Concepts and Their Role in Knowledge: Reflections on Objectivist Epistemology

Natural Kinds and Rand’s Theory of Concepts: Reflections on Griffiths

148 Natural Kinds and Rand’s Theory of Concepts Reflections on Griffiths Onkar Ghate I n his commentary on the essays in the present volume by Allan Gotthelf and by James G. Lennox, Paul Griffiths raises a number of interesting issues about (1) how to situate Rand’s theory of concepts, particularly with regard to recent debates about natural kinds, and (2) whether her theory has the resources to address some recent findings about the nature of concepts. I will address a few of the issues he raises in my brief, exploratory comments. Natural Kinds and a Complete Taxonomy Griffiths in his comments writes, In the mainstream tradition of thought about natural kinds, the idea has two important aspects. Natural kinds are associated with a vision of naturalness and also with a picture of conceptual dynamics. The “naturalness ” of kinds is the idea that they are constructed by nature and not by our intellect, discovered and not invented, and are “mind-independent.” The dynamic associated with the natural kind idea is that of progressively refining our definition in the light of our growing empirical knowledge Reflections on Griffiths ■ 149 of nature. Rand converges on this picture of conceptual dynamics, and I believe it is fundamentally correct. It is less clear that she converges on the conception of “naturalness.” It is definitely correct that Rand’s theory of concepts maintains that it is often mandatory to revise our definitions of concepts in light of our growing knowledge of nature (ITOE 40–54; Lennox in the present volume ). I think it is also correct to say that Rand would reject the mainstream conception of naturalness described by Griffiths. Although Rand argues that a properly formed concept has a basis in the facts of a mind-independent reality, she also argues that mindindependent reality does not come preclassified or presorted into kinds. The abstractness and universality of (valid) concepts—the facts that a concept ranges over qualitatively and perceptually different things that count as instances or units of the concept (the concept’s abstractness) and that a concept encompasses all instances or units, whether past, present, or future, which obviously includes existents the knower has never personally encountered (the concept’s universality)—are a product of the mind processing the facts of a mind-independent reality. Absent this mental processing , neither abstractness nor universality nor groups nor kinds exist. Here is the key passage from ITOE where Rand makes this point (the rest of ITOE is in essence an explanation of her point): The ability to regard entities as units is man’s distinctive method of cognition , which other living species are unable to follow. A unit is an existent regarded as a separate member of a group of two or more similar members. (Two stones are two units; so are two square feet of ground, if regarded as distinct parts of a continuous stretch of ground.) Note that the concept “unit” involves an act of consciousness (a selective focus, a certain way of regarding things), but that it is not an arbitrary creation of consciousness: it is a method of identification or classification according to the attributes which a consciousness observes in reality. This method permits any number of classifications and crossclassifications : one may classify things according to their shape or color or weight or size or atomic structure; but the criterion of classification is not invented, it is perceived in reality. Thus the concept “unit” is a bridge between metaphysics and epistemology: units do not exist qua units, what exists are things, but units are things viewed by a consciousness in certain existing relationships. (ITOE 6–7) 150 ■ Onkar Ghate Griffiths writes, in the first section of his discussion, that one way of capturing the mainstream idea of natural kinds is that the notion “implies a single best taxonomy of nature independent of any particular human purposes.” Given what has been said above, I think Rand would argue that her theory has no such implication—and that it would be defective if it did; this further suggests that she rejects the mainstream notion of naturalness. The notion of a “single best taxonomy” seems to be the idea of identifying the unique, correct place of each existent in one’s “conceptual scheme.” And this smacks of the idea that each existent in reality has a metaphysical essence that we must discover, a metaphysical essence that makes the existent the kind...