Objectivist Epistemology and Ayn Rand Essay

The starting point of Objectivist Epistemology is the principle, presented by Rand as a direct consequence of the metaphysical axiom that Existence is Identity, that acquaintance is Identification. Objectivist epistemology9 studies how one can translate perception, i. e. , awareness acquired through the senses, into validated theorys that really identify the facts of reality. Objectivism states that by the method of reason man can earn knowledge (identification of the facts of reality) and rejects philosophical skepticism.Objectivism also rejects faith and feeling as sum of attaining knowledge. Although Rand acknowledged the importance of sense in humans, she maintained that the existence of emotion was part of our reality, not a separate means of achieving awareness of reality. Rand was neither a classical empiricist (like Hume or the system of logical positivists) nor a classical rationalist (like Plato, Descartes, or Frege). She disagreed with the empiricists mainly in th at she considered perception to be simply sense experience extended over time, limiting the scene of perception to automatic, pre-cognitive awareness.Thus, she categorized questionable perceptual illusions as errors in cognitive interpretation due to complexity of perceptual data. She held that objective identification of the values of attributes of existents is obtained by measure, broadly delimitate as procedures whose perceptual component, the comparison of the attributes value to a standard, is so simple that an error in the resulting identification is not doable given a focused mind.Therefore, according to Rand, knowledge obtained by measurement (the fact that an entity has the measured attribute, and the value of this attribute relative to the standard) is contextually certain. Ayn Rands most distinctive contribution in epistemology is her theory that designs are mightily formed by measurement omission. Objectivism distinguishes valid concepts from poorly formed conce pts, which Rand calls anti-concepts. piece of music we can know that something exists by perception, we can only identify what exists by measurement and logic, which are necessary to turn percepts into valid concepts.Procedural logic (defined by Rand as the art of non-contradictory identification) specifies that a valid concept is formed by omitting the variable measurements of the values of corresponding attributes of a ensnare of instances or units, but keeping the list of shared attributes a pathfinder with measurements omitted as the criterion of membership in the conceptual class. When the fact that a unit has all the attributes on this list has been verified by measurement, thence that unit is known with contextual certainty to be a unit of the given concept.9 Because a concept is only known to be valid within the range of the measurements by which it was validated, it is an error to assume that a concept is valid outside this range, which is its (contextual) scope. It is also an error to assume that a hypnotism is known to be valid outside the scope of its concepts, or that the certainty of a syllogism is known to be valid outside the scope of its premises. Rand ascribed scope violation errors in logic to epistemological intrinsicism. 94Rand did not consider the analytic-synthetic distinction, including the figure that there are truths in virtue of meaning, or that necessary truths and numeral truths are best understood as truths in virtue of meaning, to lay down merit. She similarly denied the existence of a priori knowledge. Rand also considered her ideas distinct from foundationalism, naive naturalism about perception like Aristotle, or representationalism (i. e. , an indirect realist who believes in a veil of ideas) like Descartes or Locke.Objectivist epistemology, like most other philosophical branches of Objectivism, was first presented by Rand in Atlas Shrugged. 5 It is more fully actual in Rands 1967 Introduction to Objectivist Epi stemology. 9 Rand considered her epistemology and its basis in reason so central to her philosophy that she remarked, I am not primarily an inspire of capitalism, but of egoism and I am not primarily an advocator of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows.