 Concepts are the uniquely human method of intellectual functioning. Each concept we hold, each idea, is a kind of storehouse. It synopsizes and symbolizes huge quantities of information. Ideas are in effect the microfilm of the mind. Consider how primitive and limited our mental operations would be if we could be aware of, think about and deal with mentally only the separate concretes that we encounter. Only this chair and that chair and that chair, but never chairness. Never the concept which stands for every chair that ever did or ever will exist. Or consider what would happen to our mental capacity if we could be aware of the concept chair, but we couldn't build concepts out of concepts. We couldn't form the concept furniture or the more of the still broader concept manufactured objects. Ideas are the tools of human thought, the tools of logical inference. They're what make human thought possible. For instance, if we're just considering the issue of individual rights, think of how much that simple concept covers, how many different concretes and how many other concepts it pertains to and integrates. It covers the concept of freedom of speech and any concrete expression of that idea. The concept of freedom of the press, the concept of a free market. Think what would happen if we tried to think about political issues and instead of having the concept of rights, we had to spell out in detail each time every concrete which that idea summarizes would be mentally paralyzed. Intelligence means the mind's ability to deal with ideas. When we're considering the intelligence of any living being, whether it be man or animal, we're considering the degree of that organism's cognitive capacity. When we speak of man whose distinctive cognitive capacity is the ability to deal with concepts, with ideas, then we measure a man's intelligence by the width and complexity of the concepts that he can integrate and work with. It is only man who has the ability to ask questions of nature and of the universe. In proportion as men are intelligent, they ask wider meaning more fundamental and abstract, wise about more things. In order to understand other men and the world we live in, in order to think efficiently, we have to constantly ask ourselves what accounts for the phenomena that I'm observing? What's the principle that will make those things intelligible? In other words, we must think in principles. It means always trying to understand one's perceptions, one's experiences, observations by reference to general principles. It means the habitual method of looking at reality in this manner. The habit of saying, what do I know or can I figure out or can I find out that will make this intelligible? Do you request for a why, any attempt to understand an event to give the reason for it, means to relate it to a wider principle? We all have to make reference to principles in order to function at all. The only question is, do we do it consciously and deliberately and therefore with a reasonable expectation of accuracy and do we do it as a consistent habitual policy? Consider the simplest problem of human life and what would happen if we attempted to solve such problems without the application of principles? Say the decision we face on a given evening was simply whether to stay home and do some work or go to a movie. If we don't make that decision by reference to a wider principle, we could only decide by what we feel like or by a momentary whim or perhaps by an unthinking obedience to a sense of duty. What we'd have to do in order to decide rationally and in so simple an instance we wouldn't have to do it explicitly but it would be implicit in our thinking, would be to grasp the wider importance of our career in the total of our values and then to consider the relationship of the work we could do this evening to that career. In that context we could make a reasonable decision. I want to give you an illustration of the method involved in thinking in principles. In the Passion of Ion Rand, my biography of Ion, I describe the means by which she arrived at the idea for the theme of the Fountainhead. I'll read the description to you and as you listen try to see the principle behind what her mind was doing. I quote, The theme of the Fountainhead, which she identified as individualism versus collectivism, not in politics but in man's soul, had been born on the day that Ion grasped the distinction between two basic types of human motivation. A young woman who lived in the same Hollywood apartment as Ion and Frank had an important position as an executive assistant at RKO where Ion was working in the wardrobe department. Ion watched the woman's professional struggle with fascination. She was battling Ion felt with a desperate amoral ferocity, scheming, manipulating, conniving to advance her career. The woman was passionately ambitious, so was Ion. The woman was enormously hard working, so was Ion. Yet Ion sensed a basic difference in the nature of their ambition, a difference of profound moral and psychological importance. Seeking a clue to the principle involved, she asked the young woman one day, what is your goal in life? What is it that you want to achieve? The young woman answered immediately as if the answer had long been clear in her mind. She said, I'll tell you what I want. If nobody had an automobile, then I would want to have one automobile. If some people have one, then I want to have two. Ion was never to forget her feeling of incredulity, indignation, contempt. Her mind raced with the implication she saw in the young woman's statement. She knew that in a few brief sentences she'd been given the key to answer the question she'd wondered about for years, the question about people whose values and actions seemed incomprehensibly irrational, but how can they? In future years she would say it was like a light bulb going on. Without that woman's statement, I don't think I could ever have arrived at the explanation. I owe the fountain head to that. It was typical of Ion's method of thinking that she searched for a fundamental principle that would make the woman's attitude intelligible, rather than leaving it at all she cares about is material possessions, or she wants to feel superior. It was typical of Ion's method of considering intellectual issues that from a brief verbal exchange she would work her way to a dissection of human motivation. The woman Ion thought would conventionally be called selfish, but wasn't herself that which thinks, judges, values and chooses precisely what she lacked. I want to achieve things that are important, important objectively and reality in fact, Ion thought. She wants only to make an impression on others. I choose my own goals. I decided that I wanted to write and what I wanted to write. She struggles to imitate the goals chosen by others. I set my own standards. Her desires are dictated by the standards of others. Why? What is the concept that will name the essence of the difference involved? She was led to define two different ways of facing life. Two antagonists, two types of man. The man of self-sufficient ego, of first-hand independent judgment and the spiritual parasite. The dependent who rejects the responsibility of judging. The man whose convictions, values and purposes are the product of his own mind. And the parasite who is molded and directed by other men. The man who lives for his own sake and the collectivist of the spirit who places others above self. The prime mover whose source of movement is within his own spirit and the soulless being who is movement without an internal mover. The creator and the second-hander. Howard Roark and Peter Keating. End quote. Now what would the ordinary person do if he noticed that there seemed to be a difference between the nature of his ambition and the ambition of someone else? He might conclude something illuminating such as we seem to be different or it takes all kinds to make a world. What he probably wouldn't do is to see consciously to understand the difference by means of a wider, more fundamental principle. Or if you were a little more philosophical and realized that his conclusions were not explanations, he might think, I wonder what accounts for the difference and leave the matter at that with only the mental note that there's a question here. Observing irrationality in other people, he wouldn't have asked what is the principle that explains their behavior. He would simply have shrugged it away with the solution such are people. We don't automatically think in principles any more than we automatically focus or front seat drive. And we will not easily think in principles if we haven't been accustomed to doing so. It requires self-consciousness, training, work. We must constantly remind ourselves when we're faced with a fact or event that we don't understand, not to reach for the easiest explanation, but to try to relate those new facts to principles we've already learned, to our past knowledge, and if we don't have the knowledge, then to look for new principles, new ideas, new abstractions that we haven't applied in the present context. I want now to turn to some alternatives to thinking in principles. The first failure of this kind can be called being concrete bound. To be concrete bound is to attempt to deal with, to understand a specific situation without the guidance of any wider concepts. It means simply staring at separate facts and trying to come to conclusions about them with no reference to the principles which alone can make them intelligible. Let me illustrate the form in which we see this phenomenon constantly. Imagine that you have a young friend who has an emotional conflict and he's come to you for advice. His mother wants him to go into the profession of law in order to carry on a long-standing family tradition. His mother is ill and tends to become much worse when she is crossed. Your friend has no interest in law but is despairingly thinking of going into it nevertheless giving up the career to which he truly is devoted that of medicine for the sake of his mother. You discuss with him what's wrong with self-sacrifice. You explain that if he chooses law he will be sacrificing his happiness his first-hand judgment of what's best for him his whole life in the name of his mother's irrational devotion to tradition. Your friend is convinced he grasped the principle you've discussed the disaster of self-sacrifice and he sees that the principle does apply to his situation. He's going to study medicine, he tells you. Several months later your friend about to begin his medical studies comes to you with another problem. What he really wants is to go into medical research but he feels he ought to go into general practice instead because as a researcher he can't be sure he'll discover anything of great value but in medical practice he could be certain of helping a great many people. He's stating again, this time with different concretes the exact conflict that you discussed before self-sacrifice versus self-interest. He's once more considering the sacrifice of his own desires and happiness to the needs of others. What has happened or has failed to happen inside your friend's mind? He might very well have agreed with the point of your first conversation. He may have been honestly convinced that self-sacrifice is wrong. Where did that knowledge go and why was it not applied to the new situation? Most probably your friend had never formed the mental habit of judging concrets by means of principles of integrating his theoretical knowledge to new situations. When he's faced with a problem he doesn't try to interpret it in the light of his theoretical understanding. He doesn't attempt to look for the principle that would untangle it. He gazes blankly at concrets at his dilemma as if he had no knowledge or as if any theoretical knowledge were irrelevant to his understanding of the situation. If you don't attempt to interpret a concrete problem or event in the light of a principle the fact that you've once learned the relevant principle won't help you. You might as well never have learned it. By this method of thinking or rather non-thinking a man who once grasped the concept of property rights won't be able to decide whether or not to rob a bank. A man who once understood the principle of rational self-interest won't know whether or not to jump into a cannibal's pot. A man who has identified the meaning of justice won't be able to decide whether or not to condemn a mass murderer. A man who has grasped the intellectual importance of front seat driving won't be able to decide whether to think about an urgent problem or to passively daydream. This is being concrete bound. If you want to see being concrete bound in action look at conservative politicians who tell you never mind ideology for the moment. We have to get Republicans elected avoiding the fact that it matters which Republicans that if we don't judge candidates by their relationship to our political ideology we can't achieve the victory of that ideology. Or look at the people who saw communist Russia and saw Nazi Germany and decided that the opposite of communism is fascism who didn't look for the single common principle underlying both the systems the principle that man must exist for the state and therefore didn't grasp that communism and fascism are fundamentally identical. These are the people who now watch fascism growing in America and blinded by concretes say there can't be fascism in America. We believe in the welfare state and besides there's no stormtroopers there's no concentration camps there's no Hitler. They have never considered the relationship of the concretes they do see the government's gradual control of one area of the economy after another to the wider principle defining the essence of fascism which is government control of the economy not by means of open ownership of the means of production but by means of a snowballing regulation of business. There is a kind of counterfeit thinking in principles which many people practice by which one may appear to be dealing with abstractions but in fact one is dealing with what can be called floating abstractions. A floating abstraction is any concept or idea which we don't know how to concretize which we believe or attempt to use in our thinking without clearly knowing what that concept actually means in reality without knowing what facts it refers to. If we hold floating abstractions then we understand words, concepts, ideas, theories not in terms of what they denote but in terms of what they connote that is in terms of their emotional meaning to us. The essential function of a concept is denotation the naming of a concrete specific attribute, event or entity in reality. Many concepts of course do suggest things to us one of the purposes of a fiction writer is precisely to use the connotative function of words but we may safely react to the emotional significance of an idea if and only if we're first aware of its exact meaning so we can fail to think of principles in one of two ways by trying to understand facts without reference to principles which means being concrete bound or by holding principles with no real idea of what they refer to in reality which means holding floating abstractions. For instance, consider the people who say that political freedom is valuable, is good, is important and that we ought to spend billions of tax dollars improving our inner cities. In their minds the concept of political freedom of floating abstraction referring to nothing in particular connoting an undefined set of circumstances that arouses in them an emotion of approval. It means something good, helpful, therefore it. If they concretize their abstractions if they recognize that freedom means the absence of physical coercion and that the money poured into the inner cities is taken by force from men who have earned it to be given to those who haven't they couldn't possibly applaud both freedom and the principle behind the so-called help for the inner cities. The concept of sacrifice has almost no denotation at all in the minds of most of the people who use it if it had far fewer of them would use it with approval. Ask people who uphold this concept precisely what they mean by it and see how many of them are able to tell you. They have an emotional feel of its meaning sufficient for many of them to ruin their lives practicing it. But few understand that sacrifice means not the vaguely good or the undefinedly noble it doesn't mean giving a people a hand in trouble or being kind but the act of giving up a value for that which is not a value that it means in concrete application such acts as giving your life to save a man you despise or renouncing your own convictions for ideas you consider wrong. I once knew a young man of 17 who having discovered the fountain head was determined that he was going to live for himself and not be an object of sacrifice. He would be independent and selfish. As a result his bewildered parents were unable to get any sleep. He insisted with moral righteousness on playing his television as loudly as he pleased at three in the morning on the grounds that to do so suited his selfish purpose. This seems very young which it was and foolish which it was. But consider a statement from the eminent philosopher John Dewey. After a trip to the Soviet Union in the 1930s he stated that the Soviet Union was an undertaking quote probably the first in the world to attempt scientific regulation of social growth. Now what concretely do these concepts mean? Social growth means the movement of society in a direction which is called growth if the viewer approves of it. Scientific regulation means the regulation of people's lives by the state. In other words it means dictatorship. When one concretizes what Dewey has said one would agree that the Soviet Union was probably the first in the world to attempt to achieve the values of communism of complete collectivism by means of an absolute dictatorship. But that's not what Dewey intended to say. He also wrote that the Russian Revolution was quote a liberation of people to consciousness of themselves as a determining power in the shape of their ultimate fate. If one grasps that the idea of shaping one's fate means in fact the freedom to choose one's goals and to act to achieve them then if the Russian people believed that they were now free to shape their feet under the heel of an arbitrary dictatorship which determined everyone's goals and actions one can only conclude that Dewey is saying that a whole nation has gone totally insane. I have to add that Dewey ultimately changed his view of the noble experiment and became an anti-gunist. But these were the kind of floating abstractions that hundreds of thousands of people fell for during and after the red decade of the 1930s. They fell for them in many cases partly through their own evasion partly through the brainwashing they received in their schools, their books, their newspapers and partly through the mental mechanism of holding floating abstractions of not figuring out what their abstractions meant in reality. It was once suggested that philosophy would return to sanity if philosophers had to put down their ideas in the form of fiction. That is, if they had to dramatize and concretize their ideas showing by that means what their ideas mean in action and in human life. Consider for instance the very wise philosophical idea that the body is evil and only the spirit is good. To many people this sounds vaguely uplifting because although or because they don't know what it means. But imagine that they attempted to make it the theme of a story. They would have to know that it means more than that a businessman should feel mildly guilty in church on Sunday because he enjoys making money. They would have to know that it means there should be no businessman, no New York City, no electric light, no brain surgery, no cure for cancer, that we should all sit and starve to death while purifying our souls. Or imagine trying to concretize the philosophical theory that matter is an illusion, trying to show what that means in reality. In what reality I don't know. It means that the material wavelengths you think are carrying my voice to you don't exist, that the chairs you sit that you think are preventing you from falling to the floor don't exist. And neither does the floor, neither do your physical bodies. But by telling themselves that such a theory sounds profound and intellectual by giving it no concrete meaning whatever people are able to endorse it and never be aware of what an absurdity they're uttering. Years ago at a party a man was insisting to me that no one can prove that anything exists. And I said to him, if you don't think you exist, I'd appreciate it if you'd stop talking to me. I would be very embarrassed to be seen having a conversation with empty air. He left me at once, angrily, I'm sure concluding that I didn't have the spiritual sensitivity to understand basic issues of philosophy. Clearly we all learn many of our concepts from other men. One of the great advantages of society is that we don't have to each of us invent the wheel all over again. But this creates a potential problem that we have to be aware of. In learning ideas from other men rather than arriving at a given piece of knowledge as a result of our own thinking we necessarily and quite legitimately skip certain mental steps that would otherwise have to go into the learning process. What we skip when we learn an idea from someone else is the firsthand observation of the facts that logically led to that particular piece of knowledge. So that if you are to fully understand an idea you have to reverse the process that the person who explained that concept to you had to go through to arrive at it. You have to find the kind of concretes that made it possible for the man to the kind of concretes that gave rise to and are explained by the idea he told you about. If instead say the issue is what is a floating abstraction. If you were to leave here with the idea that a floating abstraction is something or other that makes thinking inefficient that it's some sort of misuse of ideas then you'll be holding a floating abstraction about the nature of floating abstractions. The mind that is concrete bound that only looks at specifics, at concretes and the mind that uses floating abstractions not knowing what his principles really mean in reality they seem to be opposites. One is a rather unthinking boob the other an abstract ivory tower intellectual but if we look more deeply if we look for the fundamental principle beneath the two methods we'll find that they stem from the same basic idea the implicit belief that there is no necessary connection between facts and ideas between reality and thought and there will not be much difference in the disastrous errors to which these two methods of thinking lead. How much longer have I got? I want to briefly discuss another crucial component of efficient thinking the use of language of words in one's thinking. If you were to take any idea which you're absolutely convinced is true and for which you know the proof and try to prove it in your own mind without the use of words I think you'll see immediately that you can't do it we can't form or retain our thoughts in consciousness we can't order them in a logical progression we can't front seat drive without the use of words. Language is the cardinal tool of thought language is the means by which we denote and work with concepts it's the means by which we retain and hold our concepts in our mind if thinking in words we make an error and come to a false conclusion we have the means to correct the error because we know what idea we have accepted and upon what facts and observations we based it it is to the extent that we don't use language in our thinking do not formulate concepts in words that were at the mercy of chance of our subconscious, of our stale thinking of irrational associations of emotional over generalizations the method of the backseat driver is to substitute emotions and images for language in the process of problem solving it is as though the backseat driver is attempting in his own mind to form a syllogism by introducing as the first premise a verbalized statement of fact then he paints a mental picture intended to represent the second premise then he tries to derive a conclusion from the union of the concept and the picture but it can't be done whatever conclusion he reaches won't have been derived from the union of a picture and a concept the memory of an event isn't a concept an emotion isn't a concept a picture isn't a concept thinking, conceptual thinking begins with the employment of language only the most primitive kinds of mental processes are possible without the use of language for instance we might be able to project the idea the cat is on the mat by mentally visualizing a cat on a mat but we couldn't grasp the nature and importance of a focused consciousness or understand what a concept is or know why a productive life is superior to an unproductive life or understand why an dictatorship it is the worst of men who rise to the top by means of mental pictures there's obviously some form of subverbal thinking in which we do engage and in which we necessarily engage if there were no such phenomenon as subverbal thinking we couldn't account for the fact that man ever learned to use language man had to be engaged in some kind of mental process before language evolved a mental process which didn't employ language but which made possible the gradual development of language we don't go from a state man didn't go from a state of complete non-thinking to a state of conceptual verbal thinking similarly we are all aware of the phenomenon of struggling to put a thought into words a thought that isn't yet in words but which is still in some sense a thought but existing only in a subverbal form but we don't know what that thought is until we can translate it into words both in the history of the race and in the thinking of any individual this subverbal state is not a substitute for clearly formed conceptual thinking it's the mind's first grasping for concepts and let me clarify this through your own experience suppose you're struggling to grasp some new principle you've observed a number of concretes and you vaguely sense that there's something important that they have in common but you don't quite know what the common factor is your mind moves from one concrete to another and you struggle to pull out the feature you're groping for then at some point you say, I've got it and you utter a word or combination of words that stand for the thing you have been trying to identify it isn't that you first clearly and consciously arrive at the concept and then as a separate act decide what you'll name it rather the act of naming it is the final stage in the process of forming the concept only when you have named it can you think efficiently with it now when I say one should think in words when problem solving does it mean that we should think literally as we would write should every step in the process be connected in full grammatical sentences in one's mind not necessarily and not usually and it's not required but what should at any point be what should be formulated in words when we're problem solving in clear grammatical sentences to the extent that a given problem is complex that's the extent to which we should formulate our thinking in words even when we're not dealing with a highly complex problem we still should as at a minimum form our questions and the answer to those questions in words I've said that the essence of front seat driving is the process of question asking of raising first the overall question we want to answer then the sub-questions that have to be answered before the overall question can be answered these ought to be fully, carefully, intelligibly formulated in words because the question side posts they keep our mind moving in the right direction they prevent us from losing ourselves in asides and irrelevancies we should formulate in words in our thinking the purpose of a thought process what we want to solve the sub-questions we need to answer the key points along the way and our final answer that's how we keep a conscious check on what our mind is doing and at the end of a thought process we should be able to name the logic behind our conclusion we might have arrived at the conclusion by a roundabout way we might have tried different approaches asked different questions some of which turned out to be irrelevant when we reach a conclusion then we don't have to formulate in words every step of the progression by which we got there since some of the steps weren't required but we should formulate in words the rationale the logic which justifies the conclusion the use of language is a necessary condition of efficient thinking but it isn't the only condition it's not a sufficient condition the question is granted that we use words in thinking what words? some of us in our thinking and speaking employ a kind of loose, inexact, approximate metaphorical, flowery use of language never thinking or speaking exactly we may prefer for instance to think of ourselves as sensitive and vulnerable when the literal fact is that we lack self confidence or we think that we have an artistic temperament when in fact we have a bad temper there is a logical fallacy called obfuscation which is the fallacy of using words to obscure or conceal meanings and we can do this in conversation or in our own minds and I quote from a book entitled Applied Logic the weakness of a questionable argument may be difficult to detect if the structure of the argument is concealed in a mass of words which contribute nothing to the meaning for this reason a person may appear to deal with an issue without actually doing so simply by using an excessive number of words it is often easier to avoid taking a stand on an issue in a thousand words than in fifty the fallacy of obfuscation then consists of using meaningless word groups either inadvertently or for the purpose of obscuring or avoiding an issue unquote most politician's speeches are monuments to this misuse of words but what is important for our purposes is the fact that we can use words in this manner not only in speaking but in our own heads we can form approximate habits of thinking we can formulate almost what we mean we can over detail we can skirt around certain issues we can be slightly off focus and we'll arrive as a result at mistake conclusions if any conclusions at all precision and simplicity are essential in dealing with ideas I want to conclude but a minute and a half there's a widespread thinking error which particularly hits us with regard to creative thinking and we'll call it thinking in a square a puzzle I once saw in a magazine illustrates the nature of this error and was the reason I gave it its name thinking in a square the puzzle showed a ruled square and inside it were a number of black dots apparently strewn at random within the square one was supposed to draw lines connecting those dots without lifting the pen through the paper such that all the dots would be linked by no more than four straight lines when I first tried to do it it seemed impossible to link all the dots without drawing six or seven lines I struggled and struggled but I couldn't solve it until it occurred to me that there was no reason why the lines I drew couldn't extend beyond the boundaries of the ruled square with this possibility in mind I easily saw that by extending the lines I drew beyond the boundaries of the square it was easy to join all the dots with only four lines and this was precisely the purpose of the puzzle it was to see if one would accept the limits that were suggested but not required by the existence of the square to think in a square means to try to solve a problem with a too narrow idea of the nature of the problem and of the intellectual approach that can be used to solve it it means constricting the range of one's thinking by an unnecessarily limited intellectual approach to it consider an example of thinking outside the square in the area of business Henry Ford's concept of mass production until his time it was taken for granted that an industrialist's profit was a function of how high a price he could charge but Ford didn't remain within the square of that idea he and he arrived at the conclusion that he a revolutionary conclusion at the time that he could improve his, increase his profit by mass producing goods and lowering their price to the consumer and that's how he became enormously wealthy the advance of thinking and knowledge has consisted of breaking through intellectual squares of questioning the given of asking what if the sun doesn't revolve around the earth what if molecules are not the smallest of all material entities what if candles are not the only means of creating illumination throughout history advances have been made in art and science and philosophy in every field of human endeavor by those who don't allow themselves to be mentally trapped by limiting assumptions from the artist who said why should a painter paint objects with black outlines around them when there are no such outlines in nature to the moralist who said why is it assumed that human life requires the sacrifice of some men to other men what if it doesn't to the scientist who said why do we assume that disease is a manifestation of the will of God and therefore not to be tampered with by man to the novelist who said why should only workers go on strike what would happen if all the creative minds went on strike in any thought process then from the simplest to the most complex if we find ourselves stopped we find we can't solve a problem we have to ask ourselves if it's possible to go outside the square to find a new direction or new approach or aspect that we hadn't considered before rather than working within the square of our past thinking or past assumptions which are no longer adequate thank you ladies and gentlemen