your idea of a concept is likely to harden to the point where you miss the wide variations possible in its form.
If concepts are the variables of cognition, what are the constants? Perceptions.
Have you ever asked why more people can drive a car than can engage in an abstract discussion? Both activities require reason.
But in driving, people are dealing direct with reality via their perceptions. Perceptions (assuming an intact and non-substance affected brain) do not vary between people. Conceptions do. So the scope for mistakes is vastly less with perception.
It isn’t that people can’t deal with abstractions successfully. They can. It is just harder because there are so many variables to consider. Everyone knows what an oncoming car means. It is not so easy to know what someone else means by an abstraction.
It is not a good solution to declare that concepts have a single meaning and proceed to assert what that is. It is much better to recognize variability and get to learn what the other person means, even if you then persuade them that their variant of the concept is invalid or not appropriate to the context.
Ayn Rand’s great insight about concepts is that they are used as the algebraic, not the numeric symbols of cognition. As she wrote in chapter 2 of ITOE:
a concept is used as an algebraic symbol that stands for any of the arithmetical sequence of units it subsumes.
To give an example, the concept “cat” can refer to any particular cat, past, present or future despite the fact that each of them may differ widely in their measurements, i.e., quantitatively.
My discovery is that a concept isn’t just used as a symbol for units that can vary in quantity. It is used as a symbol for units that can vary in quality. A unit of the concept “cat” may be a feline… or a jazz musician.
To give a more abstract example, the concept “compromise” can stand for units that are qualitatively very different. A compromise can be a positive phenomenon or a negative one, depending on which variant of the concept you’re talking about. It can be a legitimate adjustment of competing claims or the unilateral surrender of a principle. Either is a valid form of the concept, but their units are radically different.
Everyone agrees that a word can vary in its meaning. But it can do so for only one reason: the concept it represents can vary qualitatively.
How is that possible? Isn’t a concept an entity with a fixed nature? That’s certainly the conventional wisdom. But is it right?
It’s time to take a much deeper look at what a concept is. We will do so in the next article.
What is a concept? I used to think of it as an idea or a thought, particularly about a class of things. If I had a concept of a ship, I knew there could be a large variety of particular ships that it covered: from tramp steamers to schooners, from sleek motor yachts to aircraft carriers.
But then I discovered Ayn Rand’s writings and found a new level of precision about concepts, particularly the type represented by a single word.
I now think it is possible to go even further. Every one of her identifications about such concepts has turned out to go only so far. Let us review them briefly.
She called a concept a “mental entity”, but knew a concept is not literally an entity and at one point, rather than call it an entity, concluded it was a “mental something.” I quote:
AR: If you mean: does such a thing as the concept of “emotion” in a mind really exist? Yes, it exists—mentally. And only mentally.
Prof. E: Would it be fair to say that a concept qua concept is not a concrete but an integration of concretes, but qua existent it is a concrete integration, a specific mental entity in a particular mind?
AR: That’s right. But I kept saying, incidentally, that we can call them “mental entities” only metaphorically or for convenience. It is a “something.” For instance, before you have a certain concept, that particular something doesn’t exist in your mind. When you have formed the concept of “concept,” that is a mental something; it isn’t a nothing. But anything pertaining to the content of a mind always has to be treated metaphysically not as a separate existent, but only with this precondition, in effect: that it is a mental state, a mental concrete, a mental something. Actually, “mental something” is the nearest to an exact identification. Because “entity” does imply a physical thing.
Nevertheless, since “something” is too vague a term, one can use the word “entity,” but only to say that it is a mental something as distinguished from other mental somethings (or from nothing). But it isn’t an entity in the primary, Aristotelian sense in which a primary substance exists.
We have to agree here on the terminology, because we <ioe2_158> are dealing with a very difficult subject for which no clear definitions have been established. I personally would like to have a new word for it, but I am against neologisms. Therefore I think the term “mental unit” or “mental entity” can be used, provided we understand by that: “a mental something.”
Introduction to Objectivist EpistemologyAppendix—Concepts as Mental Existents
She also called a concept an abstraction. But there are many types of abstractions: from ideas to designs to theories. They may incorporate concepts in her sense of the word, but most are far wider than her idea of a concept.
She also called it a mental “file folder”. But this is a metaphor. It is not a literal statement of what a concept is.
So let us take her best identification, the one where she offered her definition of a concept. It comes in Chapter 2 of ITOE:
A concept is a mental integration of two or more units possessing the same distinguishing characteristic(s), with their particular measurements omitted.
What is the problem with a definition which fifty years ago seemed so ground-breaking? The word “unit” is ambiguous.
According to Ayn Rand, a “unit” is an existent, something external to the mind. She defined it this way in Chapter 1:
A unit is an existent regarded as a separate member of a group of two or more similar members. (Two stones are two units; so are two square feet of ground, if regarded as distinct parts of a continuous stretch of ground.)
How do you integrate two existents like two stones by mind power? You can’t. You can only integrate mental representations of such external existents. And she later acknowledged that when she wrote in Chapter 7:
Whether the units with which one deals are percepts or concepts, the range of what man can hold in the focus of his conscious awareness at any given moment, is limited.
What is a percept? It is a mental representation of an external existent, for instance the mental image of a cat. Ayn Rand defined it thus in Chapter 1:
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.
And a concept itself is a mental proxy for external existents.
So, if a “unit” can be either an external existent or an internal representation of that existent, the scope for confusing the external and the internal is immense.
Yet the whole purpose of ITOE was to show that concepts refer to real things rather than internal representations. As Ayn Rand said in the Appendix to Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology on the Role of Words:
The meaning [of a concept and its symbol, a word: TM] is the objects which are being isolated and integrated. The meaning of the word is always metaphysical, in the sense of its referents, not psychological. The meaning of the word is out there in existence, in reality. The process that one had to perform in order to arrive at that meaning, and at that integration, is psychological.
<ioe2_166>
I want to stress this; it is a very important distinction. A great number of philosophical errors and confusions are created by failing to distinguish between consciousness and existence—between the process of consciousness and the reality of the world outside, between the perceiver and the perceived. Therefore, it’s very important here, if the issue arises at all, to stress emphatically that a concept and its symbol, the word, stands for certain objective referents—for existents outside, in reality.
Her most prominent follower, Leonard Peikoff, has ignored this stricture and milked the confusion in her definition down to its final consequences. He claims the meaning of a concept is its internal content. He writes in his essay The Analytic Synthetic Dichotomy:
Since a word is a symbol for a concept, it has no meaning apart from the content of the concept it symbolizes.
This is a collapse of consciousness and existence. The meaning of a concept is the things in reality it refers to, not the content of the concept itself. The contents of a concept are only internal representations of external things.
A knock-on consequence is the belief that a concept is immutable. Despite ample evidence of variation, Dr. Peikoff wrote In Objectivism the Philosophy of Ayn Rand: “a concept, once formed, does not change.”
The evidence against this claim is everywhere, including an instance of Ayn Rand talking about expanding a concept (the concept “animal”) on page 25 of Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. She also talks about subdividing a concept or corrupting one.
But if you start from the false premise that the meaning of a concept is its content—thus collapsing the internal and external units—how could you change a concept by mind power alone?
You would think it impossible because you would have to change the metaphysical nature of what the concept refers to in order to change the internal representations the concept contains. And of course you can’t.
What is the solution? To get under the whole problem and offer a new view of a concept—to identify what the basis of a concept really is. The identification of that root should not be metaphorical, but literal.
The root of a concept is neither a mental integration of units, nor an abstraction, nor a mental entity.
At root, a concept is the exact opposite of an entity, mental or otherwise. It is a perspective.
A concept is a perspective on a group of external existents, captured in a single word.
Yes, a concept becomes an abstraction, an integration of mental units and also a mental entity. But these facts are secondary to the perspective that gives rise to them.
Any abstraction, integration or mental entity is shaped by a given perspective and will change as the perspective changes.
Objectivity comes about when a conceptual perspective is directed by a respect for the facts and in particular a respect for the relationships between existents.
The reason a word can have several meanings is that it is possible to vary a perspective.
Here is an example that illustrates all the above.
Is it possible to have the perspective that animals are only four-legged creatures with fur? Yes, that is the perspective of many younger children. They don’t regard fish and birds as animals.
Only at a certain age can they integrate percepts of fish and birds with those of four-legged creatures and thus widen their concept “animal”. What changed? The facts of reality? No, the child’s perspective.
Was the child’s first perspective on animals invalid? No. It was just narrow. A narrow perspective produces a narrow abstraction.
Check over the child’s abstraction. What did he abstract, i.e., isolate in his first shot at forming the concept “animal”? Four-legged creatures like cats, dogs and rabbits. The range of his abstraction was governed by his limited perspective.
So also was his mental integration. He only integrated data about cats, dogs and rabbits because that was all his perspective could fit together.
And, as a result, the mental entity—the metaphorical file folder—he summarizes by the word “animal” contains only mental units (percepts and narrower concepts) that pertain to four-legged creatures with fur, but not to fish or birds.
When he develops his perspective he will abstract more, integrate more and include more types of units in his mental entity.
Where does objectivity fit in? As his conceptual ability grows, i.e., his ability to recognize similarities and differences matures, it becomes objectively valuable to include fish and birds with the other creatures in his perspective of animals. Why? Because, once his ability to think has broadened, their similarities actually outweigh their differences.
Changing a concept means changing a perspective. The form of the new abstraction follows from that.
And then, as a final consequence, the meaning of a word changes.
People who worry that changing a concept means changing the metaphysical nature of the existents that concept refers to don’t understand what a concept is. When a person changes his perspective, he does not interfere with the nature of what he perceives. He focuses on a different range of existents.
This is simply a reflection of an axiom: consciousness perceives the metaphysically given. It has no power to alter its nature.
Changing a concept means changing a perspective.
ARE CONCEPTS METAPHYSICAL OR EPISTEMOLOGICAL?
A concept is wholly epistemological. It begins with the ability to regard existents as units. It then becomes a specific perspective on a group of selected existents. These are the units the concept refers to, called, naturally enough by Ayn Rand, the concept’s referents. They are always external.
However, the mind can hold internal representations of those referents in the form of percepts and narrower concepts. These are also called “units”. But they are epistemological units, not metaphysical ones. Epistemological units are the only type that can be integrated. You confuse the two types at your peril.
THE PROBLEM WITH THE TERM “ENTITY’
It is a mistake to overuse a term out of metaphysics to describe something from epistemology, even if it is used metaphorically. The term “entity” applied to a concept easily leads to the idea that a concept is beyond the mind’s power to change.
When you stick to an epistemological term like “perspective”, there is no problem with seeing how it can be changed.
A concept is not so much an entity or even an existent as a perspective on entities and existents.
A WAY OF LOOKING AT THINGS
A conceptual perspective is a way of regarding things, a selective focus. Ayn Rand knew this:
This is the key, the entrance to the conceptual level of man’s consciousness. The ability to regard entities as units is man’s distinctive method of cognition, which other living species are unable to follow.
Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology1. Cognition and Measurement
But a conceptual perspective is not confined to the ability to regard entities as units. Conceptual ability is the ability to regard existents as units, then either hold your perspective on them or change it to capture reality better. If you want a concrete image of the latter, think of the child widening his perspective to include the units “fish” and “birds” in the concept “animal”.
A CONCEPT IS A VARIABLE
If you talk about a variable integration or a variable entity it sounds weird. But a variable perspective is comprehensible. Most people can vary their perspective.
SUMMARY
A concept is a perspective on a group of external existents, captured in a single word.
Why should anyone be interested in concept variation? Because concepts are philosophy’s most important tools and they enshrine our perspectives.
In fact, they are our perspectives.
Many years ago, I read a quotation from the novelist D H Lawrence. I have never been able to find it since, but it went like something like this: “Our perspective begins as a wide starry sky. It then becomes a mansion, then a house, then a hovel and finally it becomes an umbrella pulled down tight over our heads.”
Why do I like it so much? Because it captures the fact that one’s concepts and philosophy, if not refreshed, can as easily be a prison as a liberation.
A corrupt concept can be a prison. The concept “racism” has become so corrupted today that in most contexts it functions as an anti-concept and traps anyone who buys it. It is now held to subsume any negative judgment about a non-Western ideology, even a religious ideology like Islam.
But such an ideology is a matter of ideas. It is to be judged on its objective merits, independent of the race of its originator. Will someone, who doesn’t know you can change a concept, enter debates, get accused of “racism” and accept the accusation without recognizing how devalued the term is in that context? Very possibly.
But the reverse also holds true. A once corrupt concept can be redeemed. And you can be stuck in a prison of the past if you don’t understand that.
When The Political Compass website made the observation that the telling distinction today is between authoritarianism and libertarianism, I was struck with its justice. And I realised how much the concept of “libertarianism” had changed since Ayn Rand so vehemently rejected it. But I wonder: do Objectivists know it? Or is their perspective on libertarianism acting as an umbrella pulled down tight over their heads?
If they don’t know that concepts capture perspectives, will they be able to escape their umbrella? Will they be able to adjust their perspective to embrace this new one and use it to build bridges with other lovers of freedom? I doubt it.
And do they understand that if Ayn Rand had not widened her perspective on capitalism, we would not have the concept today that gives us the wide starry sky of her vision? Or that if she had not narrowed her perspective on selfishness to exclude all its irrational instances our own view of selfishness might be as confused a prison as it has been for centuries?
There is something deeply selfish—in the best sense—in thinking and being master of one’s thought. How can you master your thought if you can’t change your perspectives when you need to? Conceptual stuck-in-the-mudness is a denial of self.
Reason is the only absolute in philosophy. And to follow reason one must be willing to change the concepts that capture one’s perspectives when necessary. And that, dear reader, is a great adventure.
