 Ayn Rand is loved, hated, admired, and despised all throughout the world. She created a philosophy that she called Objectivism. But is Objectivism a real philosophy? Should we take it seriously? How does it answer basic questions in metaphysics and epistemology? To help me learn, I've asked the founder of the Atlas Society, Dr. David Kelly, to come on the 61st episode of Patterson in Pursuit. Hello, my friends, and welcome to another episode of Patterson in Pursuit. Got another excellent and exciting episode for you today. I've gotten tons of requests from people to talk about Ayn Rand and Objectivism, and I've yet to do so so far on my show. For about the past year, actually, I've been working on a four-part series called Why I'm Not an Objectivist. I haven't released any of the articles yet. I'm no expert on the philosophy, but from what I read, I've got some disagreements, some foundational disagreements. But several people whom I respect have in conversation mentioned or shared this YouTube lecture series on Objectivism put on by a guy named David Kelly. This lecture series is very in-depth about Objectivist philosophy in a way that I have never heard it presented. I was very impressed with what I heard, though I disagreed with some of the ideas, and thought, this is the guy I got to have on the show to get down to some of the nitty-gritty philosophic details about Objectivism. Let's see what's there. And sure enough, we had an excellent conversation. But before we dive into it, I want to tell you about the sponsor of this episode. If you are one of the many individuals that has started to doubt the value of the university degree, first of all, no, you're not alone. There are many other individuals, companies, and businesses which also see what you see. And now Praxis is a company that's offering an alternative. Instead of the overpriced pseudo-education that you get at your average university system, the Praxis program is three months at a professional boot camp that is followed by six months of a paid apprenticeship in the real world. Graduates of the Praxis program now have a 98% employment rate with an average salary of $50,000. So if you're looking for an alternative, check out steve-patterson.com slash praxis. My guest, Dr. David Kelly, is a philosopher and author of many books, including Unrugged Individualism, The Contested Legacy of Ayn Rand, The Evidence of the Senses, The Art of Reasoning, and A Life of One's Own. He is the founder of the Atlas Society, and he has been a proponent of objectivism for more than 25 years. I'll have a link to his website, his books, the YouTube lecture series I was talking about, all on the show notes page this week, which is steve-patterson.com slash 61. Enjoy. All right, Dr. David Kelly, thanks so much for coming on Patterson in pursuit. It's a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you, Steve. It's a pleasure to be here. So I have encountered lots of objectivists in my discussions and my travels, and almost universally, whenever I get down into the nitty-gritty of objectivist epistemology, people will send me links or they'll say, hey, you got to listen to these lectures that were put on by David Kelly back in, I think it was the late 80s, they're out on YouTube, and they're fantastic. I must say, they're definitely the most in-depth objectivist material that I've read anywhere, and I know lots of people really love it. Well, thank you. Those were lectures that I gave at colleges in the, I think they were mostly in the 80s, as you say, and I've always been amazed that they're fairly technical. They were written for and delivered for people who had a very high degree of interest in objectivism and a high degree of knowledge about it. But the fact that they're not listening to a philosophy lecture instead of being able to read it and stop and think is a challenge. So I really am grateful for the interest. I have begun writing up some of them and will continue to do so. That's great, and I do want to cover some of the material that you'll have covered in those lectures. I'll make sure to have the videos I'm talking about linked in the show notes for this week. But I want to start with you kind of at the basics and then we'll get into more advanced stuff. I think the basics, if you've got to start anywhere with Ayn Rand, it's the fact that so many philosophers, professional philosophers and public intellectuals, don't even consider Ayn Rand a philosopher to begin with. They don't even think that she meets the basic criteria for being taken seriously as a philosopher. Now, you, I'm guessing, have some disagreement with that position, is that right? That would be a good guess, yes. I have complete disagreement with that. And I will say that your perception of the world of academic philosophers is basically correct and has been from the beginning. But over the years, there have been thinkers, people in technical academic philosophy, who have found great value in Rand's ideas. It's a small minority, but in addition to myself, there are others who are writing at what we would consider a professional philosopher, philosophy level. But Rand wrote from such a different paradigm, both in terms of the method of philosophy and the questions of philosophy. And getting her paradigm into communication with the one paradigms or context that are common in academic philosophy is a real challenge. It's like, you know, cross-translation of two different languages. I think that's a great insight. So would you say that Rand is a philosopher in the sense that she's engaging with some of the biggest ideas in the world, talking about the fundamentals of human cognition and our relationship with the world, but the way that she phrases those questions and the way that she tries to tackle those questions isn't in the modern academic jargon. It's not in that standard language. And so many people conclude, well, therefore, she's not even a philosopher because she doesn't speak our lingo. Yes, that's essentially right. I mean, philosophy, and this is true of other disciplines as well, tends to function by an ongoing conversation. That was Richard Rorty's term a while back. It might not have been original with him. But, you know, there are articles, published ideas put forward to address questions. And then if you're going to write on those issues, you have to be conversant with that literature and try to make some advance in it. And but speak within an existing framework of what are the theories on the table. And it becomes highly technical. Academics do that. That's sort of in the nature of the game. Right. But on any rational, normal standard of what philosophy is that would incorporate Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, John Locke, Emmanuel Kahn. Rand is certainly a philosopher and is certainly dealing with this issues at the same level of fundamentality. I think that's a great summarization. And I've experienced just a little bit of this, not nearly to the level that Rand gets. But in my own pursuits and my own limited writing on philosophy, I've gotten the same criticism that, oh, well, you're not talking the way that the modern professional philosophers talk in the 20th and 20th century. Therefore, it can't be that you're doing philosophy, which I think is fundamentally mistaken. But it's a perfect segue into the actual ideas that Rand was talking about. So Rand was the founder of the School of Objectivism. And the two general areas that I want to cover with you today are metaphysics and epistemology. These two kind of blend back and forth into one another. They are foundational to any philosophy. And so a natural first question is to ask, what are the contents of objectivist metaphysics? What types of things are there? I'm guessing there's physical stuff. Most philosophies say there's some physical stuff. Is there, in addition to physical stuff, is there mental stuff? Are there abstract objects? What's kind of the basic overview of objectivist metaphysics? OK, we need to separate a couple of dimensions here. One aspect dealing with the issue of abstract objects is the view. And this would be axiomatic. I mean, it's really consequence of the law of excluded middle. That thing either has some property or not. It is something specific. So everything that exists is concrete and specific. There are no abstractions out there. The objectivist view is that abstractions are the result of mental cognitive operations by human beings and if any other species can do it, by a mind. Let's put it that way. So that's along the scale of concreteness versus abstraction. And it's the kind of core question in the problem of universals and its epistemological aspect, the problem of concepts, which I expect we're going to want to get into a bit. But in terms of ontology, there are certainly physical objects. But the concept of physical objects is a little tricky because what we see, what we are aware of and what objectivist would insist on, there's a natural world. It's things, everything that exists exists in space, in time, in some way. There's no supernatural in any religious or mystical sense. But when we form the concept of physical or matter, material aspects and things, we're doing that by contrast with our introspective awareness of our consciousness, conscious functions, feelings, thoughts, desires. And so there are, and which are certainly real as well. So the natural world includes conscious beings, which includes human beings and then quite a few other species who have the ability to perceive and presumably feel the various degrees of desire and emotional reactions. So there are minds. The technical question, what is the relationship between consciousness and the body, or the mind and body, consciousness and the brain, is one that has so many scientific aspects to it that I would say as an objectivist, and I think most objectivist philosophers would take this view, there is, what we know is that consciousness exists. That's like Descartes, you cannot deny that without contradiction. And so it exists, and we know that it is causally efficacious, which has been a pretty hot topic of discussion in the philosophy of mind for the last 20, 30 years. Do mental states have causal efficacy on our physical movements and bodies, or is it just an epiphenomenon with all physical results, including the motion of our limbs and traveling to New York or whatever, really the product of neural activity only? So on that score objectivist, we certainly believe, and I would argue vehemently, that yes we do, we make choices, we make, and as a result of those choices, which we do on the basis of considerations, thoughts, feelings, goals, and when we do, when we make decisions and act on them, our minds are causal agents in the physical realm. Personally, I think from my study and a little bit of now most outdated knowledge of the brain sciences, is that I'm comfortable with the idea of mind as an emergent property of certain kinds of complex animate systems. And in fact, I think that is a much more fruitful approach. Instead of a stark contrast, everything is either physical or mental. That is, things are organized at different levels, and at different levels of complexity, you get, you know, from molecules to cells to animals, to functioning organisms to humans and self-direction as increasing layers of complexity emerging. Okay, so in that kind of broad big picture look at things, you'd say there are physical, let's just take the simple example of a physical object. There's a table right in front of me, here's a table. The objectivist says, yes, there's a table out there in the world. That is something that you're perceiving. Is it the case that there's such a thing as a mental representation of the table? Is it the case that when I'm looking at what I'm looking at, I'm actually indeed looking at a table in the world? Or is it that I'm looking at a kind of mental impression, which I'm guessing correlates to some table out there in the world? The latter view would be a representationalist theory of perception, and by contrast with realism, which is that you see the table. And so I'm a realist, that was the thesis of my first book in epistemology, The Evidence of the Senses, and again it would be common currency among objectivists. We see the world, yes, we see it in a certain way. We see it in virtue of the way it appears, but it's not justified to infer from that that all we see is the appearance. So how do you deal with questions of illusion? So let's say I'm in the middle of a very vivid dream and I have this seems like I have the same perceptual experience of this table. Like maybe I'm dreaming right now of this conversation. How does, how would an objectivist deal with direct perception that doesn't appear to correlate to a state of the physical world? Well, precisely because we think perception is the awareness of objects through activation of our sense organs. We would not say that in dreaming you are perceiving in the first place. There's something perception like in what your mind is doing when you dream. And I don't have a good theory, I'm not sure that this is a philosophical issue in the first place as opposed to a psychological, a neurological one. But hallucinations dreaming the so-called non-baritical experiences where if you define baritical as meaning aware of objects, external to your mind. Those have to be separated from what are called illusions or conceptual illusions like the bent stick and water. And those are not, those are every bit as much the perceptual awareness of the object as it is in itself. It's just that you are perceiving it in conditions that are unusual. And therefore, if you don't understand that they are unusual, you are liable to make the wrong conceptual judgment and say the stick is bent. But when you perceive that stick, a glass of water, it is appearing to your senses exactly the way it has to in accordance with the way your eyes function and the laws of optics. So there's nothing false about it. We don't perceive, I introduced the term in my book. There's an assumption that we perceive that to be valid perception has to be diaphanous. Our senses, our faculties of experience cannot have anything to do with the way things look. But the way things look is precisely a relational term about an object with its properties and the detection mechanisms that have evolved for us and other animals are sensory apparatus. What would be the right way for a stick that's in water to appear? The non-elusory one. I mean, it would violate the laws of optics. That would be a really distorting view of the world if somehow your eyes, if it didn't look bent. Now, I say that, I have to qualify. Your eyes and brain, your visual system and other sensory systems do a lot of correcting and thank God because otherwise we have a lot of trouble making our way around in the world. When you move around your table, the actual shape on your retina, the actual visual, so-called visual image or retinal image is going to change because of, again, because of the laws of optics. You don't even notice that because we have the phenomenon of perceptual constancy, our senses, you have to adopt a special focus like the way a painter does in order even to notice that the apparent shape is changing even as you are quite perfectly well aware that the real shape is not changing. Okay, so let me ask you one more question about that and then we'll go to kind of the next step in metaphysics, that when you talk about the stick in the water, it makes me think, and the way you talked about that perception through sense organs or via sense organs, to me it sounds like a type of representationalism and when we're talking about dreaming, I want to go back to, let's say that if we use the language of the objectivists that there's no perception per se going on when you're dreaming and we say, okay, I'll grant you that word, but there's still mental goings on. There's still a kind of show. There's images that I'm, there's an awareness, even if it's not awareness of objects outside of myself or outside of my eyes. So what is the language then that objectivists would use to describe something like a vivid dream? Well, it's a phenomenon of consciousness for sure. And it does have sensory aspects. And I think we would go as far as saying that the contents of dreams, although you are not actually perceiving anything at the time of your dream and in the dream, the images and shapes and actions are ones that you did at one time see. I mean, consciousness has to get its contents from reality initially. Then we can run with them. We can engage in flights of imagination and fantasy during our waking time. And also our brains apparently dreams play some incredibly important function psychologically because there's a lot of experiments of depriving people of dreaming and they go nuts. So I don't know what that function is exactly, but it may be an internal self-maintenance function that consciousness has. Your malware bites software running in the background in your computer or backing you up overnight or whatever to use a computer analogy. So I don't know, but the fact that it's conscious, I don't see it as a problem. My whole approach and really Grant's approach was let's look at what consciousness is. And not make assumptions about our priori assumptions about how it has to function to be valid or our priori assumptions that it has to be in some way we have to explain how it reduces to physical neural activity. No, let's look at it and understand it and draw our conclusions, draw our generalizations that are in accordance with what we understand as what we can identify as the nature of our faculties. They have a nature that's a fundamental principle. But what that nature is is something we have to discover. OK, OK, so let's move on then to the next step here. We'll stick with the table example. How in the objectivist metaphysics do you deal with what's called the sororities paradox? So let's say we're starting with a bunch of wood. And our goal is to construct a table out of the wood. That wood starts maybe eventually within a seed and then it slowly grows out of a plant, turns into a tree, a tree gets chopped down, and so on. At some point, it goes from just wood to a table. Seems like there's some continuum there. And lots of different philosophers have their own approach at resolving when the wood turns into the table. What is the Randian solution to sororities paradox? Or maybe actually, let's not talk about the table, because that's maybe a little bit more complex. An even easier one is grains of sand turning into a heap. One grain of sand is not a heap, and yet there are heaps at some point. So at some level, adding a grain pops a heap into existence or taking away a grain pops a heap out of existence. How do you deal with that? Well, that's an issue that, yes, that is what most people have in mind when talking about the so-called sororities paradox. Sororities, if you're not aware of it, is a term in logic for an inference that has multiple steps with each step having a conclusion that then becomes a premise for a further step, and then to a further conclusion, and then that as a premise, and so on. So the typical example would be, I have one grain of sand on the beach. I add a second one. Is that a heap? Well, no. But if adding one doesn't make something a heap, then that should be true no matter how many grains of sand I add. And you end up with the chain of inferences that says when I get to the 347,000th grain, that's not a heap, because the previous one didn't make a heap. And so the next one's not going to make a heap either. But meanwhile, we look at it and we say, hey, this is a five-foot hill of sand. So the problem here is that it's addressed by Rand's theory of concepts, the rejected theory, which is that we form concepts on the basis of patterns of similarity that we notice among things and similarities that allow us to isolate one group of things and differentiate them from others. But the things within the similar groups have differences. And what allows this cognitive function, concept formation, to work as well as it does is that there are high degrees of similarity and then discontinuities to the next most similar thing. But there are always borderline cases. Typical, I mean, a common example, a textbook example, is where does yellow stop and red begin? And you introduce orange. OK, where does yellow stop and orange begin? OK, well, yellow-orange. However, finally, you split up the visual spectrum, you're going to have borderline cases. Well, OK, so what? The whole function of concepts is to allow you to talk about yellow things as a group for whatever reason, to identify things as yellow, like a taxi cab or a sunset. But reality doesn't exist to comply with our concepts. Our concepts exist to allow us to identify reality. And that there are borderline cases is just a fact of the matter. And so one of my colleagues pointed out one time, when you look at sand on the beach and distinguish this, this is a heap, but this isn't. No one does it by actually counting grains of sand, right? We perceive it if it has the shape of a heap as opposed to the shape of a minor variation in the surface of the sand. That's all we need. And there will be borderline cases. So it's a small heap or an even smaller heap, whatever. We can handle it perfectly well by trying to give them more definite, precise, specific description if we need it. And we can get as precise as we want, even down to counting the grains of sand. But I think this whole question of the sororities paradox in this sense with Continua is a case of what Brandwerth called stamping your feet at reality and saying it doesn't make it easy or it doesn't give us the exact, sharp borderlines between concepts. Oh, boo-hoo. Well, come on, let's deal with it. That's the way it is. OK, so I believe there's a philosophy called epistemicism, I think it's called, from Timothy Williamson. And his position is, I want to know if it's similar to what you're saying. The position is that there is some cutoff in reality where a heap is some independent thing separate from the parts which constitute it. But that boundary might not be able to be identified clearly in our conceptual scheme. So we may never know where the cutoff point is from where you go from just a grain to a heap, but it actually is out there in the world. Or are you saying that actually in the world the boundaries are fuzzy? And it's not just in our conceptual scheme. Well, in this case, the world is what it is, but it does not include natural kinds in their tutorial sense or the realist sense using realism here for a theory of universals that there actually are kinds that share an inner abstract essence with borderlines so that they either have that essence or they don't, which means it's either a heap or it's not a heap in reality, apart from any human cognition. As I said at the outset, we don't think there are any abstract aspects in reality itself. So the surface of a body of sand has the shape it has in reality. It is what it is. Identifying it as a heap is a human conceptual means of making a differentiation between some kinds of surfaces and flatter surfaces. So I guess I'm not well-versed in Williamson's theory on the score. So I'm guessing that there is an element of Aristotelian realism here. And if so, then we would disagree with it. OK, so this is kind of the way that I like to think about this problem in metaphysics, and I wonder if what your position is. I like to say that in reality, there are just the base units. There are the grains of sand, if you will. And at whatever point you like, you can call them a heap. But that distinction is conceptual. And if we wanted to be really precise, we could say, OK, one grain of sand is one grain of sand. Two grains is a heap with two grains. Three grains is a heap with three grains. Four grains is it. So technically speaking, yes, every heap is a little bit different, and it has an exact, precise amount of grains to it. But it's just a lot easier to say, keeps over this certain amount, however we come to that than our conceptual scheme, we're just going to all call them heaps. Right, when you look at the world and the questions of types of things and our identification of those types by concepts, one of the principles governing that or epistemological canons would be, don't multiply concepts beyond necessity. Concepts serve a purpose of identifying major significant similarities and drawing major significant differences. And so if the concept of a heap is useful, it's probably useful in distinguishing a bunch of sand that's mounded into a conical shape of some kind versus a flat surface or with a few ripples in it. So having, stipulating a definition of heap, that would be a heap of two grains, a heap of three grains, you could, the word heap there doesn't help you much, it just, there are two grains, here we have a bunch of three grains, here we have a bunch of four grains. And if there were some cognitive purpose, if it was of any use, if there were enough common attributes of two grain heaps as opposed to three grain heaps, that concept was useful and if there were enough, if separating two grain from three grain heaps allowed you to study all the universal common properties of two grain heaps as a type, as opposed to the common properties of three grain heaps, well, there aren't any real differences, are there, we know. So that's a useless distinction and it's a case of multiplying concepts beyond necessity. That's Rand's razor, model that they're Occam's razor, don't multiply entities beyond necessity. I think in this circumstance, the reason would be just to resolve any potential paradoxes. If a philosopher would come around and say, oh, look, reality is indiscreet, there are no clear boundaries in the world because of paradoxes, like continuum paradoxes, we could say, okay, well, if we were gonna be overly pedantic and come up with concepts that may correlate precisely to the world but don't actually solve anything other than philosophical problems, then I think we'd come up with this conceptual scheme. But I agree, in general, there's not much practical use value to coming up with each individual concept if it's not necessary. Now, there was, we began this discussion, a part of the discussion with your example of the table. And there is a real issue here, which I would say is not so much a matter of a continuum, although there is a continual process if you follow from an acorn to a tree to a table. But what are the criteria for continued existence of an entity? When has an entity changed so much that it is no longer the thing it was but has been transformed into something else as a particular? In most cases, across a broad range of phenomenon, the answer's usually pretty clear, for a plant like a tree, plants are built to grow from seeds. So from the seed to the tree, it's continued, it is growing and maturing as the individual plant that it is. But when it's cut down, sent through the sawmill and planks probably from different trees are put together into a table, but whatever, even the same tree, it's no longer a living thing. So pretty clearly it has gone. The living thing has gone out of existence. And a new thing, an artifact, the table has come into existence. Now there are many hard cases like this and this issue gets very involved, very tied in with the issue of personal identity. What makes you the same person you are across time? That's an incredibly sticky one. I do wanna ask just a question right on that because this is one of the things that when I've spoken with objectivists just informally we talk about it. It seems like I might have some disagreement here when we're talking specifically about the table. If I were to scratch the table and take away some of the particles that were there, is it the same exact table or is it a different table? I would, no, I'd say it's the same table but the table has changed or you have changed it. Because what's essential through a table? I mean, a table is an artifact. So unlike a natural object like a plant or a tree, its conditions of identity would have more to do with the human purpose for constructing it or at least as much to do with that as with physical shape, size, color, et cetera. And if you scratch the table unless it's a $10,000 antique which is now useless and is no longer an antique or a saleable one but now in a normal case it's the same table. You can still lead off it, work on it or whatever. It's the same though it's changed? Yes. I mean, this paradox of change goes back to the Greeks and, you know, in paramentities who said, if a thing is what it is then it cannot ever be anything but that so change is impossible. And that was, I mean one of the great things about Aristotle was he said, no, obviously we look at the world, things change. So let's, something about your assumptions has to be wrong and what Aristotle pointed out that change is a real part of reality and what that means is that things have the potential to change in certain ways, to affect, to act or to be acted upon in certain ways and that potential is in their nature as the kind of thing they are or as the very thing they are. So as long as they act or are affected in respect of that potential we just said the thing has changed its, you know, the smoothness, if you scratch it the smoothness of its surface has changed. But the table is still the same table. I mean, it'd be the same thing if you move the table two feet to the right, it's moved. Is it the same table? Well, change is about things engaged in action which is change. So if any change makes it a different thing then you have erased the whole idea of things acting and things changing. Now it sounds like one way that a thing could maintain its identity while changing in some way is when you said, well what is a table? It's wrapped up with purpose. It's wrapped up with a kind of human purpose and in that respect, if that's true, if part of what makes a table a table is our intention or our purposeful action towards it then it would make sense that you could have superfluous things change, you could have a scratch, it could be in a different location in this place. You could blow on it and blow some molecules off the top but the purpose hasn't changed so that that's what it would still maintain its identity. And perhaps, I wonder what you think about this, perhaps if it's the case that all we're identifying, all that we mean a table is is only the bits of matter which are located at that place in space and that's it then it would seem like if the tables get scratched then indeed it would change. Would that follow? Yes, but I guess I would put it a little differently and the ontology that Objectivism would subscribe to is really the same as Aristotle's. There are entities, there are properties that entities have, there are actions and reactions that entities go through and there are relationships among entities but the foundation is the existence of entities. So there can't be any property unless it's a property of something, that is some entity. There's no action except the action of something. There's no relationships except relationships among or between entities. So in that way entities are kind of the fundamental ontological category and change of properties, change of location and whatever are part of reality. It's just that we can't use a priori or just arbitrary assumptions about what identity ought to be in terms of properties or actions and say, okay, now we're gonna revise or even eliminate or reduce our concept of entity. So if what we mean by the entity in a case of the table is something that has as a necessary part of it our purpose, a mental purpose, does that mean that without minds there would be no such things as tables? Well, yes, but not because tables are like concepts. The table actually exists out there. So and once it exists, it's there regardless of who's aware of it, we could all, you know, some scourge could wipe out all human consciousness and the table would still exist, it is what it is. But there wouldn't be any tables unless people had made them in the first place. So is it the purpose of the table upon its making or is it that it has to continue to be used as a table in order to be a table? I would say it has to continue to be usable. I mean, the tables are made to support things at some level above the floor or ground. And once a shape that enables that, once an object with a shape that enables that function, then it is what it is regardless. I mean, and then at that point, you can ignore it. You can never ever put anything on it. You can put it out in the rain and just let the boards warp, whatever. But it's not a matter of that at every moment or slice of time, it depends on our conceptual identification of it. It's just that it's an artifact. It was man-made and not natural. So we have to ask, how did it come into existence? I mean, that's typically part of its identity. I think this is probably the most perfect segue of any of the conversations I've had because next on my list of the questions I want to ask you is about universals. And this is when you say the table has a shape and has a certain property to it that even if we don't identify it, it still remains a table. Well, I have to ask you about shapes and properties and universals. So are you, so first of all, a good way to start would be if you could just explain what the problem of universals is in philosophy and maybe traditional approaches and then what you see as Rand's offered solution to the problem of universals. Okay, sure. The problem of universals was originated really by, I would say, Plato, the first one who had a clear conception of it. We take the concept of human being or take the concept of table, let's stay with tables. We have the concept of table, but there are many tables in the world. And so it seems like there's an issue here there are many individual tables, but they seem to be all of a kind, all of a type. And how do we explain that? They seem to have a table. There must be something in them. A table-ness or tablehood. Now, so that was one route to Plato's theory, which is called extreme realism, which is there is a abstract object in another dimension called table, the table. And all tables in our world are reflections of that somehow. It gets a little, I mean, the metaphysics here is a little spooky, you're mysterious, but he made a much bigger point about in regard to numbers because we can look at sets of doubles, trios, sets of four, sets of five, sets of six, and there are many such sets for any cardinality. So where do we get the number three? Well, mathematical universals have to be in some other realm. And there's still quite a few people in philosophy and mathematics who believe that. So that's extreme realism. Aristotle said, no, the universal is in the thing itself. Each thing has an essence. And in respect of its essence, it is identical to every other thing with that same essence. Every horse is identical qua horse with every other horse. It's just that it has other attributes that are unique in particular to it. And its essence is embodied in different matter. You know, one horse is flesh, another horse is flesh, but they have the same essence. That's a more reasonable, you know, this worldly kind of theory, but I don't think it's sustainable because the only reason for believing, we don't literally see those essences in things. We don't see horses, we just see, you know, this particular horse in the pasture. That's what we see. We don't see the horse in this, per se. So we have to infer the existence of that ontological element. What's the basis of the inference? The only basis has ever been offered, as far as I can see, is that's what's needed to make our concept of horse objective because our concept is unitary and reversal. And, but Rand came along and said, no, you're assuming that the mind has to be some diaphanous reflection of the world, but no, the mind, in this case now, we're talking about the conceptual faculty, is a cognitive faculty with a specific mode of operation and that mode of operation is the capacity to abstract from, to abstract into a common mental unit from the similarities and differences within a group of similar things. And that puts them closer to the camp of what are called nominalists in the history, the theory of reversals. But unlike the nominalists in modern philosophy, Barkley and Hume are the two classic examples. But what makes them nominalists is that they say there are no abstract concepts either in the mind. They're only images. There's a mind image of the horse. It's just that when I hear the word horse and hear a statement about horses, my mind will call up all the similar images. But there's not even an abstract concept in the mind. So Rand would sometimes be described as a conceptualist. There are concepts that are genuinely abstract in the sense of they stand for an open-ended set of things that differ, as she said, only in measurement, only in specific degrees along some dimension. So that's where, that's kind of a quick cook's tour of the problem of reversals. And it's why I said earlier, it's really tied in. It's really the same problem, it's a problem of concepts. Okay, so let me try to rephrase and see if I do an accurate job of rephrasing the circumstance and then Rand's resolution. So talking about the horses, what is it that all horses have in common? Well, you have the Plato's extreme realist position, which is that there is such a thing as hoarseness that is so real that it exists separate of any actual horse in another realm. That is the platonic horse out there. And then horses in this world are mere reflections of the horse. Aristotle might have said, well, there is such a thing as hoarseness in the world, but it's in the individual horses. You can't take the hoarseness somehow out of the horse. Rand is saying, well, yes, there is, or maybe I should put it this way. What hoarseness is, is a concept that we apply to a bunch of different particulars. Is that fair? But there's no metaphysical hoarseness that is somehow outside of our concept of it. Is that correct? Yes, that's exactly right with, I would phrase it in one respect slightly instead of that concept of abstraction that we apply to things. I would say it's an abstraction that we abstract from things. Because Rand and objectivism, I mean, the whole idea of objectivity that is kind of our core commitment is that there is a basis in reality for concepts. And that basis is the actual real similarities and real differences among things. Isn't that the Aristotelian position that we recognize the hoarseness, let's say, in all the horses, and then we abstract away and then we have the concept of hoarseness? Well, yes, but Aristotle thinks that for that to work or to be valid, you don't have to have the horse essence out there in the horses. So then what is Rand saying? What is the thing that she's abstracting from? Each horse has its own specific properties, its own specific nature. But that's not essence. Color and patterning of colors, a certain hardness of a certain speed of maximum gait, et cetera, et cetera. No two horses are identical in every respect. But when you look at horses in a pasture or lined up at the racetrack and you can see those differences quite clearly, but when a dog enters a picture or a human being, you say, oh, well, the difference is between any one horse and the dog is way, way more than the difference between any two of these creatures lined up here at the gate. So that means I'm gonna separate these animals, these particular animals, and because they're so similar, their similarities brought out by the, even though they differ among themselves, those differences pale in significance, visual significance that start with perceptual level from by comparison with the difference any one of them has with a dog or a human being. So we form, we say we were aware of the differences among the horses. They have different measurements. This was a random semi-technical term, different measurements along the different dimensions, in this case of color, height, gait, speed. But we omit those measurements as merely quantitative as opposed to the really qualitative differences in along those same dimensions of shape, height, speed, et cetera of the dog or the human person. So we form the concept horse by omitting those measurements. Now, this is a complex theory and the more you get into it, the more interesting and insightful I think it becomes. And having written about this, I know I am skating over lots of philosophical questions that people might have, but that is the essence of the process that Rand put forward. And what it means is that there is no horseness out there in those beautiful animals lined up at the gate. No, each of them is what it is. But they have similarities along dimensions that allow us to achieve cognitive unity by forming the concept of horse to stand for them. And so that we say, this one's a horse, that one's a horse, the other one's a horse. We're saying exactly the same thing about each and every one of them. We can use the concept of horse to unite all knowledge of all the other properties that they have that we discover about them. So that's why I think it's not an Aristotelian kind of view, literally. Okay, now I think I'm getting close to grasping this. And to my surprise, I think this is actually, this is pretty close to how I'm trying to put things together in my own worldview. So would you say that the error in the Aristotelian conception is that it's treating hoarseness as a kind of property? That that's the kind of thing that is in the horses is the hoarseness. And what Rand is saying, well, no, there are properties there, but hoarseness isn't one of them. It's all these other properties about, like you said, the hardness of the hoof and maybe the color and the size and the shape. And then on top of those fundamental properties that are in the world, we place the label of hoarseness. So it's kind of a package of fundamental properties go into this concept of what a horse is. Right, right, yes. Okay, now. I think that's the view we've got it right. I like that. But I have to ask about those fundamental properties then. So this view, it's a kind of weak, and just in the way that I'm thinking about it, it's kind of a weak Aristotelian position in the sense that the essence isn't there, the essence of hoarseness isn't there, but there is some real properties in the world that exist separate of us. So maybe you could say the hoarseness doesn't exist separate of us, because that's a concept. But what the hoarseness refers to in the world actually would exist because it's the properties that you've described. But for those properties, you're saying that those properties are real things in the world that would exist separate of any conceiving of them. That shape is something unlike higher level taxonomic distinctions, shape is something that is kind of base level. Oh, okay. Yeah, I think I see where you're going with this. Taxonomy, would, you know, when you go from horse to animal, horse to mammal, to onward up to animal and so forth, or downward into types and different breeds of horse, those are different levels of abstraction, so that's all conceptual. But the reason for forming concepts or one of the great advantages of them is that it allows us to, well, it makes it possible for what we observe about one horse to be extended or generalized inductively to other horses unless we have evidence against that. Now, most of the properties that I mentioned as the perceptual bases for forming the concept of horse would never go into a definitional force because we know enough, the adult concept, and especially even more of the scientific concept is, they are living organisms. Each one is an organism in its own rights, very specific, it has a specific form and set of history of activities of respiration, digestion, reproduction, et cetera. Its stomach works in its own individual way, very similar to the stomach of any other horse, but those are different properties. The external color and height and gait turn out to be, you know, not what we would want to use to define the concept. We do want to get to what is epistemologically essential in our definition of horse, and by that, this is more of another part of the objective theory, essences are epistemological, not metaphysical, as Aristotle said, what that means is we want our concepts to refer to those aspects of the things in our category, our concept, those aspects which underline, explain the greatest number of other attributes and which are really can't be changed without an entity becoming something, you know, outside the category. So a horse could change its color, and note, I mean, the difference, what makes horses horses at the end of the day is not any specific color, not any specific height within a certain range, we're emitting those measurements, they are, but the fact that they're alive, that they have mammals structure and beyond that, you know, whatever other taxonomical, wherever they fit in the biological taxonomy, common properties, those are more essential and because they explain what horses can do and why they eat what they eat and why they're so fast, et cetera, et cetera, and they have an evolutionary history as well, which is very important for the biological understanding of what makes a horse a member, you know, what we should use in conceptualizing an animal as a horse, like, you know, interbreeding. So I don't want to say that, for Rand, the only real properties are the ones that we can perceive, every property, every individual concrete specific property of anything that exists is real, whether we can perceive it or not. The spin of atoms, the spin of an atom is a real property of that atom as an individual thing, even though we can't see it, we know of it only through long chains of inference, but does that help? Yes, and this naturally goes into Rand's theory of concepts and it sounds like there's kind of a blending of the epistemology and the metaphysics into this theory of concepts, which correct me if I'm wrong, I think Rand considered one of her greatest or maybe her greatest contribution to philosophy was her theory of concepts, right? I believe she did, I do, and that's thanks to me because I think in ethics and also in aesthetics, she had some really important fundamental insights too, but this theory of concepts to me and what we label theoretically as the measurement omission theory of concepts is a huge breakthrough, huge insight. What are the other aspects of Rand's theory of concepts do you find compelling? So for example, she has a theory about where concepts come from. Do you find that persuasive, can you tell us about that? What other parts of the theory you think are so important? Yes, there are, this might be, get us into a whole pretty long discussion, but given this theory of concepts and the fact that they serve a cognitive purpose, leads Rand to emphasize the, well, a couple of things. One is concepts remain, they're not frozen by a definition that we happen to have at a given time. You know, a lot of analytic philosophers going back, you know, contemporary academic philosophers say, all right, the concept is where it is that let's define as necessary and sufficient conditions and then those are the only, anything that meets those necessary and sufficient conditions is automatically an instance of a concept and that's all we have to consider. Rand said a concept integrates a group of actual things, a category of things in reality and therefore has to remain open to everything that we discover about those things, things in that category. And so as we advance in our knowledge, we move from understanding trait, this category and defining the relevant concept in terms of relatively superficial features and properties of the things to deeper, more causally explanatory ones. So that's a contextual theory that the mind is latched onto this group of things in the world, is open-ended set of things in the world and now through study we, the concept remains open. It's like a file, she is the file cabinet or file folder, it's an analogy, everything you learn, you just put in that file folder. So that's one important aspect and I believe that that's really important pedagogically to, you know, as a former teacher, well, I still am a teacher really. I've used that to help students take concepts that they kind of sort of understand and get them to have a clearer and fuller understanding of that very concept that is, you know, that they have. I mean, Socrates was doing the same thing much better than I ever did back in ancient Greece. But so that's one thing. Another thing is that because concepts are formed through a certain cognitive process and concepts are formed from or reacquired concepts through, you know, related but some of different processes, each concept is tied to reality through a certain chain of, you know, abstract connections that your mind has drawn and observed. So there are certain conceptual fallacies that Rand talked about and some of them I've never encountered anywhere else in epistemology. The one she probably best known for is what's called the Stolen concept. If you have a concept, if you use one concept in a way that negates a prior concept that it depends on, that's the fallacy. The classic example is the statement by, I believe it was French socialist Prudence in 19th century, property is theft. Right. All right. If there's no property, there can't be theft. So, I mean, that's a case of, you know, sawing off the very branch you're standing on cognitively. And not too many people, not too many philosophers, I think, have really appreciate the phenomena that there are conceptual fallacies as well as the more straightforward, familiar propositional fallacies of ad hominem and circular reasoning, et cetera. Yeah, that's a good point. I see that all the time. One of the areas that I enjoy studying is logic and epistemology, and you see that all the time. I'm sure you're familiar. There's a school of thinking called paraconsistent logic where people say, well, in some circumstances, you can have something that is true and false at the same time. I would say that's what they're doing. I like that analogy. They're sawing off the branch that they're standing on. Yeah, that involves, you know, putting aside the law of non-contradiction, so. Right, yeah. Well, unfortunately, we are out of time. This has been a fantastic conversation. I appreciate you being a generous. We went a little bit over. One, I think we have proved definitively it is definitely the case that objectivism is a philosophy that should be taken seriously because we've just scratched the surface and there's so much here to talk about. Well, I agree and I've enjoyed it immensely. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk and I'd be happy to join you again for another conversation if at any time you choose. I'd love to have you back on. I feel like this is one of those areas that it just doesn't get as much investigation as it should. So, though I disagree with Rand on some things, I definitely want to give her her due. So, thanks again. Thank you. Take care. All right, that was my conversation with Dr. David Kelly. I hope you guys enjoyed it. Make sure to check out the show notes page this week, steve-patterson.com slash 61. And if you like this content, if you appreciate that Ein Rand is being taken seriously and you like this show, you can become a supporting listener at patreon.com slash steve-patterson. You can pitch in just a dollar or two whenever new articles or videos or podcasts like this are released. All right, thanks everybody. I'll talk to you again next week.