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.
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.
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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.
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Chris C. comments: As I understand it, the requisite condition for a proposition being meaningful is for a cognitive agent to understand the conditions under which the proposition being asserted would be true, i.e., that the state of the world is such that the proposition corresponds to that state. This is classic correspondence theory of truth as I understand it. If an arbitrary assertion is one where no evidence is offered for consideration, we can pronounce it as arbitrary and not consider it further -- but we still have to be able to understand what the claim is *saying* in order for us to be able to understand what would count as evidence for it. To that extent is the claim meaningful, or meaningful-subscript1 in some sense that falls short of being meaningful-subscript2 in a fuller sense? (A certain co-editor at JARS has this hobby-horse wherein he attacks at length the "Peikovian doctrine of the arbitrary." My guess as to the essential thrust of the attack is that for someone to be able to pronounce a statement as arbitrary one has to know what it means, what would be the correspondence-conditions, etc.)
I'm not clear on what the Objectivist "doctrine" (I'll call it "concept") of the arbitrary accomplishes if it goes beyond the traditional burden-of-proof and argument-from-ignorance principles of logic. Most clearly, it concerns the *epistemological status* of claims uttered without evidence: such claims are to be dismissed. Much less clearly, it purports to have to do with meaningfulness of claims, or whether claims made without evidence are even to be regarded as propositions at all. That's the part that concerns many students of Oism who don't want to conflate issues of epistemic admissibility with other, admittedly quite difficult and/or obscure, issues in philosophy of language or meaning. What is accomplished, exactly, in holding to the view that not only are arbitrary claims inadmissible, but that they don't assert anything that the minds of either those making them or those to whom they are addressed objectively *understand* content-wise? The Oist concept of the arbitrary (as expounded in OPAR at any rate; it's less definitive in the '76 course on this count given the formulation there that arbitrary claims aren't to be *judged* as true or as false) appears to apply not just to claims where the meanings of the terms involved are left vague or floating and hence objectively indeterminate, but also to claims where the meanings seem crystal clear but for which no evidence has been offered.
As an example, let's take the statement, "Rand and Branden had a romantic affair." In the minds of those back in 1968 who were not privy to the facts here, the claim had the status as a rumor not backed by evidence. It might be judged as arbitrary *in their cognitive context*. That's a useful epistemological principle, i.e., that cognitive context is crucial to assessing the truth-status of claims. But the idea that the proposition contained in "Rand and Branden had a romantic affair" is *neither true nor false* given the cognitive context of a great many of the addressees of the statement, strikes many a reader as little short of ludicrous. It either happened or it didn't, there is no alternative to these scenarios, there is an excluded middle, etc. The notion that the statement is meaningless, or neither-true-nor-false, is, well, I can't make out the meaning of *that* notion. And, to reiterate, I don't know what is accomplished by it.
I don't find the formulation in the '76 course as transcribed/edited for the 'Lexicon' - http://aynrandlexicon.com/l... - to be problematic. It un-problematically says, "According to Objectivism, such [an arbitrary] claim is not to be regarded as true or as false." It is not entitled to our epistemic assessment. That's all. This seems a different matter from whether the claim corresponds to reality. Where he then discusses the savage uttering a memorized pattern of sounds without understanding, I don't take issue either: in that case, the savage isn't making a meaningful proposition any more than a parrot is. Does this make *meaning* and hence truth or falsity subject to a cognitive context? It certainly makes the *grasp* of meanings subject to cognitive context. Now take another example: 132 times 67 equals 7884, uttered by a non-savage such as you or me. Is the statement meaningful? We grasp what these numerals mean; at least I think we do. The question is whether there was a correct mathematical procedure here. It looks right off that it *might* be; it ends in a "4" (as a multiplication involving numerals ending in "2" and "7" should), 13 x 6 is 78, so we know 7884 is at least in the ballpark.
Other than that, I wasn't all that rigorous in pinning down the correct answer; I was making a rough and somewhat plausible-looking guess. In that regard, the mathematical rules weren't followed all that rigorously in coming up with the proposed(?) answer, and so to that extent the proposed(?) answer (and hence mathematical formulation) is arbitrary. Is it neither true nor false? (Perhaps mathematical truths(?) are of an obscure variety? If so, LP's use of a mathematical example might be a bit ill-advised?) To complicate matters more: let's say that you as addressee of the statement don't know whether I was rigorous or merely "ballparking" the answer. Does that make a difference as to whether we rightly say it is neither true nor false? Perhaps this example is too problematic for our purposes?
You raise a textual issue and a few philosophical issues:
First, the textual issue: The 1976 course contains a lot more on this than the line you quote from the Lexicon. Listen to the relevant part of the lecture or read the transcript (both linked in the post). Among other things, Peikoff says: “Now, if you understand what we mean by the concepts of ‘truth’ and ‘falsehood,’ you’ll see why the arbitrary is outside of either concept.”
Now, the philosophical issues.
First, you ask, what point there is to saying that the arbitrary is meaningless, rather than just saying that the arbitrary should be dismissed. In most contexts it's sufficient to just say that the arbitrary should be dismissed. And this is what I do in most of the contexts in which I've discussed it (e.g. in my lectures on objectivity, or when giving advice to students, etc.). The point about meaning comes up only when one seeks understand more deeply the basis of this norm and to situate it within a broader epistemology. I've indicated in the post how the norm and the point about meaning follows from the distinctively Objectivist approach to epistemology. I discuss this very briefly also in ARSPS2 p. 73, n. 69.
You're worried about conflating issues of epistemic admissibility with obscure issues in the philosophy of language. But my view is that to get those issues in the philosophy of language right, and to understand the epistemic norms about admissibility all the way to their root, one has to grasp how the issues are connected.
You say that one has to know what a proposition says in order to know what would count as evidence for it. I don't disagree, but in order for the proposition to say anything at all, the concepts composing it have to have objective meaning, and they only do so to the extent that one has formed them and continues to maintain and apply them objectively--which means in accordance with a certain evidence-intensive method. So, one's following that method and being appropriately responsive to evidence is part of what makes the propositions meaningful.
In any case, in normal cognition, we don't first come up with propositions, then think about what would count as evidence for them, and only then go looking for the evidence. The propositions are generated in the first place as part of a process of identifying things by subsuming them under concepts on the basis of evidence. They exist and have the identities they do only in relation to that process. So instead of asking, as separate questions "What does that mean?" and then "How can I know it?" it's better to try to reconstruct and evaluate the process by which one would come to think it.
Your example concerning the Rand-Branden affair is good in that it’s a real example of people dealing with a rumor that had some relevance to them. But I'm not going to analyze it here because I find it distasteful to publicly dissect such a painful episode in the life of someone I admire, when there are other examples that would do just as well. If you give me another similarly realistic example, then, time permitting, I'll work through it.
Your second example concerns the claim "132 times 67 equals 7884." To think about whether it's arbitrary we need to envision a context in which the claim might be considered. If you and I are working on some project for which we need to do various calculations and we divvy them up, and I have reason to believe that your honest and competent in math, and you come back with "132 times 67 equals 7884." I think that would be (non-conclusive) evidence of it. Or again, if I saw that written on a piece of paper, I might form the hypothesis that it was written there by someone doing his math homework, who arrived at it by the familiar algorithm. That it's a plausible looking number (given its size and that it ends in 4) would be some confirming evidence for this hypothesis and so for the claim itself. On the other hand, I was writing a song and that sentence occurred to me as something that fit the meter and rhyme scheme, that would be non-cognitive, likewise if I wrote some program to fill in random numbers into a sentence of that form, and this is one of the things it spit out. The arbitrary is the non-cognitive when treated as cognitive, so the sentence in question would become arbitrary if, having arrived at it in either of these ways, I then treated it as a hypothesis to test. Now if I did that on one isolated occasion, I could supply a context and test it, but if I adopted that policy with such sentences, I'd soon stop being able to do even that. Any policy on which these sentences count as hypotheses, would also have to count them as hypotheses in all the bases other than 10, leaving me with an infinite string of equations to check, and no idea what any of them meant other than that they're equations of some sort--or maybe they're not equations but clever cyphers, etc. Once anything that occurs to me becomes a hypothesis just by virtue of having occurred, then Pandora's box is open and everything is possible, and nothing means anything specific.
In any case, let me close by stating what I think the main point here is. It's not that the arbitrary is some third category, in addition to true and false. It's that a certain sort of activity that goes on in people's minds and is expressed in their speech and writing often passes for cognition (to which the alternative of truth and falsity properly applies), but is essentially different from it. Recognizing this difference, especially in our own mental lives, helps us to be better thinkers and (thereby) better people.
The following comments on this post were preserved:
Douglas R. says: Lots of interesting things here. But it also seems that If one has not proven that (1) "X is impossible," it would be an instance of fallacy of the argument from ignorance to claim that (2) "X is possible." Until and unless evidence for (2) is provided, one should not believe (2). Note that doing this is not the same as believing (1). The same point applies in regard to the situation where one has not proven that (4) "X is possible"--that is, one should not say (5) "X is impossible" but say that one does not believe (5). The key principles here are: avoiding the fallacy of the argument from ignorance; the onus of proof principle; and the idea that one should not prejudiced--that is, that one's beliefs should be based on or proportionate to the evidence.
Greg S. replies: Doug I agree. I think that there are two senses of "possible" relevant here, but what you say applies to both. When we're talking about whether one believes that "X is possible," it's most natural to interpret "possible" in a more metaphysical way--as a claim about what entities are capable of what things. Understood this way "Is life on Mars possible?" would be a question about whether the natures of life and of Mars are such that things could live on Mars. One may have evidence that the natures of the relevant entities enable this, or evidence that the natures rule this out, or one might just be ignorant, in which case one shouldn't say anything at all. The sense of "possible" that I think is more directly relevant to how Peikoff uses the term in the relevant passages is more directly epistemic. Here it means something like "has sufficient evidence to be rationally entertained as a hypothesis" and, in this sense, I don't think of "impossible" as a direct contradictory of "possible." The contradictory would be "arbitrary" or just "not possible." "Impossible," if one wants to give it a distinctly epistemic sense would have to mean "positively excluded by the evidence," and of course merely showing that there's no evidence for something doesn't show that there's positive evidence against it. And, as you say, it would be an argument from ignorance if someone interpreted a lack of evidence in this way.
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.
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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.
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Chris C. comments: As I understand it, the requisite condition for a proposition being meaningful is for a cognitive agent to understand the conditions under which the proposition being asserted would be true, i.e., that the state of the world is such that the proposition corresponds to that state. This is classic correspondence theory of truth as I understand it. If an arbitrary assertion is one where no evidence is offered for consideration, we can pronounce it as arbitrary and not consider it further -- but we still have to be able to understand what the claim is *saying* in order for us to be able to understand what would count as evidence for it. To that extent is the claim meaningful, or meaningful-subscript1 in some sense that falls short of being meaningful-subscript2 in a fuller sense? (A certain co-editor at JARS has this hobby-horse wherein he attacks at length the "Peikovian doctrine of the arbitrary." My guess as to the essential thrust of the attack is that for someone to be able to pronounce a statement as arbitrary one has to know what it means, what would be the correspondence-conditions, etc.)
I'm not clear on what the Objectivist "doctrine" (I'll call it "concept") of the arbitrary accomplishes if it goes beyond the traditional burden-of-proof and argument-from-ignorance principles of logic. Most clearly, it concerns the *epistemological status* of claims uttered without evidence: such claims are to be dismissed. Much less clearly, it purports to have to do with meaningfulness of claims, or whether claims made without evidence are even to be regarded as propositions at all. That's the part that concerns many students of Oism who don't want to conflate issues of epistemic admissibility with other, admittedly quite difficult and/or obscure, issues in philosophy of language or meaning. What is accomplished, exactly, in holding to the view that not only are arbitrary claims inadmissible, but that they don't assert anything that the minds of either those making them or those to whom they are addressed objectively *understand* content-wise? The Oist concept of the arbitrary (as expounded in OPAR at any rate; it's less definitive in the '76 course on this count given the formulation there that arbitrary claims aren't to be *judged* as true or as false) appears to apply not just to claims where the meanings of the terms involved are left vague or floating and hence objectively indeterminate, but also to claims where the meanings seem crystal clear but for which no evidence has been offered.
As an example, let's take the statement, "Rand and Branden had a romantic affair." In the minds of those back in 1968 who were not privy to the facts here, the claim had the status as a rumor not backed by evidence. It might be judged as arbitrary *in their cognitive context*. That's a useful epistemological principle, i.e., that cognitive context is crucial to assessing the truth-status of claims. But the idea that the proposition contained in "Rand and Branden had a romantic affair" is *neither true nor false* given the cognitive context of a great many of the addressees of the statement, strikes many a reader as little short of ludicrous. It either happened or it didn't, there is no alternative to these scenarios, there is an excluded middle, etc. The notion that the statement is meaningless, or neither-true-nor-false, is, well, I can't make out the meaning of *that* notion. And, to reiterate, I don't know what is accomplished by it.
I don't find the formulation in the '76 course as transcribed/edited for the 'Lexicon' - http://aynrandlexicon.com/l... - to be problematic. It un-problematically says, "According to Objectivism, such [an arbitrary] claim is not to be regarded as true or as false." It is not entitled to our epistemic assessment. That's all. This seems a different matter from whether the claim corresponds to reality. Where he then discusses the savage uttering a memorized pattern of sounds without understanding, I don't take issue either: in that case, the savage isn't making a meaningful proposition any more than a parrot is. Does this make *meaning* and hence truth or falsity subject to a cognitive context? It certainly makes the *grasp* of meanings subject to cognitive context. Now take another example: 132 times 67 equals 7884, uttered by a non-savage such as you or me. Is the statement meaningful? We grasp what these numerals mean; at least I think we do. The question is whether there was a correct mathematical procedure here. It looks right off that it *might* be; it ends in a "4" (as a multiplication involving numerals ending in "2" and "7" should), 13 x 6 is 78, so we know 7884 is at least in the ballpark.
Other than that, I wasn't all that rigorous in pinning down the correct answer; I was making a rough and somewhat plausible-looking guess. In that regard, the mathematical rules weren't followed all that rigorously in coming up with the proposed(?) answer, and so to that extent the proposed(?) answer (and hence mathematical formulation) is arbitrary. Is it neither true nor false? (Perhaps mathematical truths(?) are of an obscure variety? If so, LP's use of a mathematical example might be a bit ill-advised?) To complicate matters more: let's say that you as addressee of the statement don't know whether I was rigorous or merely "ballparking" the answer. Does that make a difference as to whether we rightly say it is neither true nor false? Perhaps this example is too problematic for our purposes?
Greg S. replied: Chris,
You raise a textual issue and a few philosophical issues:
First, the textual issue: The 1976 course contains a lot more on this than the line you quote from the Lexicon. Listen to the relevant part of the lecture or read the transcript (both linked in the post). Among other things, Peikoff says: “Now, if you understand what we mean by the concepts of ‘truth’ and ‘falsehood,’ you’ll see why the arbitrary is outside of either concept.”
Now, the philosophical issues.
First, you ask, what point there is to saying that the arbitrary is meaningless, rather than just saying that the arbitrary should be dismissed. In most contexts it's sufficient to just say that the arbitrary should be dismissed. And this is what I do in most of the contexts in which I've discussed it (e.g. in my lectures on objectivity, or when giving advice to students, etc.). The point about meaning comes up only when one seeks understand more deeply the basis of this norm and to situate it within a broader epistemology. I've indicated in the post how the norm and the point about meaning follows from the distinctively Objectivist approach to epistemology. I discuss this very briefly also in ARSPS2 p. 73, n. 69.
You're worried about conflating issues of epistemic admissibility with obscure issues in the philosophy of language. But my view is that to get those issues in the philosophy of language right, and to understand the epistemic norms about admissibility all the way to their root, one has to grasp how the issues are connected.
You say that one has to know what a proposition says in order to know what would count as evidence for it. I don't disagree, but in order for the proposition to say anything at all, the concepts composing it have to have objective meaning, and they only do so to the extent that one has formed them and continues to maintain and apply them objectively--which means in accordance with a certain evidence-intensive method. So, one's following that method and being appropriately responsive to evidence is part of what makes the propositions meaningful.
In any case, in normal cognition, we don't first come up with propositions, then think about what would count as evidence for them, and only then go looking for the evidence. The propositions are generated in the first place as part of a process of identifying things by subsuming them under concepts on the basis of evidence. They exist and have the identities they do only in relation to that process. So instead of asking, as separate questions "What does that mean?" and then "How can I know it?" it's better to try to reconstruct and evaluate the process by which one would come to think it.
Your example concerning the Rand-Branden affair is good in that it’s a real example of people dealing with a rumor that had some relevance to them. But I'm not going to analyze it here because I find it distasteful to publicly dissect such a painful episode in the life of someone I admire, when there are other examples that would do just as well. If you give me another similarly realistic example, then, time permitting, I'll work through it.
Your second example concerns the claim "132 times 67 equals 7884." To think about whether it's arbitrary we need to envision a context in which the claim might be considered. If you and I are working on some project for which we need to do various calculations and we divvy them up, and I have reason to believe that your honest and competent in math, and you come back with "132 times 67 equals 7884." I think that would be (non-conclusive) evidence of it. Or again, if I saw that written on a piece of paper, I might form the hypothesis that it was written there by someone doing his math homework, who arrived at it by the familiar algorithm. That it's a plausible looking number (given its size and that it ends in 4) would be some confirming evidence for this hypothesis and so for the claim itself. On the other hand, I was writing a song and that sentence occurred to me as something that fit the meter and rhyme scheme, that would be non-cognitive, likewise if I wrote some program to fill in random numbers into a sentence of that form, and this is one of the things it spit out. The arbitrary is the non-cognitive when treated as cognitive, so the sentence in question would become arbitrary if, having arrived at it in either of these ways, I then treated it as a hypothesis to test. Now if I did that on one isolated occasion, I could supply a context and test it, but if I adopted that policy with such sentences, I'd soon stop being able to do even that. Any policy on which these sentences count as hypotheses, would also have to count them as hypotheses in all the bases other than 10, leaving me with an infinite string of equations to check, and no idea what any of them meant other than that they're equations of some sort--or maybe they're not equations but clever cyphers, etc. Once anything that occurs to me becomes a hypothesis just by virtue of having occurred, then Pandora's box is open and everything is possible, and nothing means anything specific.
In any case, let me close by stating what I think the main point here is. It's not that the arbitrary is some third category, in addition to true and false. It's that a certain sort of activity that goes on in people's minds and is expressed in their speech and writing often passes for cognition (to which the alternative of truth and falsity properly applies), but is essentially different from it. Recognizing this difference, especially in our own mental lives, helps us to be better thinkers and (thereby) better people.
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Douglas R. says: Lots of interesting things here. But it also seems that If one has not proven that (1) "X is impossible," it would be an instance of fallacy of the argument from ignorance to claim that (2) "X is possible." Until and unless evidence for (2) is provided, one should not believe (2). Note that doing this is not the same as believing (1). The same point applies in regard to the situation where one has not proven that (4) "X is possible"--that is, one should not say (5) "X is impossible" but say that one does not believe (5). The key principles here are: avoiding the fallacy of the argument from ignorance; the onus of proof principle; and the idea that one should not prejudiced--that is, that one's beliefs should be based on or proportionate to the evidence.
Greg S. replies: Doug I agree. I think that there are two senses of "possible" relevant here, but what you say applies to both. When we're talking about whether one believes that "X is possible," it's most natural to interpret "possible" in a more metaphysical way--as a claim about what entities are capable of what things. Understood this way "Is life on Mars possible?" would be a question about whether the natures of life and of Mars are such that things could live on Mars. One may have evidence that the natures of the relevant entities enable this, or evidence that the natures rule this out, or one might just be ignorant, in which case one shouldn't say anything at all. The sense of "possible" that I think is more directly relevant to how Peikoff uses the term in the relevant passages is more directly epistemic. Here it means something like "has sufficient evidence to be rationally entertained as a hypothesis" and, in this sense, I don't think of "impossible" as a direct contradictory of "possible." The contradictory would be "arbitrary" or just "not possible." "Impossible," if one wants to give it a distinctly epistemic sense would have to mean "positively excluded by the evidence," and of course merely showing that there's no evidence for something doesn't show that there's positive evidence against it. And, as you say, it would be an argument from ignorance if someone interpreted a lack of evidence in this way.