| | Marc,
I'm glad you appreciate rhetoric, even when's it directed against your own arguments. I admit, it was largely rhetorical and illustrative, rather than concrete-bound hard Aristotelian/Randian logic. I thought you might appreciate that approach.
I think you misunderstand something about rand's epistemology. It does not, as you say, demand "concrete definitions." In fact, I do not even know what that would be.
A definition only needs to indicate, within the limits of one's current understanding, what the referents of a concept are. It does not have to say anything about those referents or relate them to anything else, except where it is necessary to make the referents explicit and prevent confusion with anything else.
The fact is, things are already related in reality, and identifying things means identifying them in their actual context, the world they are found in. Whether explicitly stated or not, that identification implies their relationships to all other things.
It is reality that dictates the hierarchy of things, and therefore, our knowledge of them. To the extent one's knowledge does not reflect that hierarchy, one's own knowledge is limited and disintegrated.
I also think most people, especially philosophers, do not know what epistemology is, and, even Rand made this mistake on occasion. Epistemology is not the study of how we ought to reason, but the study of the nature of knowledge itself. If the nature of knowledge is correctly understood, how it ought to be acquired and addressed follows. Most philosophers jump into the middle of the question and just begin explaining what correct reason is, without the vaguest idea of what they are reasoning about, or why, since knowledge is just assumed. The premise seems to be, "we have knowledge but have no idea what it is nor do we need to bother to find out." Thus: Popper and Bayes.
Regi
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