The Ayn Rand Lexicon - Objectivism From A To Z Part 2

The latter viewpoint is fundamental to every version of the a.n.a.lytic-synthetic dichotomy. The advocates of this dichotomy divide the characteristics of the existents subsumed under a concept into two groups: those which are included in the meaning of the concept, and those-the great majority-which, they claim, are excluded from its meaning. The dichotomy among propositions follows directly. If a proposition links the "included" characteristics with the concept, it can be validated merely by an "a.n.a.lysis" of the concept; if it links the "excluded" characteristics with the concept, it represents an act of "synthesis."

[Leonard Peikoff, "The a.n.a.lytic-Synthetic Dichotomy," ITOE, 127.]

The Objectivist theory of concepts undercuts the theory of the a.n.a.lytic-synthetic dichotomy at its root.... Since a concept is an integration of units, it has no content or meaning apart from its units. The meaning of a concept consists of the units-the existents-which it incilidilig all the characteristics of these units.

Observe that concepts mean existents, not arbitrarily selected portions of existents. There is no basis whatever-neither metaphysical nor epistemological, neither in the nature of reality nor of a conceptual consciousness-for a division of the characteristics of a concept's units into two groups, one of which is excluded from the concept's meaning....

The fact that certain characteristics are, at a given time, unknown to man, does not indicate that these characteristics are excluded from the ent.i.ty-or from the concept. A is A; existents are what they are, independent of the state of human knowledge; and a concept means the existents which it integrates. Thus, a concept subsumes and includes all the characteristics of its referents, known and not-yet-known.

[ibid., 131.]

The theory of the a.n.a.lytic-synthetic dichotomy has its roots in two types of error: one epistemological, the other metaphysical. The epistemological error, as I have discussed, is an incorrect view of the nature of concepts. The metaphysical error is: the dichotomy between necessary and contingent facts.

[ibid., 144.]

Only in regard to the man-made is it valid to claim: "It happens to be, but it could have been otherwise." Even here, the term "contingent" is highly misleading. Historically, that term has been used to designate a metaphysical category of much wider scope than the realm of human action; and it has always been a.s.sociated with a metaphysics which, in one form or another, denies the facts of Ident.i.ty and Causality. The "necessary-contingent" terminology serves only to introduce confusion, and should be abandoned. What is required in this context is the distinction between the "metaphysical" and the "man-made." ... Truths about metaphysical and about man-made facts are learned and validated by the same process: by observation; and, qua truths, both are equally necessary. Some facts are not necessary, but all truths are.

[Ibid., 150.1 The failure to recognize that logic is man's method of cognition, has produced a brood of artificial splits and dichotomies which represent restatements of the a.n.a.lytic-synthetic dichotomy from various aspects. Three in particular are prevalent today: logical truth vs. factual truth; the logically possible vs. the empirically possible; and the a priori vs. the a posteriori.

[Ibid., 152.]

The theory of the a.n.a.lytic-synthetic dichotomy presents men with the following choice: If your statement is proved, it says nothing about that which exists; if it is about existents, it cannot be proved. If it is demonstrated by logical argument, it represents a subjective convention; if it a.s.serts a fact, logic cannot establish it. If you validate it by an appeal to the meanings of your concepts, then it is cut off from reality; if you validate it by an appeal to your percepts, then you cannot be certain of it.

[Ibid., 126.]

See also CAUSALITY; CONCEPT-FORMATION; CONCEPTS; DEFINITIONS; MEANING (of CONCEPTS); METAPHYSICAL vs. MAN-MADE; NECESSITY.

Anarchism. Anarchy, as a political concept, is a naive floating abstraction: ... a society without an organized government would be at the mercy of the first criminal who came along and who would precipitate it into the chaos of gang warfare. But the possibility of human immorality is not the only objection to anarchy: even a society whose every member were fully rational and faultlessly moral, could not function in a state of anarchy; it is the need of objective laws and of an arbiter for honest disagreements among men that necessitates the establishment of a government.

["The Nature of Government," VOS, 152; pb 112.]

If a society provided no organized protection against force, it would compel every citizen to go about armed, to turn his home into a fortress, to shoot any strangers approaching his door-or to join a protective gang of citizens who would fight other gangs, formed for the same purpose, and thus bring about the degeneration of that society into the chaos of gang-rule, i.e., rule by brute force, into perpetual tribal warfare of prehistorical savages.

The use of physical force-even its retaliatory use-cannot be left at the discretion of individual citizens. Peaceful coexistence is impossible if a man has to live under the constant threat of force to he unleashed against him by any of his neighbors at any moment. Whether his neighbors' intentions are good or bad, whether their judgment is rational or irrational, whether they are motivated by a sense of justice or by ignorance or by prejudice or by malice-the use of force against one man cannot be left to the arbitrary decision of another.

[Ibid., 146; pb 108.]

A recent variant of anarchistic theory, which is befuddling some of the younger advocates of freedom, is a weird absurdity called "competing governments." Accepting the basic premise of the modern statists-who see no difference between the functions of government and the functions of industry, between force and production, and who advocate government owners.h.i.+p of business-the proponents of "competing governments" take the other side of the same coin and declare that since compet.i.tion is so beneficial to business, it should also be applied to government. Instead of a single, monopolistic government, they declare, there should be a number of different governments in the same geographical area, competing for the allegiance of individual citizens. with every citizen free to "shop" and to patronize whatever government he chooses.

Remember that forcible restraint of men is the only service a government has to offer. Ask yourself what a compet.i.tion in forcible restraint would have to mean.

One cannot call this theory a contradiction in terms, since it is ohviously devoid of any understanding of the terms "compet.i.tion" and "government." Nor can one call it a floating abstraction, since it is devoid of any contact with or reference to reality and cannot be concretized at all, not even roughly or approximately. One ill.u.s.tration will be sufficient : suppose Mr. Smith, a customer of Government A, suspects that his next-door neighbor, Mr. Jones, a customer of Government B, has robbed him; a squad of Police A proceeds to Mr. Jones' house and is met at the door by a squad of Police B, who declare that they do not accept the validity of Mr. Smith's complaint and do not recognize the authority of Government A. What happens then? You take it from there.

[Ibid., 152; pb 112.]

The common denominator of such [advocates of "competing governments"] is the desire to escape from objectivity (objectivity requires a very long conceptual chain and very abstract principles), to act on whim, and to deal with men rather than with ideas-i.e., with the men of their own gang bound by the same concretes.

["The Missing Link," PWNI, 53; pb 44.]

Picture a band of strangers marching down Main Street, submachine guns at the ready. When confronted by the police, the leader of the band announces: "Me and the boys are only here to see that justice is done, so you have no right to interfere with us." According to the "libertarian" anarchists, in such a confrontation the police are morally bound to withdraw, on pain of betraying the rights of self-defense and free trade.

[Harry Binsw.a.n.ger. "Q & A Department: Anarchism," TOF, Aug. 1981, 12.]

Private force is force not authorized by the government, not validated by its procedural safeguards, and not subject to its supervision. The government has to regard such private force as a threat-i.e., as a potential violation of individual rights. In barring such private force, the government is retaliating against that threat.

[Ibid., 11.]

See also COMPEt.i.tION; GOVERNMENT; ECONOMIC POWER vs. POLITICAL POWER; LAW, OBJECTIVE and NON-OBJECTIVE; OBJECTIVITY; RETALIATORY FORCE; WHIMS/WHIM-WORs.h.i.+P.

Ancient Greece. The sound of the first human step in recorded history, the prelude to the entrance of the producer on the historical scene, was the birth of philosophy in ancient Greece. All earlier cultures had been ruled, not by reason, but by mysticism: the task of philosophy --the formulation of an integrated view of man, of existence, of the universe-was the monopoly of various religions. that enforced their views by the authority of a claim to supernatural knowledge and dictated the rules that controlled men's lives. Philosophy was born in a period when ... a comparative degree of political freedom undercut the power of mysticism and, for the first time, man was free to face an un.o.bstructed universe, free to declare that his mind was competent to deal with all the problems of his existence and that reason was his only means of knowledge.

["For the New Intellectual," FNI, 19; pb 22.]

Ancient Greece tore away the heavy shroud of mysticism woven for centuries in murky temples, and achieved, in three centuries, what Egypt had not dreamed of in thirty: a civilization that was essentially pro-man and pro-life. The achievements of the Greeks rested on their confidence in the power of man's mind-the power of reason. For the first time, men sought to understand the causes of natural phenomena, and gradually replaced superst.i.tion with the beginnings of science. For the first time, men sought to guide their lives by the judgment of reason, instead of resorting exclusively to divine will and revelation.

The Greeks built temples for their G.o.ds, but they conceived of their G.o.ds as perfect human beings, rejecting the cats, crocodiles and cow-headed monstrosities enshrined and wors.h.i.+ped by the Egyptians. Greek G.o.ds personified abstractions such as Beauty, Wisdom, Justice, Victory, which are proper human values. In the Greek religion, there was no omnipotent mystical authority and no organized priesthood. The Greek had only a vague idea of, and little interest in, an afterlife.

[Mary Ann Sures, "Metaphysics in Marble," TO, Feb. 1969, 12.]

See also ART; HISTORY; MYSTICISM; REASON; PHILOSOPHY.

"Anti-Concepts." An anti-concept is an unnecessary and rationally unusable term designed to replace and obliterate some legitimate concept. The use of anti-concepts gives the listeners a sense of approximate understanding. But in the realm of cognition, nothing is as bad as the approximate....

One of today's fas.h.i.+onable anti-concepts is "polarization." Its meaning is not very clear, except that it is something bad-undesirabte, socially destructive, evil-something that would split the country into irrecortcilable camps and conflicts. It is used mainly in political issues and serves as a kind of "argument from intimidation": it replaces a discussion of the merits (the truth or falsehood) of a given idea by the menacing accusation that such an idea would "polarize" the country-which is supposed to make one's opponents retreat, protesting that they didn't mean it. Mean-what? ...

It is doubtfut-even in the midst of today's intellectual decadence-that one could get away with declaring explicitly: "Let us abolish all debate on fundamental principles!" (though some men have tried it). If, however, one declares: "Don't let us polarize," and suggests a vague image of warring camps ready to fight (with no mention of the fight's object), one has a chance to silence the mentally weary. The use of "polarization" as a pejorative term means: the suppression of fundamental principles. Such is the pattern of the function of anti-concepts.

["Credibility and Polarization," ARL, I, 1, 1.]

Observe the technique involved ... It consists of creating an artificial, unnecessary, and (rationally) unusable term, designed to replace and obliterate some legitimate concepts-a term which sounds like a concept, but stands for a "package-deal" of disparate, incongruous, contradictory elements taken out of any logical conceptual order or context, a "package-deal" whose (approximately) defining characteristic is always a non-essential. This last is the essence of the trick.

Let me remind you that the purpose of a definition is to distinguish the things subsumed under a single concept from all other things in existence; and, therefore, their defining characteristic must always be that essential characteristic which distinguishes them from everything else.

So long as men use language, that is the way they will use it. There is no other way to communicate. And if a man accepts a term with a definition by non-essentials, his mind will subst.i.tute for it the essential characteristic of the objects he is trying to designate.... Thus the real meaning of the term will automatically replace the alleged meaning.

[" 'Extremism,' or The Art of Smearing," CUI, 176.]

[Some other terms that Ayn Rand identified as anti-concepts are "consumerisrn," "duty," "ethnicity," "extremism," "isolationism," "McCarthyism," "meritocracy," and "simplistic."]

See also ARGUMENT from INTIMIDATION; CONCEPTS; DEFINITIONS; INVALID CONCEPTS; "PACKAGE-DEALING," FALLACY of.

Anti-Conceptual Mentality. The main characteristic of this mentality is a special kind of pa.s.sivity: not pa.s.sivity as such and not across-the-board, but pa.s.sivity beyond a certain limit-i.e., pa.s.sivity in regard to the process of conceptualization and, therefore, in regard to fundamental principles. It is a mentality which decided, at a certain point of development, that it knows enough and does not care to look further. What does it accept as "enough"? The immediately given, directly perceivable concretes of its background....

To grasp and deal with such concretes, a human being needs a certain degree of conceptual development, a process which the brain of an animal cannot perform. But after the initial feat of learning to speak, a child can counterfeit this process, by memorization and imitation. The anti-conceptual mentality stops on this level of development-on the first levels of abstractions, which identify perceptual material consisting predominantly of physical objects-and does not choose to take the next, crucial, fully volitional step: the higher levels of abstraction from abstractions, which cannot be learned by imitation. (See my book Introduction to Objectivist Epestencology.) ...

The anti-conceptual mentality takes most things as irreducible primaries and regards them as "self-evident." It treats concepts as if they were (memorized) percepts; it treats abstractions as if they were perceptual concretes. To such a mentality, everything is the given: the pa.s.sage of time, the four seasons, the inst.i.tution of marriage, the weather, the breeding of children, a flood, a fire, an earthquake, a revolution, a book are phenomena of the same order. The distinction between the metaphysical and the man-made is not merely unknown to this mentality, it is incommunicable.

["The Missing Link," PWNI, 45; pb 38.]

[This type of mentality] has learned to speak, but has never grasped the process of conceptualization. Concepts, to him, are merely some sort of code signals employed by other people for some inexplicable reason, signals that have no relation to reality or to himself. He treats concepts as if they were percepts, and their meaning changes with any change of circ.u.mstances. Whatever he learns or happens to retain is treated, in his mind, as if it had always been there, as if it were an item of direct awareness, with no memory of how he acquired it-as a random store of unprocessed material that comes and goes at the mercy of chance.... He does not seek knowledge-he "exposes himself" to "experience," hoping, in effect, that it will push something into his mind; if nothing happens, he feels with self-righteous rancor that there is nothing he can do about it. Mental action, i.e., mental effort-any sort of processing, identifying, organizing, integrating, critical evaluation or control of his mental content-is an alien realm.

["The Age of Envy," NL, 177.]

This mentality is not the product of ignorance (nor is it caused by lack of intelligence): it is self-made, i.e., self-arrested.

["The Missing Link," PWNI, 50; pb 42.]

In the brain of an anti-conceptual person, the process of integration is largely replaced by a process of a.s.sociation. What his subconscious stores and automatizes is not ideas, but an indiscriminate acc.u.mulation of sundry concretes, random facts, and unidentified feelings, piled into unlabeled mental file folders. This works, up to a certain point-i.e., so long as such a person deals with other persons whose folders are stuffed similarly, and thus no search through the entire filing system is ever required. Within such limits, the person can be active and willing to work hard....

A person of this mentality may uphold some abstract principles or profess some intellectual convictions (without remembering where or how he picked them up). But if one asks him what he means by a given idea, he will not be able to answer. If one asks him the reasons of his convictions, one will discover that his convictions are a thin, fragile film floating over a vacuum, like an oil slick in empty s.p.a.ce-and one will be shocked by the number of questions it had never occurred to him to ask.

[Ibid., 47; pb 39.]

He seems able to understand a discussion or a rational argument, sometimes even on an abstract, theoretical level. He is able to partic.i.p.ate, to agree or disagree after what appears to be a critical examination of the issue. But the next time one meets him, the conclusions he reached are gone from his mind, as if the discussion had never occurred even though he remembers it: he remembers the event, i.e., a discussion, not its intellectual content.

It is beside the point to accuse him of hypocrisy or lying (though some part of both is necessarily involved). His problem is much worse than that: he was sincere, he meant what he said in and for that moment. But it ended with that moment. Nothing happens in his mind to an idea he accepts or rejects; there is no processing, no integration, no application to himself, his actions or his concerns; he is unable to use it or even to retain it. Ideas, i.e., abstractions, have no reality to him; 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.

But there is one constant in his mental flux. The subconscious is an integrating mechanism; when left without conscious control, it goes on integrating on its own-and, like an automatic blender, his subconscious squeezes its clutter of trash to produce a single basic emotion: fear.

["The Comprachicos," NI., 218.]

It is the fundamentals of philosophy (particularly, of ethics) that an anti-conceptual person dreads above all else. To understand and to apply them requires a long conceptual chain, which he has made his mind incapable of holding beyond the first, rudimentary links. If his professed beiiefs-i.e., the rules and slogans of his group-are challenged, he feels his consciousness dissolving in fog. Hence, his fear of outsiders. The word "outsiders," to him, means the whole wide world beyond the confines of his village or town or gang-the world of all those people who do not live by his "rules." He does not know why he feels that outsiders are a deadly threat to him and why they fill him with helpless terror. The threat is not existential, but psycho-episternulogical: to deal with them requires that he rise above his "rules" to the level of abstract principles. He would die rather than attempt it.

"Protection from outsiders" is the benefit he seeks in clinging to his group. What the group demands in return is obedience to its rules, which he is eager to obey: those rules are his protection-from the dreaded realm of abstract thought.

["The Missing Link," PWNI, 49; pb 40.]

Racism is an obvious manifestation of the anti-conceptual mentality. So is xenophobia-the fear or hatred of foreigners ("outsiders"). So is any caste system, which prescribes a man's status (i.e., a.s.signs him to a tribe) according to his birth; a caste system is perpetuated by a special kind of sn.o.bbishness (i.e., group loyalty) not merely among the aristocrats, but, perhaps more fiercely, among the commoners or even the serfs, who like to "know their place" and to guard it jealously against the outsiders from above or from below. So is guild socialism. So is any kind of ancestor wors.h.i.+p or of family "solidarity" (the family including uncles, aunts and third cousins). So is any criminal gang.

Tribalism ... is the best name to give to all the group manifestations of the anti-conceptual mentality.

[Ibid., 50; pb 42.]

Observe that today's resurgence of tribalism is not a product of the lower cla.s.ses-of the poor, the helpless, the ignorant-but of the intellectuals, the college-educated "elitists" (which is a purely tribalistic term). Observe the proliferation of grotesque herds or gangs-hippies, yippies, beatniks, peaceniks, Women's Libs, Gay Libs, Jesus Freaks, Earth Children-which are not tribes, but s.h.i.+fting aggregates of people desperately seeking tribal "protection."

The common denominator of all such gangs is the belief in motion (ma.s.s demonstrations), not action-in chanting, not arguing-in demanding, not achieving-in feeling, not thinking-in denouncing "outsiders," not in pursuing values-in focusing only on the "now," the "today" without a "tomorrow"-in seeking to return to "nature," to "the earth," to the mud, to physical labor, i.e., to all the things which a perceptual mentality is able to handle. You don't see advocates of reason and science clogging a street in the belief that using their bodies to stop traffic, will solve any problem.

[Ibid., 52; pb 43.1 See also CONCEPTS; PERCEPTION; PSYCHO-EPISTEMOLOGY; RAC ISM; REASON; TRIBALISM.

Ant.i.trust Laws. The Ant.i.trust laws-an unenforceable, uncompliable, unjudicable mess of contradictions-have for decades kept American businessmen under a silent, growing reign of terror. Yet these laws were created and, to this day, are upheld by the "conservatives," as a grim monument to their lack of political philosophy, of economic knowledge and of any concern with principles. Under the Ant.i.trust laws, a man becomes a criminal from the moment he goes into business, no matter what he does. For instance, if he charges prices which some but eaucrats judge as too high, he can be prosecuted for monopoly or for a successful "intent to monopolize"; if he charges prices lower than those of his compet.i.tors, he can be prosecuted for "unfair compet.i.tion" or "restraint of trade"; and if he charges the same prices as his compet.i.tors, he can be prosecuted for "collusion" or "conspiracy." There is only one difference in the legal treatment accorded to a criminal or to a businessman: the criminal's rights are protected much more securely and objectively than the businessman's.

["Choose Your Issues," TON, Jan. 1962, 1.]

The alleged purpose of the Ant.i.trust laws was to protect compet.i.tion; that purpose was based on the socialistic fallacy that a free, unregulated market will inevitably lead to the establishment of coercive monopolies. But, in fact, no coercive monopoly has ever been or ever can be established by means of free trade on a free market. Every coercive monopoly was created by government intervention into the economy: by special privileges, such as franchises or subsidies, which closed the entry of compet.i.tors into a given field, by legislative action. (For a full demonstration of this fact, I refer you to the works of the best economists.) The Ant.i.trust laws were the cla.s.sic example of a moral inversion prevalent in the history of capitalism: an example of the victims, the businessmen, taking the blame for the evils caused by the government, and the government using its own guilt as a justification for acquiring wider powers, on the pretext of "correcting" the evils.

"Free compet.i.tion enforced by law" is a grotesque contradiction in terms.

["Ant.i.trust: The Rule of Unreason," TON, Feb. 1962, 1.]

[There is only one] meaning and purpose these laws could have, whether their authors intended it or not: the penalizing of ability for being ability. the penalizing of success for being success, and the sacrifice of productive genius to the demands of envious mediocrity.

["America's Persecuted Minority: Big Business," CUI, 57.]

See also CAPITALISM; COMPEt.i.tION; ECONOMIC POWER vs. POLITICAL POWER; FREE MARKET; LAW, OBJECTIVE AND NON-OBJECTIVE; MONOPOLY; PROPERTY RIGHTS.

Appeas.e.m.e.nt. Do not confuse appeas.e.m.e.nt with tactfulness or generosity. Appeas.e.m.e.nt is not consideration for the feelings of others, it is consideration for and compliance with the unjust, irrational and evil feelitigs of others. It is a policy of exempting the emotions of others from moral judgment, and of willingness to sacrifice innocent, virtuous victims to the evil malice of such emotions.

["The Age of Envy." NL, 160.]

The truly and deliberately evil men are a very small minority; it is the appeaser who unleashes them on mankind; it is the appeaser's intellectual abdication that invites them to take over. When a culture's dominant trend is geared to irrationality, the thugs win over the appeasers. When intellectual leaders fail to foster the best in the mixed, unformed, vacillating character of people at large, the thugs are sure to bring out the worst. When the ablest men turn into cowards, the average men turn into brutes.

["Altruism as Appeas.e.m.e.nt," TO, Jan. 1966. 6.]

It is understandable that men might seek to hide their vices from the eyes of people whose judgment they respect. But there are men who hide their virtues from the eyes of monsters. There are men who apologize for their own achievements, deride their own values. debase their own character-for the sake of pleasing those they know to be stupid, corrupt, malicious, evil.

["The Age of Envy," NL, 158.]

[Intellectual appeas.e.m.e.nt] is an attempt to apologize for his intellectual concerns and to escape from the loneliness of a thinker by professing that his thinking is dedicated to some social-altruistic goal. It is an attempt that amounts to the wordless equivalent of the plea: "I'm not an outsider! I'm your friend! Please forgive me for using my mind-I'm using it only in order to serve you!" ... An intellectual appeaser surrenders morality, the realm of values, in order to be permitted to use his mind.

["Altruism as Appeas.e.m.e.nt," TO. Jan. 1966, 2.]

See also COMPROMISE; EVIL,- INTEGRITY; MORAL COWARDICE; MORAL JUDGMENT; TACTFULNESS.

"A Priori." The failure to recognize that logic is man's method of cognition, has produced a brood of artificial splits and dichotomies which represent restatements of the a.n.a.lytic-synthetic dichotomy from various aspects. Three in particular are prevalent today: logical truth vs. factual truth; the logically possible vs. the empirically possible; and the a priori vs. the a posteriori.

[Leonard Peikoff, "The a.n.a.lytic-Synthetic Dichotomy," ITOE, 152.]

Any theory that propounds an opposition between the logical and the empirical, represents a failure to grasp the nature of logic and its role in human cognition. Man's knowledge is not acquired by logic apart from experience or by experience apart from logic, but by the application of logic to experience. All truths are the product of a logical identification of the facts of experience.

[Ibid., 151.]

See also a.n.a.lYTIC-SYNTHETIC DICHOTOMY; LOGIC; TRUTH.

Arbitrary. "Arbitrary" means a claim put forth in the absence of evidence of any sort, perceptual or conceptual; its basis is neither direct observation nor any kind of theoretical argument. [An arbitrary idea is] a sheer a.s.sertion with no attempt to validate it or connect it to reality.

If a man a.s.serts such an idea, whether he does so by error or ignorance or corruption, his idea is thereby epistemologically invalidated. lt has no relation to reality or to human cognition.

Remember that man's consciousness is not automatic, and not automatically correct. So if man is to be able to claim any proposition as true, or even as possible, he must follow definite epistemological rules, rules designed to guide his mental processes and keep his conclusions in correspondence to reality. In sum, if man is to achieve knowledge, he must adhere to objective validating methods-i.e., he must shun the arbitrary....

Since an arbitrary statement has no connection to man's means of knowledge or his grasp of reality, cognitively speaking such a statement must be treated as though nothing had been said.

Let me elaborate this point. An arbitrary claim has no cognitive status whatever. According to Objectivism, such a claim is not to be regarded as true or as false. If it is arbitrary, it is ent.i.tled to no epistemological a.s.sessment at all; it is simply to be dismissed as though it hadn't come up.... The truth is established by reference to a body of evidence and within a context; the false is p.r.o.nounced false because it contradicts the evidence. The arbitrary, however, has no relation to evidence, facts, or context. It is the human equivalent of [noises produced by] a parrot ... sounds without any tie to reality, without content or significance.

In a sense, therefore, the arbitrary is even worse than the false. The false at least has a relation (albeit a negative one) to reality; it has reached the field of human cognition, although it represents an error-but in that sense it is closer to reality than the brazenly arbitrary.

I want to note here parenthetically that the words expressing an arbitrary claim may perhaps be judged as true or false in some other cognitive context (if and when they are no longer put forth as arbitrary), but this is in elevant to the present issue, because it changes the epistemological situation. For instance, if a savage utters "Two plus two equals four" as a memorized lesson which he doesn't understand or see any reason for, then in that context it is arbitrary and the savage did not utter truth or falsehood (it's just like the parrot example). In this sort of situation, the utterance is only sounds; in a cognitive context, when the speaker does know the meaning and the reasons, the same sounds may be used to utter a true proposition. It is inexact to describe this situation by saying, "The same idea is arbitrary in one case and true in another." The exact description would be: in the one case the verbiage does not express an idea at all, it is merely noise unconnected to reality; to the rational man, the words do express an idea: they are conceptual symbols denoting facts.

It is not your responsibility to refute someone's arbitrary a.s.sertion-to try to find or imagine arguments that will show that his a.s.sertion is false. It is a fundamental error on your part even to try to do this. The rational procedure in regard to an arbitrary a.s.sertion is to dismiss it out of hand, merely identifying it as arbitrary, and as such inadmissible and undiscussable.