Re: virus: Angelica de Meme

Lee Daniel Crocker (lcrocker@calweb.com)
Sun, 6 Apr 1997 00:32:39 -0800 (PST)


> >If you intend that these represent Objectivist axioms, then be
> >more honest about #3.
>
> What axioms? I have no idea what you are talking about.
>
> I am talking about us in CoV. I don't think our answers depend on WHO said
> what. I take, you suggest to change my third question to:
>
> (3) Do we believe we are capable of knowing this reality?
>
> Fine with me. Do we?

No, absolutely not. That's why I wanted to clarify. Stated in
this new way, that's Rand's axiom, and is utter nonsense. To "know"
something with certainty is to deny that empirical falsification of
the assertion is possible, and can only be true of meaningless
tautologies. Any meaningful assertion can be tested only by empirical
falsification, failure of which increases verisimilitude, but can
never lead to omniscience. Rand herself hand-waves the obvious away
by calling such knowledge "contextual", but when her concept is
clarified and reduced to its ultimate conclusion, it loses content
by reducing the context to those conditions that make the assertion
in question tautological.

-- 
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com>  <http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC