| | Robert,
I only now looked at the stretch of conversation on pages 237–38 to which you referred in #0. Very often in that stretch, the pronoun you is merely the usage in which one could as well use the pronoun one.
Rand speaks that way chronically. So, for example, on page 236 where she says “but your understanding of the meaning of a concept and your knowledge about the referent . . . .” she could just as well say “but one’s understanding of the meaning of a concept and one’s knowledge about the referent . . . .”
Similarly, on page 238, from Binswanger “you don’t know about these referents . . . which is all that concerns you in regard to concept-formation” and, from Gotthelf, “you do know fully now what you mean.”
One might take Binswanger’s statement spanning 237-38 to be the same sort of talk. Binswanger saying “So in the argument against the analytic-synthetic dichotomy, when you say that newly discovered characteristics are included in the concept’s meaning, you mean they belong to the same units” could be understood to be saying only “So in the argument against the analytic-synthetic dichotomy, when one says that the newly discovered characteristics are included in the concept’s meaning, one means they belong to the same units.”
I would say that that much is being said in the statement, but there is more. “The argument” does not refer to Quine’s argument against the distinction. Nor the argument of Morton White. It refers to “the” Objectivist argument. There could be more to that argument, which may have been discussed at this seminar or in other verbal discussion, but anyway the Objectivist argument would include at least all the argument published in Peikoff’s essay. There is another reason, however, to think that Binswanger was not here using the pronoun you indifferently to one.
He does not refer to the synthetic-analytic essay, but to the synthetic-analytic argument. And as you noted, when he speaks of “newly discovered characteristics” being “included in the concept’s meaning,” he is referring back to rather dubious remarks of Rand earlier in the conversation (pp. 236–37). He is right, I think, to be wary of Rand’s slippage here away from the idea that a concept is only its units (as substitution elements), which are fixed by a definite class of particulars (the referents) organized with units (as measures) along dimensions such that in the context of one’s present knowledge the concept will be productive working with one’s other concepts. Rand gets into saying on page 237 that as one learns more about the referents of one’s concept, one knows more about the particulars that are those referents and more about the units that figure into one’s concept, yet: an alteration in one’s knowledge of the units has not altered one’s concept.(!) But I digress into some of the substantive issues (in which you have also indicated some interest). Anyway, Rand is here in oral discussion, which has loose ends and ambiguities and which Rand did not know would ever appear as published material.
Returning to your question on “the [Objectivist] argument against the analytic-synthetic dichotomy,” I conclude after this further look only what I had concluded in the previous post: there is no intimation here that Rand was the author of Peikoff’s essay, only that it was a paper with which, as published, she concurred in every way. Peikoff has spoken of giving Rand manuscripts on her philosophy that she would mark up, and they would discuss the shaky points or expressions, and the ones squarely wrong, and so forth. As the editor of Objectivity, I almost always had discussed with the authors, in great detail, the manuscripts that eventually made it to acceptance for publication (about one-fifth of those submitted were eventually accepted). In my case, I was not bringing them around to my own considered view of an issue, but talking about expression, about arguments counter theirs that they might want to address, about further research or analyses of others bearing on their topic, and so forth. (Our communication in those years was entirely by written letters, surface mail, except for some authors in Chicago, where oral discussion of the paper and my letters was feasible.) Essays in Objectivity not authored by me were seldom something I thought true in every way. Not so for Rand in the journals she edited.
You might like to ask Peikoff (not about that minute statement of Harry’s, but) what was the way Peikoff worked with Rand as editor on his paper. What was his professional learning that he brought to her learning on this topic? How did the idea of having such a paper get going, and how did it develop?
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