| | I don't own a recording of the early-1970s lecture by Leonard Peikoff that Adam is referring to, but I recall Peikoff saying the same thing: philosophy does not depend on science but science depends on philosophy.
According to the edited material from Rand's epistemology workshops, collected in the second edition of Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, Rand was making this point by 1971.
Here's an excerpt from my 1999 article on Ayn Rand's intellectual debts to modern cognitive psychology. I cite the workshops under the names of "Binswanger and Peikoff" because they edited the material. You can see the whole article at http://hubcap.clemson.edu/~campber/randcogrev.html.
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Rand insisted that philosophy in no way depends on the theories or findings of psychology. This tenet is usually not taken to indicate a distrust of psychology per se, although a pejorative comment can be found in her epistemology workshops (Binswanger & Peikoff 1990, 216): when another participant brings up mathematicians who are interested only in mathematical concepts, not their referents, she reacts, "That would be psychology, or psychopathology, and I can’t go into that." Normally her position is understood as an old-fashioned separation between philosophy and the "special sciences."
Philosophy by its nature has to be based only on that which is available to the
knowledge of any man with a normal mental equipment. Philosophy is not
dependent on the discoveries of science; the reverse is true.
So whenever you are in doubt about what is or is not a philosophical subject, ask yourself whether you need a specialized knowledge, beyond the knowledge available to you as a normal adult, unaided by any special knowledge or special instruments. And if the answer is possible to you on that basis alone, you are dealing with a philosophical question. If to answer it you would need training in physics, or psychology, or special equipment, etc., then you are dealing with a derivative or scientific field of knowledge, not philosophy. (Binswanger & Peikoff, 1990, p. 289)
Such a demarcation procedure runs up against the fact that what is considered specialized training has changed over human history; knowledge that was once highly specialized has become available to any educated person. Rand, of course, presumes that the ability to read is not a specialized skill. In our culture it is not so regarded. But in Ancient Egypt, where learning to read and write usually required a long apprenticeship in the guild of scribes, reading surely qualified as a specialized skill. In chemistry as taught in better American high schools in the 1990's, students learn to explain the behavior of acids and bases in terms of subatomic particles such as protons and neutrons. Such explanations would not have been part of high school chemistry in 1930. And in 1830 they could not have been part of the most advanced training in chemistry, for no one yet knew that there were protons, neutrons or electrons. The sort of partition that Rand sought to establish between philosophy and the sciences, natural or social, would at the very least to have be movable over time.
More to the point, it is hard to believe that epistemology can be successfully walled off from the relevant subdisciplines within psychology. Psychology only began to differentiate from philosophy around 1860 (Boring, 1950), and a philosophical account of the way human beings ought to think might be expected to pay some attention to the way human beings actually do think (cognitive psychology) or the way in which their thinking actually develops (developmental psychology).
Rand not only borrowed her conception of limited cognitive capacity from cognitive psychologists, she made frequent assertions about the manner and the sequence in which children form and use concepts. In the Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, the most prominent (but by no means the only) discussion of child development is the developmental sequence of definitions of the concept man (42-43). Are we to conclude that the data collected by child psychologists have no bearing on whether children form and define their concepts of human being in the manner and order that Rand specified? That is what we would have to conclude, if we adhered to Rand’s stated views on philosophy and psychology. In the epistemology workshops that were later published as an appendix to the Introduction, Rand makes frequent and confident assertions about the way that children (and sometimes infants) develop cognitively (Binswanger & Peikoff, 1990, 147, 151-52, 162, 167-74, 178-81, 200, 206-10, 212, 217-18, 231-32). (This tradition is carried on by Leonard Peikoff, in his account of the way children learn about causality [1993, p. 14].) These assertions cannot have been based on Ayn Rand’s introspection! And if they are supported by observations of children, what makes Rand’s observations of children admissible evidence for a philosopher, whereas the observations or experiments conducted by a trained child psychologist are to be rejected as inadmissible? For instance, are philosophers supposed to ignore the data of developmental psychology when they evaluate the assertion that children do not begin to count until well after they learn to use words for other purposes, or when they set out to analyze the cognitive prerequisites for the correct employment of counting (p. 200)?
Jean Piaget (1950) also considered the means by which children acquire new knowledge to be crucial to an account of concept formation (or, for that matter, of any other problem area in epistemology). But for that very reason he rejected all attempts to assert that philosophy has priority over psychology, and all attempts to wall off philosophical inquiry from the theories and findings of psychology (Campbell, 1997).
Rand’s understanding of the critical role of cognitive capacity limitations and her interest in cognitive development should have led her to regard epistemology as a cognitive science (as Ó Nualláin, 1995, does), or even as a developmental science (à la Piaget, or Feldman, 1993). A truly systematic and integrative conception of knowledge of the sort that Rand aimed at (Sciabarra, 1995) would overcome another dichotomy, the dichotomy between epistemology and psychology. Instead, her attempts to isolate philosophy from the sciences have obstructed the assimilation of cognitive psychology by most Objectivists. Even David Kelley, who once taught in a cognitive science program, and has made his own extensive use of ideas from cognitive psychology, still accepts the formulations of Quine (1969), a philosopher who never gave up his allegiance to behaviorism, as circumscribing the potential of "naturalized epistemology," and continues to insist on one-way traffic between philosophy and psychology (Kelley, 1986, 1998). I am convinced that Rand’s antipsychological metatheory (a set of declarations more than a little at odds with her actual practice) has significantly inhibited the further growth of the Objectivist epistemology, within the areas sketched by Rand as well as beyond them.
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Robert Campbell
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Man rises above the perceptual level by integrating his percepts into concepts, his concepts into principles, his principles into sciences, and all of his sciences into a philosophy.
