HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: madhavn@madhavn.mentorg.com (Madhav Nerurkar)
Subject: Re: A=A: My Beef with the Bull
Date: Fri, 08 Jan 1993 21:52:23 GMT
Organization: mentor
Keywords: 
Followup-To: 

In article <106399@bu.edu>, ccmlh@buitc.bu.edu (Mark Hayes) writes:
|> What makes my (facetious) requests for short proofs of "objectivism"
|> appropriate is the frequency with which we are told that "objectivism"
|> is unique among all schools of philosophical thought in the
|> self-evidence of its premises and the purity of its logical reasoning.

I don't think your request is unreasonable. I am not sure I belong to the
class you refer to as "Randites" but I do have a copy of most of Rand's
works. 

Here is what we could do. You post one example of a result logically derived
in some philosophy other than Objectivism. This is just so that we understand
what you expect as a logical derivation and what level of "goodwill" can be
expected (so that one does not have to be cryptically formal).

I will then go through the "Galt's speech" and select a small subset that 
seems self-sufficient (barring self-evidency). I will consider my job done at
this point and won't explain or defend.

Some may want to comment on the legitimacy of the "proofs" while others (including
you perhaps) may want to show how it is not correct. I feel that regardless of
coming to any conclusions, just forcing the issue in this way aught to lead to
better understanding.

This is not a challenge, just pursuit of knowledge. Alternative ways of 
resolving this issue would also be welcome.


Madhav Nerurkar           Disclaimer: These are my opinions.
From: starr@genie.slhs.udel.edu (Tim Starr)
Subject: Re: Anarchy in Iceland and elsewhere
Organization: UDel, School of Life & Health Sciences
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 1993 08:28:08 GMT

In article <1993Jan6.171437.975@shearson.com> pmetzger@snark.shearson.com (Perry E. Metzger) writes:
}We can go further, of course.  Most modern commercial law is a direct
}descendant of the Lex Mercator (I think I have my latin right there,
}pardon if its wrong)

"Mercatoria."  This has been a private service announcement brought to you
by pure, unadulterated selfishness.

Tim Starr - Renaissance Now! - Think Universally, Act Selfishly
starr@genie.slhs.udel.edu

"True greatness consists in the use of a powerful understanding to enlighten
oneself and others." - Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire
Newsgroups: alt.philosophy.objectivism
From: lewchuk@cs.UAlberta.CA (Michael Lewchuk)
Subject: Re: Rand's Personality vs Objectivism
Organization: University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 1993 15:59:31 GMT

cmk@athena.mit.edu (Charles M Kozierok) writes:
>A. Rand was right that her behaviour reflected objectivist ideals
>   and since her behavior was flawed, objectivism is flawed;
>or
>B. Rand was *wrong* that her behavior reflected objectivist ideals
>   and so the flaws in her behavior are irrelevant.

>there are other counter-arguments too, but the above is one point
>i thought beared explanation. it is simply possible that Rand was wrong
>not in her philosophy, but rather in her evaluation of how well
>she applied it to her own life.
>-- >charles

About B.:
Yes, but if Ayn was not following her own philosophy, either that says Ayn
somehow created a philosophy of Objective reality before becoming a
self-deluded twit or she never really understood what the heck she was
saying.  The latter, combined with the fact that her novels are about extreme
opposites (in some sense "cartoon characters", not "real people"), it seriously
jeopardizes the notion of whether such a system as it *really is* can work.

Or perhaps I'd rather buy a book from one of you on the Net here, providing
you used "normally human characters" instead of "characterizations", than
Ayn's works.  <shrug>.

					Michael Lewchuk
					lewchuk@cs.UAlberta.CA
From: ccmlh@buitc.bu.edu (Mark Hayes)
Newsgroups: alt.philosophy.objectivism
Subject: Kant=Kant
Date: 7 Jan 93 19:30:31 GMT
Organization: Boston University, Boston, MA, USA
Originator: ccmlh@buitc.bu.edu

>Well, I'd say first and foremost, Kant refutes the idea of objective reality.
>He suggests that reality is shaped by our perceptions, thus if we imagined that
>an apple were an orange, it would become so, for the perceiver that is.  This
>goes back to what everyone is yelling about lately here because it contradicts
>the Law of Identity.
 
This is so grotesque a misinterpretation of Kant that it can only have
been acquired second-hand. To help clarify a little (God help me, here
comes Kant in a 40 line net posting):
 
Kant denies that material objects considered as "things in themselves"
possess such attributes as spatiality, temporality, and certain logical
properties. He holds that such attributes are structural components of
perception, such that while we can have no external knowledge that does
not presume a spatio-temporal-logical framework, we are not justified in
claiming that these attributes are metaphysically "real".
 
If this sounds problematic, it is.
 
However, it is in no sense equivalent to the claim that "if we imagined
that an apple were an orange, it would become so". Nor does it in any
way deny the Sacred Axiom that "A=A", which, in fact, is a pure logical
truth for Kant.
 
Kant's goal was to propose a theory of what might be called
"intersubjective knowledge": a theory of how there can be such a thing
as objective, individual-independent truth in spite of the fact that
language, perception, and thought are inevitably constrained by the
modes in which the human mind operates.
 
He probably didn't succeed, though he did say a number of very
interesting things. Certainly his arguments had much more substance to
them than anything I've yet seen presented here.
 
By they way, God help me again, I have just picked up my very own copy
of "Atlas Shrugged", and am presently quaking in my boots as John Galt
(whoever his is; I skipped ahead to the "hot part") begins his legendary
"proof" that A=A therefore ... ... ...
Newsgroups: alt.philosophy.objectivism
From: torkel@sics.se (Torkel Franzen)
Subject: Re: Premises of "objectivism?"
Organization: Swedish Institute of Computer Science, Kista
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 1993 17:26:47 GMT

In article <1993Jan12.162935.29715@nynexst.com> baruch@nynexst.com 
(Robert Baruch) writes:

   >Since I was reading all of the responses as responses to the
   >"trivial" argument, I am not aware of what the non-trivial argument is.
   >What is it that I missed?

  The non-trivial argument is the argument Keith Ramsay explained in the
article you responded to.
Newsgroups: alt.philosophy.objectivism
From: baruch@nynexst.com (Robert Baruch)
Subject: Re: Thoughts on the group
Reply-To: baruch@nynexst.com
Organization: NYNEX Science & Technology, Inc
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 93 18:47:25 GMT

In article 2522@fcom.cc.utah.edu, leon@cs.weber.edu (Leon D. Atkinson) writes:
> participating in this news group who are not objectivists and
> show no indications of having in any desire to do anything but
> cause trouble.  Hiding behind supposed interest in the subject,
> they seem only to want to quarrel.  Why do they do this?  How
> many people crowd the other groups, stirring trouble in this
> manner?  No one posts messages on the rec.games.mud groups like:
> "Do you actually think you are having fun?  Get a life." or "No
> wonder this group is in rec.games."   I think it's perhaps
> because objectivism exposes in some the bare fact that they are
> being irrational and therefore self-destructive.  Smokers don't
> enjoy being told that what they are doing causes cancer for the
> same reason.  It hurts to be shown your unattended weaknesses.
> 	I can sympathize; however, no one is forced to subscribe to
> this group.  If you don't agree with objectivism, then this isn't
> the place you ought to be.  It is pointless to argue with those
> who won't even agree to the Law of Identity, since the concept of
> logic is derived from this law.  Furthermore, while I understand
> that even the mildest of my statement will make someone's blood
> boil, it's just as annoying to me to find irrationalists flooding
> the group with mindlessness.  I interpret this behavior as a
> malevolent attack on those of us who would like to have an adult
> discussion about objectivism.
> 	Lastly, for those who honestly wish to learn more about
> objectivism, then I suggest that individual study is the best
> choice.  The works of Rand, Peikoff, and others are eloquently
> written and probably more precise than we can offer over the net. 
> This group is more appropriate for the discussion of
> higher-order objectivist issues such as ethical conduct regarding
> government educational grants or the political worthiness of the
> Libertarian party.
> 	I'm really excited about this group and hope to contribute
> often, but I refused to cater to a Kantian mob who's only real
> purpose is to shut us down.
> 


Oh, please.  Now, I am a supporter of Objectivism, and I find it hard
to believe that you refuse to reason with those who don't agree with
Objectivism.  Do you feel incapable of defending your view?  Then perhaps
you should not support your view.  Unless, of course, you want to shut
yourself up in a room and hide your head in the sand, secure in the 
knowledge that your view is correct, because no one can question your
view.

--Rob

Newsgroups: alt.philosophy.objectivism
From: johnhall@microsoft.com (John Hall)
Subject: Re: Health Care Rights?
Date: 04 Jan 93 22:50:05 GMT
Organization: Microsoft Corporation

In article sa114984@longs.LANCE.ColoState.Edu (Steven Arnold) writes:
| 	I agree totally!  I merely think that such help should be provided
| voluntarily, not through the means of government force.  Here, of course, I think
| I disagree with Ayn Rand, who seems to maintain that any form of altruism is
| somehow evil.  Correct me if I'm giving an unjustified black eye to Ayn Rand, but
| I think private altruism is perfectly OK, and I think she would disagree.

To paraphrase Rand:
Altruism is exchanging a dollar for a dime, not exchanging
a dime for a dollar.  Not buying an expensive hat so you can 
feed your child is *not* altruism -- for the woman whose 
greater value is the child.  If you have any respect for what 
you are doing, don't call it alturistic.

To quote Heinlein (not an objectivist writer)
Altruism is based upon self-deception, the root of all evil.
If you are tempted by something you deem altruistic,
root out the self-deception.
Then if you still want to do it:
Wallow in it!


-- 
-------------------------
My comments are my own.  They are independent and unrelated to the
views of my company , relatives or elected representatives.

Newsgroups: alt.philosophy.objectivism
From: torkel@sics.se (Torkel Franzen)
Subject: Re: Modern Logic -- question (was Obj. Philosophy)
Organization: Swedish Institute of Computer Science, Kista
	<MERRITT.93Jan7100008@macro.bu.edu> <TORKEL.93Jan7180729@lludd.sics.se>
	<MERRITT.93Jan7142129@macro.bu.edu> <TORKEL.93Jan7211409@bast.sics.se>
	<MERRITT.93Jan8103208@macro.bu.edu>
Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1993 16:36:00 GMT

In article <MERRITT.93Jan8103208@macro.bu.edu> merritt@macro.bu.edu 
(Sean Merritt) writes:

   >I don't have any hope of convincing you that Ayn Rand offered
   >Objectivisim first as a Science.

  We seem to be talking at cross purposes here. What I said in my
original article was only this, that "logic", "axiom", "theorem", as
these terms are used in and of Objectivism do not have the meaning
that they have in modern logic (or mathematics or mainstream
philosophy). What Rand offered Objectivism as is not at issue.

  What you need to do to judge the validity of my comments is simply to
look at what "logic", "axiom", "theorem" mean in modern logic and
make a comparison with the Objectivist usage.
Newsgroups: alt.philosophy.objectivism
From: robert@kohlrabi.tcs.com (Robert Blumen)
Subject: Re: Why I am not a Big O Objectivist
Organization: Teknekron Communications Systems Inc.
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 1993 23:14:20 GMT

In article <1993Jan6.170234.833@shearson.com>, pmetzger@snark.shearson.com (Perry E. Metzger) writes:
> Many times, Rand produced wonderful, trenchant essays. At times,
> however, she produced garbage. This is only natural -- she was human.
> I'm particularly disturbed by many times where her logic follows the
> "I can't think of a way out of this problem, so this must be a
> contradiction" attitude -- the example that comes most clearly to mind
> being her condemnation of anarchism on the basis, more or less, that
> since she couldn't think of how to get it to work there must not be a
> way, never mind that other people can not only make plausible
> arguments but also can present historical evidence that flatly
> contradicts her supposed logical conclusions -- such as the fact that
> the merchant courts that developed her beloved contract law
> essentially operated in an anarchist framework.
-- 

One thing about markets is that they are good at discovering or generating
solutions.  See especailly the works of F.A. Hayek on this point, such
as "The Uses of Knowlege in Society".  People who are new to market economics
often ask questions like "If the production of <widget X> were completely
left up to the workings of the free market then /who would produce it/how can
we be sure that everyone would get enough of it/etc..  As Thomas Sowell points
out, a market is not a particular solution to a problem.  In other words,
there is no specific answer to this problem.  Rather, a free market is a 
fremework in which multiple possible solutions can compete.  The local and
specific information known by many individuals is put to use to generate
solutions to these problems. 

So for me, a the viability of a free market in adjudication and protection
does not rest on anyone's particular version of how this would work, or
even on historical examples of how it did work, but on a more general 
understanding that markets can produce the best from among many solutions,
rather than a particular solution imposed by governments.  In the area
of adjudication and police protetction, we can see all the problems of
socialism: inadequate supply leading to long queues, corruption, an emerging 
alternative market, etc.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Robert Blumen                          | robert@tcs.com
Senior Software Engineer               | 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA 94704
Teknekron Communications Systems, Inc. | (510) 649-3759
Newsgroups: alt.philosophy.objectivism
From: tyadav@athena.mit.edu (T.Y.)
Subject: Re: Premises of "objectivism?"
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1993 00:36:22 GMT

==============================================
 jwtlai@jeeves.uwaterloo.ca (Jim W "GrimJim" Lai) writes:
>Anyone who has no doubts about whether their senses are true will always be
>fooled by perceptual illusions.  It is a fact that senses are not "true", in
>that they do not perfectly reflect reality, or else there would be no such
>thing as a perceptual illusion. 

 This is mixing things up. It is true that: reality is more complicated
 than what "first sense" tell us. However, this doesn't mean that senses
 fool us; nor does it mean that senses are not true. It only means that
 whatever we sense has more information that we cared to collect on 
 "first sights." Perceptual illusion doesn't mean our senses aren't true -
 they imply that life/percepts are more wonderful and mysterious than what
 we translate them to be. 

 It may help to introspect what "precept" and "sense" and "reality" means.

> The logical conclusion is to accept this fact,
>but I fail to see how this would cause "paralysis".  We can, after all, build
>machines operating on "fuzzy logic" (or heuristics, for that matter) which do
>not require relatively precise information in order to operate.

 Having had played with fuzzy logic myself (and designed processes with
 heuristics etc.), I disagree with what you say. Fuzzy logic does use
 precise information - the precision is in the bounds, the purpose, the
 constraints you use. Don't confuse equality with precision. 

 Your post could be interpreted in a fuzzy manner - but that wouldn't
 be precise, would it? Or is INTERNET a perceptual illusion :) .....?

T.Y.
----
tyadav@athena.mit.edu
Newsgroups: alt.philosophy.objectivism
From: torkel@sics.se (Torkel Franzen)
Subject: Re: Modern Logic -- question (was Obj. Philosophy)
Organization: Swedish Institute of Computer Science, Kista
	<Jan05.215159.69662@yuma.ACNS.ColoState.EDU>
	<TORKEL.93Jan6015026@bast.sics.se> <lewchuk.726348211@therien>
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 1993 20:03:53 GMT

In article <lewchuk.726348211@therien> lewchuk@cs.UAlberta.CA 
(Michael Lewchuk) writes:

   >If it [Objectivism] has axioms, and uses logic to turn axioms into
   >theorems, it's a formal system.  If not, it bases its conceptions on 
   >things other than logic, which is a shaky thing for a "rational" system 
   >to do. 

  As we have seen amply demonstrated in this group, the terms "axiom",
"theorem", "logic" have a very different meaning in Objectivism than
they do in logic.
From: torkel@sics.se (Torkel Franzen)
Newsgroups: alt.philosophy.objectivism
Subject: Re: Where's the Beef?
Date: 10 Jan 93 09:41:11 GMT
Organization: Swedish Institute of Computer Science, Kista

In article <106661@bu.edu> ccmlh@buitc.bu.edu (Mark Hayes) writes:

   >And what might these two senses be? "Complete", as far as I know,
   >means "yielding as theorems all true statements expressible within
   >the language".

  Since Ian Sutherland is not much given to lengthy pedantic explanations,
I'll answer this.

  No, there is no such standard concept "complete". In the incompleteness
theorems, "T is complete" means that for every closed formula A in the
language of T, either A or the negation of A is a theorem of T. (Thus
truth is not involved here.) If T is complete in your sense w.r.t. some
model of T, it will be complete in this sense (and complete in your sense
w.r.t. all models of T). But completeness in this sense is defined without
using any semantical concepts.

   In the completeness theorem for first order logic, completeness
involves two things: a set of rules and axioms, and a semantically
defined notion of logical consequence. The set of rules and axioms is
complete with respect to the notion of logical consequence in the sense that
every formula that is a logical consequence of a set of formulas
can be derived from those formulas using the rules and axioms.
Slights variants of this definition occur. It is in this sense one
speaks of the completeness of first order logic as well as of other
systems of logic (involving both derivation rules and a semantics).

  The connection with your formulation is here that if a statement is true
in *all* models of a theory, it follows by completeness that it is provable
in the theory.

  Thus if we take a first order axiomatization of arithmetic, we know from
the completeness theorem that every statement true in all models of the
axioms is provable in the theory. We know from the incompleteness theorem
that (under certain conditions) not every statement true under its usual
arithmetical interpretation is provable.
Newsgroups: alt.philosophy.objectivism
From: robert@kohlrabi.tcs.com (Robert Blumen)
Subject: Re: Anarchy in Iceland and elsewhere
Organization: Teknekron Communications Systems Inc.
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 1993 23:19:50 GMT

> We can go further, of course.  Most modern commercial law is a direct
> descendant of the Lex Mercator (I think I have my latin right there,
> pardon if its wrong), developed in the merchant courts of medieval
> europe. Merchants at trade fairs couldn't count on the local lords to
> enforce contracts, so they came up with their own system -- voluntary
> arbitration courts. Failing to obey the court's judgement led to
> nothing worse than ostracism. However, remember that if no one would
> deal with you ever again, you were pretty much up the creek and would
> have to go back to subsistance farming in some backwater as no
> merchant would ever sign a trading agreement with you again. The Law
> Merchant, developed in a completely acoercive and non-governmental
> context, is responsible for an astoundingly large fraction of the
> legal actions you take every day. Ever endorse a check? Well, that
> practice dates back to the merchant courts, when drafts were used as
> negotiable instruments far more than they are now.

> In any case, I find it amusing that captial O Objectivists seem to be
> able to figure out without any trouble how a supermarket might manage
> to get enough food in it without the need for a central authority
> allocating produce, and yet not understand how a free market might
> successfully sell security and contract enforcement services.
> 

This demonstrates not only how a free market can provide adjudication
and arbitration services, but also how the mechanism of law itself is
something which can be developed/discovered by a market.  What laws
are the most efficient?  What legal procedures facilitate trade? It is not
just a question of some body of law being handed down [from where?] and 
being enfoced by competing agencies.  The law itself is emerges from
a market process.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Robert Blumen                          | robert@tcs.com
Senior Software Engineer               | 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA 94704
Teknekron Communications Systems, Inc. | (510) 649-3759
Newsgroups: alt.philosophy.objectivism