Indeed, and lots is very interesting.

The issue here, however, is the metaphysical status of 'concept'. In other words, granted, we form abstractions (concepts), analyze and memorize as three functions of thought. So are these three metaphysical entities to be added to realism and nominalism?

Please remember thatthe most general issue is the satus of universals: things or language?

EM

Merlin,

I liked most of that quote: If "concepts correspond to something that can be found in reality they are real and man's knowledge has a foundation in fact; if they do not correspond to something that can be found in reality they are not real"  To me, it is clear that there must be a difference between my concept of a unicorn and a horse. One is concept that has no real existents. The only things that can be called a "unicorn" that are out there in the world, will be photoshopped image, a painting or drawing, a statute, or a toy, or a written or spoken description of something that referrs to no actual existent. These concepts or or symbols or replicants are all of something that is only a figment of imagination. And that is different from the concept of a horse. The concept can exist, people can have fantasies in the imagination about particular horses that might not exist, or do exist but don't match in some way the imagined horse, there can be paintings, statutes, drawings, descriptions, toys, etc.... But there are also real, concrete existents.  The initial 'existent' that is 'perceived' when forming the unicorn concept, was in the mind as a figment of imagination.

What I don't like is to say: "if they [concepts] do not correspond to something that can be found in reality they are not real." But they are real as an entity in the mind of the individual and that individual might think it is of a real correspondent in reality. Maybe I'm being picky, but it seems to me that we need to have a category, or set of categories that identify concepts of things that don't exist, like unicorns, ghosts, etc. Because there is a lot of fictional material about ghosts, and material intended to be non-fictional which assert that ghosts are real, then these can be the referents for the concept. And that makes sense. It is an accurate concept if it says, "Ghosts are imaginary spirits of dead people and are most often found in fictional accounts or in non-fiction created by people who mistakenly believe that such a thing as a ghost could exist. In fact, there are no actual ghosts."

I agree with the conceptualist position of 'essence' being created/identified by the mind - being part of the act of conceptualizing as opposed to the position of perceiving it as property of the existent.

That's why visitors from other planets report back home that our planet Earth is basically inhabited by huge, steel-enclosed animals that belch out hydrocarbons.

They would also see all the people who came out of their dwellings, walking their dogs, bending down and scooping up the poop and carrying it back home.  From that the aliens would report back that small furry creatures appeared to be in charge. That they have these nearly hairless, two legged slave creatures that follow them about (fastened to the end of a leash), save their furry leader's droppings (perhaps as religious artifacts), and use those steel-enclosed things to take the little furry leaders from place to place.
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...it's always nice to assert that A is A, it's far better to what the 'A', in reality, really is.

Being able to say what A, in reality, really is will serve our practical needs most all of the time... But if we don't assert that A is A, we fall prey to those who say it isn't. And there are lots of problems down that road, including the confusion of trying to accomodate that that A we thought we knew about, is maybe not what we thought it really was. Not because of an error in thinking (which is correctable), not because of faulty input (which is correctable), and not because of new data (which will often make us rethink), but because if A might not be A, then the universe allows contradictions. That's why we need A is A. It doesn't give us certainty in any way except to say that certainty might be possible on any given thing.  And it tells us if we have a contradiction, that we need to do more thinking.

Another text with which Rand was familiar was Volume I of Windelband’s A History of Philosophy. On pages 287–99, he covers positions on universals up through the thought of Abelard, whom he classes as a conceptualist.

Rand’s notion of what conceptualism amounts to is at odds with the notion in Windelband. Her notion was in step with the view in the book by Moore, and as Saint-André observed in his endnote 9, her notion was in step with the view of conceptualism painted in Realists and Nominalists (1946) by Carré.

Merlin, concerning your last paragraph in #41, I would think the concrete occasions of bigger are identical in respect of bigger just as one molecule of water is identical to another. They differ in how hard it was to access the two qualitative identities, and in the case of bigger, it is a single quality (which must be specified, such as volume or weight), whereas in the two water molecules, it is collections of qualities (exhaustive and) identical between the two molecules.

By the way, bigger is one of those concepts I exclude as validly falling under Rand’s measurement-omission form of concepts, as it is a concept presupposed by measurement. Rand did not realize she should exclude the measurement-presupposition concepts because she fell into conflation at times, as you have also observed, over the some-any of membership relations with the some-any of measure-value relations. Then she would think of logical connectives such as and (which is a presupposition of measurement comprehension, though she was not thinking of that role) and say, “yes, here is an occasion of conjunction in thought, here is another occasion of conjunction in thought—some-any occasion, there you go.” Of course, in my estimation, this error and my corrective is modest next to what remains for measurement analysis of concepts, which I continue to develop.

In July 1945, Rand remarked in a letter to Isabel Patterson: “I am reading a long, detailed history of philosophy. I’m reading Aristotle in person and a lot of other things. . . . It’s actually painful for me to read Plato . . . . But I must do it.” The editor of Letters of Ayn Rand identifies that history of philosophy as the one by B. A. G. Fuller. I have obtained this text History of Philosophy – Ancient, Medieval, and Modern in its second edition, which was issued in 1945.

Chapter XXV is “The Question of Universals.” Fuller focuses on this issue in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, on Roscellinus, Anselm, William of Champeaux, and Abelard. He summarizes the ultra-realism of Plato and the substantial-forms realism of Aristotle. It is common to characterize Roscellinus as a nominalist, but Fuller and others object to applying this classification to him. As Fuller understands him, Roscellinus held against Plato’s existence of universals apart from and prior to individual things, and he held against Aristotle’s existence of universals in and as part of individual things; he held universals exist only in the mind. That is not to say they are not real. Quite the contrary. They really do exist in the mind, and they exist there as universals. So Fuller classes Roscellinus as a type of realist about universals. He reserves nominalist for the later view that universals do not exist anywhere and that it is with mental images standing for classes of things that we think, not with universals.

Against Roscellinus, William of Champeaux advocated a kind of Platonic ultra-realism. Those two men were teachers of Abelard, who argued against both of their theories. Abelard argued that universals “exist at the same time ante res (as Ideas in the divine intellect), in rebus (as the common natures shared by individual substances) and post res (as the general concepts formed by human minds).”

Abelard a Moderate Realist. This doctrine, which took a middle course between the extreme positions of William of Champeaux and Roscellinus is sometimes called conceptualism. But conceptualism, like nominalism, is now regarded by many historians of philosophy as a term more properly applied to later teaching, and Abelard is classified by them as a moderate realist—much more “moderate,” needless to say, than Roscellinus. His view was later adopted, with some modifications, by Thomas Aquinas . . . . (376)

By the restrictive requirements for the classification nominalist mentioned by Fuller, I should say that Rand is not a nominalist. Specifically, her theory is not a version of what is now called resemblance nominalism. Any concept cast in her measurement-omission form of abstractions is a way of having abstract classes in mind (with words) without always requiring a mental image, exemplary or prototypical of the class. Such concepts are based on magnitude relations standing in the world. Basing such concepts on similarities in the world analyzable in terms of said magnitude relations bonds the concepts to something specific in the intended objects even if suspension of specific measure values and class membership (i.e., even if abstractness) is only in the mind. I now as ever think that Rand’s theory should not be classed a realism about universals and deserves the new name Objectivism about universals.

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PS

I'd like to add that Fuller's story of the road to nominalism from the kind of realism proposed by Roscellinus continues, on page 417, in the fourteenth century. He relays how in the thinkers Durand of Saint Pourcain (formerly a Thomist) and Peter Aureoli (formerly a Scotist) and William of Ockham the notion of abstract universal ideas is reduced to terms of sensory experience. "At the hands of this new teaching Universals as such simply vanished from human thinking as well as from every other form of existence." Although her theory is not a nominalist one, it would be not unreasonable to say that because she (i) replaced substantial forms with identities and (ii) replaced metaphysical essences with essential characteristic(s) alterable according to human state of knowledge about the dependency relations among things, Rand did away with universals. Fuller would ask whether her theory has us "abstract really general ideas from particular objects and entertain really universal concepts"? If yes, then her theory does not do away with universals by his lights. (See also my distinction for continued use of universals in Rand's theory: note [i] in post #1. )

Fuller's book was not one that Rand had simply checked from the public library and possessed only briefly. This book was in her own personal library. Nevertheless, it is questionable how much she returned to it after the 1945 reading, for further guidance in the history of philosophy. I say that because Fuller's presentation of Kant is extensive and excellent, and Rand's movement towards conception of Kant as an irrationalist, by the early '50's, and, by 1960 if not sooner, conceiving Kant's views as the root of irrationalism in subsequent philosophy is nowise a conception of Kant (a lopsided one concerning his content and his lines of influence) that she could get from Fuller.  

(Edited by Stephen Boydstun on 5/18, 7:29am)

Thanks, as always, but I had to google a bit to find PNC: Principle of Non-Contradiction. 

Thanks, Stephen.  Here is a link to the dissertation itself:

http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/8125/1/Salmieri_Dissertation_2008.pdf

(I downloaded it, but it is a work to be read, and I am reading other works for another paper due before 30 June.)

Here is Gregory Salmieri's curriculum vitae

http://philosophy.sites.unc.edu/files/2013/10/curvitae-salmieri.pdf

His ideas appear in two books by Allan Gotthelf, available via Google Books.

Teleology, First Principles, and Scientific Method in Aristotle's Biology

By Allan Gotthelf

A Companion to Ayn Rand

edited by Allan Gotthelf and Gregory Salmieri

Without having read the paper, I am not about to discuss it, but I do note that the pithy quote provided by Stephen gives pause.  If a concept has an objective basis, but need not be universal, then there must be an objective limit to the extent of the concretes (or narrower abstractions) subsumed.  When I say "book" there is no limit on the number of concretes that might be contained. All the matter and energy in the universe could be converted to books and we could still posit one more book: their index...  But would that apply to giraffes? I will have to read the paper...  See you in July ...

Has anyone other than mysaelf read Binswanger's HOW WE KNOW - if so, what are your thoughts, since this an enlargement of Ayn's monologue on concepts...

Thank you, Stephen.  That is valuable information (and well presented).

.

Look forward to your thoughts on it, Merlin.

I've been wanting to mention to you that in my close study of Peikoff's dissertation, he did a very sensitive and balanced view of Locke's epistemological views. I haven't written about that yet. I'm still in the Aristotle section. This last year there was a new translation of Metaphysics, and I must assimilate that into my remarks. So this is a slow production for me, but I'm getting there and with much profit for my own book.

On Peikoff's Dissertation

Prep