I very recently learned that many ARI affiliated Objectivists now take the position that you are either certain or not - that there are no degrees of certainty. From researching this a bit today on the web, I think this derives from a careful reading of Leonard Peikoff's book on Objectivism. He may not quite take this position in his book, but he says something that can be interpreted this way.
I was surprised at the "no degrees of certainty" position, because I remembered Rand speaking of "degrees of certainty." I went looking and found a couple of very specific references where she did indeed speak of degrees of certainty.
So they have drifted a bit from Rand's particular formulation of her philosophy on this one tiny issue. You might say it doesn't matter, that it's just semantics. Perhaps so. They have decided to use "certainty" to mean "absolute certainty." So what? Would it even have mattered to Rand? Perhaps not.
But you can see where this might throw an old person like me, who read everything Rand ever published, multiple times, long before Peikoff wrote his book. When I hear them speak of certainty as having no degrees, it sounds like a different concept of certainty than hers.
This is a small change, but my sense is that there are many other similar changes. I have to admit, I don't follow ARI affiliated forums closely. But when I drop in for a read I am often very surprised by my own lack of deja vu.
As for me
I stand
With Rand:
Certainty
Comes in degrees.
2 comments:
Hey, John! I just discovered your blog (I didn't know you had one).
...At any rate, I remember sitting in one of Leonard's lectures at Brooklyn Poly where I took "Graduate Seminar in the Philosophy of Science" and many courses with him. He spent some time on possibility=some evidence for something, probability=the preponderance of evidence, certainty=all the available evidence. And he went thru a spaceship example traveling toward Mars [I'm not stating it exactly..this is LACBP...leonard as channeled by phil]: As you fly toward Mars, first you spot a patch of green from ten thousand miles and say it's possible there's life on Mars. Land and see something in the near distance that looks like a bush and now it's probable. Go over there and a Martian dinosaur comes over and takes a big bite out of your butt and now it's certain there's life on Mars.
So he believes in degrees of evidence, etc.
Fascinating, Phil. Thank you for contributing some of your vast knowledge. Yes, I really mean that!
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