| | Jordan has referred to Post 12 in which he writes, Equating "measurement" with "trait" is implicit in ITOE. For instance on page 16, Rand gives green and long as potential common, albeit incommensurable, units of measurement, and in the same breath she calls them "characteristics," which I take as synonymous with "trait." Whoa! First of all, she doesn't give 'green' and 'long' as common units of measurement, in the sense that they share something in common. On the contrary, she refers to them as lacking a common unit of measurement. She writes, "All conceptual differentiations are made in terms of commensurable characteristics (i.e., characteristics possessing a common unit of measurement). No concept could be formed, for instance, by attempting to distinguish long objects from green objects. Incommensurable characteristics cannot be integrated into one unit." Her point is that if you're going to measure something, you have to measure it in terms of a common or commensurable characteristic. 'Green' and 'long' are incommensurable.
Secondly, she doesn't equate "measurement" with "trait" or "characteristic." She says that a characteristic is a unit of measurement, meaning that you can only measure something in terms of a common characteristic.
By the way, the passage that you refer to appears on Page 13, not Page 16. I think that both the hard and soft covers have the same pagination. And on the same page when discussing the concept of a table, she says shape is a measurement, then says shape is an attribute, which like "characteristics" I take as synonymous with "trait." Again, she doesn't say that shape is a measurement. She says that "shape represents a certain category or set of geometrical measurements" -- that "any shape can be reduced to expressed by a set of figures in terms of linear measurement." This is not the same a saying that shape is a measurement. Again, this is how I read "measurement" just with regard to concept formation. Rand uses "measurement" differently in other areas. For instance, see ITOE page 49 where she discusses anti-measurement. Where on Page 49 does she discuss "anti-measurement"? She does refer on that page to "anti-concepts", by which she means "words without specific definitions, without referents, which can mean anything to anyone." But there is no mention there of anything called "anti-measurement." Nor have I ever heard her use that term.
- Bill
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