I think highly of H.W. B. Joseph, who was one of the greatest of all philosophical critics, but here he wrongly assumes that an object's nature allows it to act in only one way. Why assume this? If, as you recognize in what you say about my criticism of Peikoff, it makes sense to say that a human being need not always choose the same way in the same conditions, why must non-human entities always operate in the same way?

You are just restating the Objectivist view that the entities that exist have to exist, not offering an argument. What is supposed to be the contradiction in thinking that other entities than the ones that in fact exist could have existed? If someone says that a round square could exist, we can readily grasp why what he says is contradictory. But to say that the entities that actually exist might not have existed is contradictory only if the entities that now exist could not have failed to exist. But that thesis is just what I am questioning. To appeal to it in order to refute me blatantly begs the question.

There have been people who have claimed that God can violate the laws of logic---I think that Descartes held this. But it has certainly not been the dominant opinion among the Scholastics, or among Jews and Christians generally. Peikoff's short proof of atheism isn't worth much if it addresses a concept of God different from that held by orthodox believers.

On the Objectivist view, a value is something that one acts to gain or keep. If approval and disapproval are tied to this notion of value, then one can't approve or disapprove of what can't be altered.

But why should one think that approval and disapproval are limited to what we can value, in terms of the Objectivist concept of value?

You have a surpassing knowledge of Objectivist philosophy, based on what is obviously a great many years of careful study and thought; but I must say that you seem to find it difficult to think outside the Objectivist framework. Your response to an objection is often to repeat the thesis that is being challenged.

In other words, there aren't innate ideas because there aren't innate ideas. Again, you respond to a question on why an Objectivist view is true by reiterating the Objectivist view.

I have no doubt that my knowledge of Objectivist epistemology is deficient, but I'm not here making the mistake of thinking that Objectivists think that observing similarities requires concepts. Rather, I'm denying, or at least questioning, that one could observe similarities in the absence of concepts. This is a very common criticism of abstractionist theories of concept formation, raised by Jerry Fodor and Peter Geach, among others.

Yes, you are certainly right that "red" does not mean "growing on a tree". But then you can't say, as Peikoff does, that "[A] concept designates existents, including all their characteristics, whether definitional or not." "Red" designates all red objects. Some of these red objects have the property of growing on trees, i.e.,this is one of the characteristics of these red objects. But then by Peikoff's statement, these characteristics become part of the designation of "red". One can then ask, what does "growing on a tree" designate? One must fill in the designations of "growing" and "tree." The process that Peikoff describes is recursive. It is in this way that you will soon get that most concepts refer to most things that exist.

Here I suggest that you are guilty of the fallacy of the stolen concept, in that what you say is perfectly true of our ordinary language concept of "concept", but you carry this over without justification to the Objectivist theory of concepts. In the ordinary language concept of "concept", a concept has a definition that give a sense, not a reference. Here, anything that meets the terms of the definition falls under the concept. But on the Objectivist view, as Peikoff states it, a concept is an abstraction, derived by "measurement omission" from concretes, and it designates the concretes from which it has been abstracted. A new concrete would then demand a new concept, because by hypothesis the new concrete is not part of the designation of the original concept.

But the point here isn't whether heaven and hell exist: it's rather that if you agree with the conclusion of my thought experiment, then it's wrong that the concept of value conceptually depends on the possibility that one can choose between life and death. It doesn't depend on the possibility that one It doesn't, for these immortal beings; and if you accept what I say, then you have rejected the conclusion that Rand and Peikoff draw from the immortal robot story. If you now say,"But it does depend on this choice for beings like us", I would respond, why? Why does what matters to us rest on the possibility that we can cease to exist?

This strikes me as true of many values, but I don't see why having a tendency to promote life is a necessary condition for pleasure. Why can't some pleasurable activities be neutral in their effect on life? Eating ice cream in moderation can be very pleasurable; but although, I don't think it is harmful, it is hardly life enhancing.

Thanks once more for your comments: I really appreciate them. If I may say so, I'm also grateful for your calm and matter-of-fact tone in responding to my very negative comments on Peikoff's book. My review gives in part a misleading impression, in that someone reading it alone would be likely to think that my attitude toward Objectivism is much more negative than it in fact is. Whether rightly or wrongly, I formed a very unfavorable impression of Peikoff, and my animus in the review is directed toward him rather than Objectivism as such. I have reviewed other Objectivist philosophers and Objectivist sympathizers much more positively.

One question in conclusion. You said in your original post that my philosophy was "rationalistic". Other Objectivists have also said this about me, but I don't have a good grasp of what is meant by this. I'd be grateful if you would say something more about this.

In brief, I don't think that Rand is correct that to acknowledge that reality is what it is requires the view of consciousness that she states in the passage that you quote. Her comments fail to distinguish between an act of consciousness, e.g., my thinking of something, and the contents of consciousness. To deny that the object of consciousness can be an idea or image, or at least an idea or image that has not been abstracted from a non-mental percept, is to adopt a particular view of consciousness, that may or may not be correct. It is not to draw out an implication of acknowledging reality. Again, if one replies to this by saying that ideas must ultimately be derived by abstraction from a non-mental reality, that is a particular theory of concept-formation, not a consequence of acknowledging reality.

Well, the assertion is composed of concepts, isn't it? You could say that a proposition is a combination of concepts organized to express a particular idea or judgment. In his paper "Concepts and Propositions," David Kelley defines "proposition" as "the content of an assertion or judgment" -- "as the complete thought expressed by a grammatical sentence

It's definitely not a percept with the details left out

The logical law of identity says that A=A. A contradiction violates this law. As an example, "Light always travels at a constant speed of about 186,000 miles per second, but sometimes light travels slower than this" is a contradiction. "Light sometimes travels slower than 186,000 miles per second" is not a contradiction, absent the antecedent of the previous statement. Thus, the statement "Light sometimes travels slower than 186,000 miles per second", taken by itself, does not violate the law of identity.

The claim that the universe has fundamental non-created constituents is not a consequence of the logical law of identity. Once more, the law of identity, taken together with the law of non-contradiction, says that contradictory descriptions of the same entity cannot both be true. The law of identity does not by itself tell us what entities exist or what are the properties of these entities.
But suppose there are fundamental constituents ,just as you suggest. It doesn't follow that different ultimate constituents couldn't have existed. Maybe we just happen to have one out of many possible sets of such constituents.

A miracle is usually defined as a violation of a law of nature. Laws of nature do not follow from the law of identity. If Jesus rose from the dead after three days, he violated a law of nature. He did not violate the law of identity. Again, as I see it, the distinction is this: "No person can rise from the dead, but Jesus rose from the dead" is a contradiction. "Jesus rose from the dead", taken by itself, is not.

I don't see why we can approve or disapprove only what can be altered or changed. I disapprove of the Nazis and Communists' murder of millions of people, but nothing can be done now to change what they did.

If a concept is a generalization from experience, then there can't be innate concepts, but this is just what's in question.

The worry raised by critics of abstractionism isn't that one can't perceive any similarities and differences without a prior concept, but that in some cases it may turn out that one can't recognize the similarities without a prior concept.

If, the concept can be extended to what is relevantly similar, fine; but in that case, why not say that the meaning of the concept is a description of the relevant property instead of saying that the meaning of the concept is its reference, i.e., the existents that it designates?

But there are no immortal robots! I used the heaven and hell example to show that it isn't the robot's immortality that makes the notion of valuing meaningless for it. Rather, it's the fact that nothing matters to it. A robot that was set to blow up in a day couldn't choose either, if nothing mattered to it.

Human beings need to act in certain ways in order to live, but how does it follow from this that everything that matters to us depends on its relation to the fact that we are vulnerable to death?

You are raising an epistemological issue: if someone were conscious only of the contents of his own consciousness, how would he identify these contents as being the contents of his consciousness, in the absence of a contrast with the outside world? That is a different issue from the one I raised, which is a metaphysical question: must the object of consciousness be external to consciousness?

If I never dreamed, would it follow that the notion of a waking state was meaningless?

Why isn't the distinction between act and object of consciousness sufficient to generate knowledge that a possess a consciousness, regardless of whether the object of consciousness is external to the mind?

It certainly sounds like the theory they are criticizing is a bad one that inconsistently combines direct and indirect realism.