A Mostly Bibliographic Note on the Objectivist View of the Arbitrary
In his recent post on epistemic possibility, Ben Bayer attributed to Rand the view that “it is evidence that gives claims their cognitive content, such that without it, there is no claim to be assessed: such ‘arbitrary’ claims are neither true nor false.” This is an idea that often raises a lot of questions and putative counter-examples, some of which have come up in the comments on Ben’s post. If there’s interest I may address these questions in a future post, but my aim here is different. Since this is an interesting idea that has often (and I think correctly) been described as part of Objectivism, but that Rand did not herself express directly, I thought it would be useful to indicate the sources for this idea in her own works and in works she endorsed. In doing so, we’ll see a little about the motivation for the theory, and this will shed some light on the questions that have been asked about it, but I’ll hold off on addressing the questions proper for a future post.
The classic treatment of the arbitrary in the Objectivist literature is Leonard Peikoff’s 1991 book Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (OPAR), which has a section (163–171) titled: “The Arbitrary as Neither True nor False.” Here’s an excerpt:
An arbitrary claim is not merely an unwarranted effusion. By demanding one’s consideration in defiance of all the requirements of reason, it becomes an affront to reason and to the science of epistemology. In the absence of evidence, there is no way to consider any idea, on any subject. There is no way to reach a cognitive verdict, favorable or otherwise, about a statement to which logic, knowledge, and reality are irrelevant. There is nothing the mind can do to or with such a phenomenon except sweep it aside.
An arbitrary idea must be given the exact treatment its nature demands. One must treat it as though nothing had been said. The reason is that, cognitively speaking, nothing has been said. One cannot allow into the realm of cognition something that repudiates every rule of that realm.
None of the concepts formed to describe human knowledge can be applied to the arbitrary; none of the classifications of epistemology can be usurped in its behalf. Since it has no relation to evidence, an arbitrary statement cannot be subsumed under concepts that identify different amounts of evidence; it cannot be described as “possible,” “probable,” or “certain.” (These concepts are discussed in the next section.) Similarly, such a statement cannot be subsumed under concepts that identify different relations between an idea and reality. An arbitrary statement is neither “true” nor ‘false.” (Peikoff, OPAR 164–165)
OPAR, which was published 9 years after Rand’s death, is not something Rand did or could have endorsed as a presentation of her own ideas, but the book is based on a 1976 lecture series by Peikoff that she endorsed as “the only authorized presentation of the entire theoretical structure of Objectivism, i.e., the only one that I know of my own knowledge to be fully accurate” (“A Last Survey” ARL 4:3 387). The material on the arbitrary can be found in lecture 6, which can be heard or read for free on the Ayn Rand Institute’s site. (The relevant portion begins at 30:30 in the MP3 file.) Here’s an excerpt:
Now, if you understand what we mean by the concept of truth and falsehood, you’ll see why the arbitrary is outside of either concept. Observe the differences. True and false are assessments within the field of human cognition. And they designate a relationship, positive or negative, correspondence or contradiction, a relationship between an idea and reality. The arbitrary, by contrast, is devoid of any relationship to reality at all. It is the wanton, the causeless, the baseless, and as such, it cannot be judged as true or false. It is devoid of any epistemological status. It is outside the realm of cognitive endeavor all together.
Rand was present at the lecture and answers a question on the arbitrary in the Q&A at the end, but the question she addresses does not deal specifically with the point that an arbitrary assertion is neither true nor false, which is the one aspect of Peikoff’s exposition of the view that is not explicit in any earlier Objectivist literature.
Peikoff (in the 1976 lecture) tells us that he “makes[s] a big issue” of the arbitrary, in order to repudiate “agnosticism”—the view that one must treat as possible any claim that one cannot positively disprove. We find points similar to Peikoff’s in Nathaniel Branden’s article on “Agnosticism” in the April 1963 issue of The Objectivist Newsletter:
In the pursuit of knowledge, there is no place for whims. Every claim, statement or proposition has to be based on the facts of reality; nothing may be claimed causelessly, groundlessly, arbitrarily.
Even a hypothesis has to have some factual basis, some factual evidence indicating that it might be true. A hypothesis based on nothing but a blind guess is not admissible into rational consideration.
Rand herself makes the point that rational hypotheses are based on evidence in “The Psychology of Psychologizing” (Voice of Reason 24) and The Art of Nonfiction (89). And Robert Efron, in his review of Hansel’s E.S.P.: A Scientific Evaluation (The Objectivist 6:3), says: “Any attempt to disprove an assertion for which no positive evidence is provided, sanctions the legitimacy of the unsupported assertion and the use which may be made of your failure to disprove that assertion.” Thus to make the attempt is “to invite an epistemological disaster.” But Branden’s 1963 presentation goes deeper than this point to explain why such assertions must be dismissed:
When a person makes an assertion for which no rational grounds are given, his statement is—epistemologically—without cognitive content. It is as though nothing had been said.
And this implies the point, which Peikoff would later make explicit, that arbitrary claims are neither true nor false. For if nothing has been said, there is nothing to be true or false.
Readers who are puzzled by this idea point to sentences that might be asserted arbitrarily but that they have no difficulty telling are true or false. (We can see examples of this in the comments.) But to respond that way is to think that the meaning of a proposition somehow resides intrinsically in the concatenation of sounds or marks by which it is expressed, and this is not the case. In both the 1976 lecture and in OPAR, Peikoff likens arbitrary claims to word-like sounds squawked by a parrot and writing-like marks that might be made by the wind. Either might produce a result that, if written or spoken by a person, could express knowledge, but considered simply as the effects of parrots or wind that they are, these effects express nothing at all. They have no content.
Peikoff’s example of the parrot squawks evokes Rand’s earlier uses of this same in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (1966) and “The Comprachicos” (1970):
Learning to speak does not consist of memorizing sounds—that is the process by which a parrot learns to “speak.” Learning consists of grasping meanings, i.e., of grasping the referents of words, the kinds of existents that words denote in reality. In this respect, the learning of words is an invaluable accelerator of a child’s cognitive development, but it is not a substitute for the process of concept-formation; nothing is. (ITOE 20)
An error of that kind [viz. holding that wider concepts have less cognitive content than narrower ones] is possible only on the basis of assuming that man learns concepts by memorizing their definitions, i.e., on the basis of studying the epistemology of a parrot. But that is not what we are here studying. To grasp a concept is to grasp and, in part, to retrace the process by which it was formed. To retrace that process is to grasp at least some of the units which it subsumes (and thus to link one’s understanding of the concept to the facts of reality). (ITOE 27)
Ideas, i.e., abstractions, have no reality to [a perceptual-level mentality]: abstractions involve the past and the future, as well as the present; nothing is fully real to him except the present. Concepts, in his mind, become percepts—percepts of people uttering sounds; and percepts end when the stimuli vanish. When he uses words, his mental operations are closer to those of a parrot than of a human being. In the strict sense of the word, he has not learned to speak. (“The Comprachicos” ROTP 77)
In all three passages, Rand makes the point that people often function with words in a manner that is essentially non-cognitive. In proper human cognition, words stand for concepts, which are vehicles of integration—a complex cognitive process that must be initiated and sustained. It is only insofar as they play their proper role in this process that words are meaningful at all. When and to the extent that a person fails to perform this process, cognition is replaced by a sort of aping or parroting, in which there is no genuine meaning and no genuine thoughts.
The difference between this sort of functioning and genuinely cognitive (or rational) functioning is a central idea in Rand’s thought. We can see it for example in The Fountainhead’s portrayal of secondhanders, in the idea that “an unfocused mind is not conscious” in “the sense of the word applicable to man” (VOS 22), and in Rand’s view that irrational people do not have values. (On this point, see especially my Chapter 3 in A Companion to Ayn Rand.) The idea that arbitrary assertions are not meaningful (and, therefore, that the alternative of truth vs. falsity does not apply to them) is just another application of this idea.
The idea also illustrates why Rand thought that a theory of concepts is central to epistemology. Whereas most philosophers treat the meaningfulness of propositions and concepts as something separate from and prior to the question of how we can know (or be justified in believing) that a proposition is true, Rand thought of the process of forming, maintaining, and applying concepts as the essential process by which we know the world. This is a rational, evidence-intensive process that is guided by epistemology. And it is only in connection with this process that propositions come about and are meaningful. (For more on this issue, see my “Conceptualization and Justification” in Concepts and Their Role In Knowledge, esp. 62–64.) Because of this, semantics cannot be separated from epistemology: violations of epistemic norms compromise the meaningfulness of one’s concepts and propositions, and to indulge in the arbitrary is to flout epistemology as such.
But this does not mean that arbitrary assertions will strike a listener (or the speaker) as mere noise. There are two reasons for this, both of which can be seen by the analogy to parrot squawkings. First, though the sounds a parrot emits do not stand for concepts in the parrot’s mind, as the words spoken by a rational person do, the sounds are evidently associated with various memories, images, feelings, and expectations, all of which prompt the parrot to make the relevant sounds in certain circumstances (e.g., in response to certain prompts) and not in others. Likewise for someone engaged in arbitrary speech (or in an arbitrary internal monologue). The process taking place in him is essentially different from the rational process on which Rand argues genuine thought depends, and so the words are not functioning as symbols of concepts, but the sounds may continue to be rich in associations, some of which may derive from the genuine (cognitive) meaning that the sounds convey when used rationally. Thus, when one indulges in the arbitrary, one’s utterances do not feel to one like nonsense—nor, however, do they feel like genuine cognition. Second, though arbitrary utterances and parrot squawkings are both meaningless in their own right, they may well be repetitions of statements that were meaningful when made by someone in some context, and often the sounds can prompt a hearer to reconstruct the context in which they were meaningful. When hearing an arbitrary assertion, we can generously supply the sort of cognitive context and types of reasons that it would presuppose if it were made as a rational judgment. However, if we do this, in the natural course of working with the judgment, we will find that we need to probe into these reasons, and we’ll soon find that they’re not really there and the claim becomes a sort of amorphous moving target.
One final point. Entertaining arbitrary assertions should not be confused with fantasizing. Fantasizing—the process of imagining situations and thinking about what would follow if they were the case—is a normal and necessary part of human mental life, which is made possible by cognition and can assist it. Concepts can be meaningfully used in this process (or else fiction would be impossible). But someone who is (properly) fantasizing does not regard the products of his imagination as real or present them to others as such. Such intrusions of fantasy into cognition would be cases of entertaining the arbitrary, and at the point that one does it one’s thinking is compromised and the meanings of one’s terms become progressively indeterminate. Things presented as counterexamples to the point that the arbitrary is meaningless are often simply fantasized scenarios, which, so long as they are treated as such, are non-arbitrary and wholly meaningful. To test the claim that they lose their meaning when asserted arbitrarily, you have to try to treat them as genuine hypotheses and to work with them as such. When one does, it quickly becomes indeterminate what they mean, and what follows from them.
The following comments on this post were preserved:
Michael asked: Greg, I guess pragmatism as a whole philosophy would be arbitrary by its nature, then? And other non-objective philosophies would hold (some or all) arbitrary views as well?
In regard to Dr. Peikoff's statement,
"An arbitrary idea must be given the exact treatment its nature demands. One must treat it as though nothing had been said. The reason is that, cognitively speaking, nothing has been said. One cannot allow into the realm of cognition something that repudiates every rule of that realm,"
it is very evident that a refutation using facts isn't working to combat such arbitrary assertions. How then does someone with an objective pursuit of values address these claims and invalidate them in today's political culture? It sounds like...I can't?
Greg S. replied: In response to your last question: One can't reach someone insofar as he's irrational. All one can do is expose the irrationality--for others who may be present, and for the person himself, who retains the ability to rise to the occasion and embrace reason. So about Trump (and most of the other candidates who do the same thing, but less brazenly), one can just point out that instead of answering the questions or giving reasons, they're just playing games with words. You can point out that this isn't how someone who cares about what's true comports himself.
As to pragmatism as a philosophy: One has to distinguish ordinary people who are pragmatic and pragmatism as a philosophy. I don't think that Trump is a pragmatist in the philosophical sense. Kennedy was, and even Nixon, but Trump's not as sophisticated as that. He doesn't have a philosophy. He's just a garden variety anti-conceptual mentality--the sort of person whose mental functioning pragmatism accurately describes, but not an adherent to the pragmatism as a theory. Such people's functioning in the realm of abstractions is basically all arbitrary. If we're talking about the philosophy of pragmatism as maintained by the philosophers who offer arguments for it (e.g. by Dewey or by Rorty or Brandom) or by their students--then, like any other theory, it's not arbitrary in these people's minds to whatever extent they believe it based on the (real or seeming) strength of arguments offered, rather than accepting it as a rationalization for some feeling. Most people's acceptance of most philosophical theories (including true ones) involves is a mixture of these two sorts of motivations, and intellectual honesty requires a proactive commitment to the one sort of motivation and deliberate rooting out of the other.
Anon said: I agree with Michael; I definitely think the explanation that what's meaningful as fantasy becomes meaningless and indeterminate when treated as a real hypothesis, would be greatly helped by some concretization. It's difficult to see how this would happen, especially since we can turn concepts (?) in our minds of things that don't yet exist in extramental reality into inventions that do--and since the concept can often be an effective guide to the actions that result in the object being produced, (in combination with other relevant knowledge.) (To be strictly and technically correct, what I should say is that we can use a concept of imagination to create units of that concept, when there were none before.)
Of course, an arbitrary claim is always going to be a proposition, not merely a concept. So I suppose the process of going from meaningful-as-imagination to meaningless-as-applied to reality would have to derive--at least in part--from the fact that what one is uttering is a proposition.
Greg S. replied: We can only turn ideas for inventions into actual inventions, when the ideas are based on actual knowledge of actual potentialities of real things, and such ideas aren't mere fantasies. I don't mean that we need to know all the details of how to do it, but there needs to be enough for it to be a rational (evidence-based) hypothesis that the thing can be built. Making up things in the way that fiction writers do in other contexts--e.g., making up zombies or flying horses, or motors that convert static electricity into current--does not give us any sort of guide for producing those things in reality. Some cases of science-fiction are on the borderline between these two sorts of cases--for example "warp drives" and "communicators" in Star Trek. But even here the science-fiction doesn't provide a direct guide to actions that enable us to produce the things, what it does is to concretize the broad sorts of fruits that a field of inquiry might later yield, and therefore serve as (among other things) a stimulus to further thought along those lines.
The following comments on this post were preserved:
Michael asks: I would love to see some concrete examples of arbitrary claims and how they are handled, if not from the comments then taken from contemporary news or political issues.
Greg S. replied: If you want examples of arbitrary assertions, where it's easy to see that they are meaningless, listen to Donald Trump, and read the many threads on which he and his supporters respond to criticisms or questions about his assertions. Here are just two small examples:
(1) His claim to have seen TV footage of thousands of Muslims celebrating in Jersey City on 9/11. This claim may have simply been false when Trump first uttered it--he may have simply mis-remembered something he saw. But it was clearly arbitrary in the mind of everyone who held it a day or two later, as the debate raged, and it was made clear that there was no such footage. And at this point the claim lacked any specific meaning as held and defended by these people. We can see this is by looking at the sorts of things that they cited as "support" for the claim--for example the evidence of a dozen people briefly celebrating in Paterson. Project the state of a mind that takes that as supporting Trump's initial claim that thousands were celebrating in Jersey City. It's a mind in which words do not have specific meanings. Instead there's one's own tribe (the Trump supporters) and the other tribe that opposes you, and language is a sort of game in which one adopts postures to score points against the other side.
(2) Trump's more recent claim that Trump Steaks was not a failure (as Mitt Romney had claimed it was.) Watch Trump respond to Anderson Cooper's questions about this. The meanings of "Trump Steaks," "available," and "nationwide" shifts to whatever suits Trump's mood in a given moment, which is to say that the terms have no specific meaning in Trump's mouth.
Mark H. replies: The video shows Trump saying he (meaning the Trump steak business) doesn’t produce the steaks, he buys them from various places (though unstated, the purchased steaks would meet standards set by him) then sells them to various outlets. From the beginning he is up front that he is not in the butchering business. Throughout he is consistent in saying he buys and sells the steaks.
In other words, though he doesn’t say it, what people are buying (besides the steak) is a Good Housekeeping seal for steaks. (Whether or not they live up to the seal I don’t know.) Trump hires a contractor to build his hotels. Trump quality hotels, Trump quality steaks.
This fits the video a lot better than “terms have no specific meaning in Trump’s mouth” – good grief.
Greg S. replies: When Trump's critics speak of Trump Steaks they're referring not to some alleged butchering enterprise nor to anything whatsoever that Trump may ever do involving beef, but to a specific enterprise that existed briefly in 2007 and shortly thereafter selling frozen meet to the general public by mail order under the Trademark Trump Steaks. That endeavor was not successful, and was discontinued, with the trademark "Trump Steaks" being canceled in 2014. It's no great blemish on Trump's business record that this particular venture was unsuccessful; business often involves trying different ventures, not all of which pan out. But it's this venture that "Trump Steaks" means when Trump's critics cite it as an example of something he failed at.
When Trump responds, "Trump Steaks" has to refer to this same venture in order for what he's saying to be any sort of response to these critics. But, when he claims that the venture still exists, it doesn't mean this any more, but now (momentarily) refers to any business he's involved with that deals with meat in any way. Likewise "available nation wide" goes from meaning available to anyone anywhere in the nation to available in the restaurants of a number of exclusive resorts located in different parts of the nation.
When someone uses words in this shifting way (which isn't uncommon among politicians), nothing he says on any occasion commits him to anything specific the following year or the following moment, which is to say that his words have no specific meanings.
I'm not going to debate this example further. I've described what I think Trump is doing in this clip and (by extension) what he's expecting his listeners to do to their minds in following his charade of reasoning. If you have some very different way of interpreting the exchange, so be it. But then surely you can imagine a politician acting in the slippery manner I'm ascribing to Trump here (perhaps you think that Obama or Hillary or Cruz operates in this way, as they probably all have on some occasion or other).
The point of having the concept "arbitrary" isn't that we can infallibly identify when other people are engaging in it and use the label to damn them. We need the concept to name a disastrous way of using one's mind so that we can avoid falling into it in our own mental lives.
Mark H. replied: Apparently Trump didn’t want to admit that “Trump Steaks” failed and he dissembled in his reply. It’s a stretch to go from the mole hill of refusing to admit a small defeat to the mountain of an idea that words are meaningless to him. He knows what the words meant, and lied.
That’s too bad but his supporters – who support him for his stand against immigration and TARP (NAFTA, GATT and other globalist treaties) – won’t care if he blustered about Trump Steaks when Anderson Cooper tried to play “Gotcha.”
And I don’t think they ought to care. His behavior wasn’t typical. Trump couldn’t have master-managed the building of skyscrapers if words were meaningless to him, or if he were dishonest in his business dealings. Though not perfect, Trump is more honest than any politician we’ve seen in many a year. He doesn’t deserve to be trashed because of ill-considered braggadocio over steaks.
Indeed there is the concept of “arbitrary” – the classic example being the claims of astrology – but it doesn’t apply to Trump where it matters.
Greg S. replied: I disagree. I think the way he handled the Trump Steaks issue is an example in miniature of how he's handled every issue in his campaign, and that, despite his reputation, he's the least straight talking candidate of a particularly unsavory and dishonest lot (on both sides). But I don't want to turn this blog into a debate about politics, so let's not pursue this further.
Also, re Trump's having master-managed the building of skyscrapers: I don't know that's an accurate description of what he did in his business career, but even if it is, it's not inconsistent with the claim that his functioning is essentially arbitrary in large domains. People are capable of compartmentalizing, and there are many examples of people who are very thoughtful and capable within a certain sphere, but not outside of it. To take the classic example of astrology, to which you allude, there are people who are rational in their performance of their jobs, but who consult astrologers about their love lives.
Whether or not I'm right about Trump in particular, though, the general point is that these assessments about whether a claim is arbitrary or cognitive need to be made with respect to each individual claim in the context in which it's made. And what's most important--more important than judging the person making the claim--is how it stands in one's own mind and how (therefore) one will proceed regarding it.