| | I hope that this quote is not interpreted as an endorsement of nominalism, and that is certainly not what Rand would have intended. It is simply a very strong restatement of the fact that concretes and only concretes are primaries and givens, and that they would still exist even if there were no minds to perceive them. Our concepts are human constructs which, however valid, have no primacy over concrete reality.
As to the independence of the sciences, these are bodies of knowledge, not things qua concretes. So while our concepts both in and of the sciences may be distinct, they are contextual, hierarchical, interrelated and ultimately inseparable.
The fact that a bird can fly, even though it is heavier than air, is not a refutation of any "laws of physics" such as gravity, but is simply a fact that we must understand as a special case to be explained under the "laws of physics."
While the axiomatic parts of human knowledge are in a sense privileged, because they cannot be refuted unless one accepts them implicitly in the act of attempting a refutation, the special branches of philosophy such as politics, ethics, and aesthetics are radically empirical - based on observation and induction at their roots. There are no axioms in these branches of philosophy in the same way that there are in epistemology. (Rand tried to base ethics on axioms, but abandoned this attempt, which one can see in her Journals.) There are fundamental principles which cannot be denied self-consistently, such as the absurdity of telling someone who does what he wishes, rather than what you wish, that he should desist because he is being "selfish." This sort of argument immediately fails when one asks in return, "So what you are saying is that I should accept your selfish desire for me to act they way you wish me to, but my own selfish desire is inappropriate by the mere fact that it is mine?"
But arguments that homosexuality is "suboptimal" or that a "real" woman should not wish to be president are not prior to facts, and in so far as they may contradict the facts, no matter how much they reflect anyone's preconceptions, if false they are merely that - preconceptions.
Ted Keer
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There is no such thing as Objectivism
