Where TOC Shines
by Adam Reed
Recently (Friday, July 30 2004) The Intellectual Activist daily newsletter, edited by Robert Tracinski and closely associated with ARI, printed a part of my letter to their editor. My letter was long and I was not surprised to see it cut - but what was published was left exactly as I wrote it. Very different from what happened to my writing at TOC, where an op-ed I sent in underwent a spongiform rewrite reminiscent of bovine encephalopathy. A not unexpected result, since ARI is known for industrial-strength KASS (thanks, Linz!) Objectivism - while TOC's op-eds are too boring to be noticed, much less read. And yet, when I only had enough time this summer for one trip, I traveled to the TOC seminars, not the ARI conference. Some people were surprised.
It all has to do with selfishness and context.
My problem with ARI conferences is that I can't remember ever learning anything new from someone who already agreed with me about everything. And when I'm not learning I'm bored. While at the ARI conference there would be a handful of people who understand Objectivism well enough to have my respect, they are outnumbered by those who are afraid to explore new areas, lest they disagree with ARI and wind up sanctioned and condemned. If I somehow wound up at an ARI conference, what would I do with myself?
Some aspects of the TOC seminar lead me to empathize with ARI's exclusivity. The TOC seminar was thick with crackpots who somehow managed - at least in their own minds - to live with blatant contradictions, assuring themselves that while supposedly embracing Objectivism, they did not need to give up whatever ideas they had accepted beforehand, whether from the religion and culture of their upbringing, or from academia, or from movements and cults such as Georgism, Scientology, Paleo-Conservatism, Post-Modernism, Libertarianism, Neo-Conservatism, EST, Recovered Memory, or The Family of the Children of God. But there were also - and these were the creators of opportunities for dialectical learning - people with serious intellectual questions about gaps in standard presentations of Objectivism, about implications of some fact of reality that in Ayn Rand's time was either not known or known only to specialists, or about the implications of Objectivism for some new context.
One of my conversations at the TOC Seminar concerned Ayn Rand's position on the death penalty - and it soon was clear that my interlocutor, a TOC staffer, did not understand Rand's perspective on criminal justice, especially the problem of false convictions that often result from bad epistemology. Kelley, in the course of his keynote address, presented a position on crimes motivated by collectivism (so-called "hate crimes,") a position that was not informed by a Randian perspective. In both cases it was clear that people who did not get Objectivism from Nathaniel Branden and Ayn Rand in the NBI days sometimes have a gap in this area. Little on the problems of criminal justice was written down, and the little that was, was written by Branden. Like the rest of Branden's contributions, most of it was de-emphasized by Rand after her break with Branden. It was not taught, or included in subsequent publications, by anyone associated with Rand after the break. Later in the TOC seminar, a question on one of Will Thomas' lectures brought to my mind a context that could be analyzed, from a Randian perspective, to serve as an illustration of this gap. I don't have time to write it in the short term, but there is room for a formal article about the Randian perspective on criminal justice. Or perhaps two: one on criminal justice as an application of the concept of justice from Objectivist ethics, and a second on proper epistemology of the legal process, and its implications for the institutions of criminal justice.
Paul Vanderveen's paper on the formation of the concept on mind - at the Advanced Seminar - reminded me of the Objectivist ontology of mind, not as an entity but as a set of attributes and relations of a human organism. The point - that "the mind is not a thing" that can be somehow copied from a human brain into a machine - was also central to Hubert Dreyfus' critiques of artificial intelligence. This opens up the possibility that some of Dreyfus' insights could be integrated with Rand's ontology and epistemology.
Merlin Jetton's Advanced Seminar paper on "Omission and Measurement" was a superb example of "fruitful error." Jetton demonstrated that if Rand's concept of "measurement" were the concept of measurement as that concept is used in the physical sciences or in everyday language, then some aspects of Rand's identification of concept formation with measurement omission would be incoherent. This is a misunderstanding of Rand, but one that leads to the "fruitful" realization that Rand did not use the concept of "measurement" from physics or from everyday language, but rather the concept of "measurement" that is used in psychology and cognitive science. Rand's use of this concept had always made sense to me, but that was because I first studied Objectivist Epistemology as a graduate student in the cognitive sciences. Objectivist Epistemology is grounded in developmental psychology, so the use of the psychological rather than the physical concept of measurement was what I had expected. But someone coming into Objectivist Epistemology without a prior background in cognitive science is bound to have questions - questions that Merlin Jetton was asking.
When Ayn Rand was working on her Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, her close intellectual associates included Robert Efron, the "father of cognitive neurology." Efron used, in his work, experimental psychology techniques derived from the psychological concept of measurement, and I guess that Efron may have taught this concept of measurement to Rand. The psychological concept of measurement dates to Stevens 1946 (Stevens, S. S., 1946, On the theory of scales of measurement. Science, 103, 677-680.) and by 1968, when Rand wrote ITOE, was in general use in the cognitive sciences. The problem, again, is that Rand de-emphasized Efron's contributions after Efron declined to take her side in the Great Schism. There is a need to bring back these points - like Rand's use of the Stevens 1946 concept of measurement - or else people like Merlin Jetton will keep on pointing out the gap.
My reaction to Merlin Jetton's paper also led me to examine, more closely, the relation between the concept of measurement in epistemology, and measurement as a mental operation. Understanding that relation, in turn, led me to the solution of a problem I needed to solve for a paper on the epistemological foundations of some interesting applications of signal detection theory in psychology. And a paper like Merlin Jetton's would not have been welcome at any ARI venue.
In sum, TOC's presentation of what it purports to present as "Objectivism" to the general public is abysmal. Since ARI is already doing that job, and doing it accurately and clearly, I wish TOC would just stop. On the other hand, TOC's Advanced Seminar, and Will Thomas' presentations of his original work at the regular TOC Summer Seminar, are a fabulously productive venue for fruitful technical exploration of new and forgotten aspects of Objectivism. They are what TOC does better than anyone, and if TOC did nothing else than that - and its other scholarly work - they would have my full support.
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