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I came late to lecture #3 so missed John’s initial question about whether Rand’s explanation of a child’s grasp of a concept (her example was “length” on page 11 of ITOE) was inconsistent with Peikoff’s insistence that “the word constitutes the completion of the integration stage: it is the form in which the concept exists” (page 70 of OPAR). Clearly, very young children seem to grasp similarities among existents they perceive (drinking bottles in John’s example) and group them together before learning to speak. I agree with Seamus that they are not inconsistent. I suggest the child’s grasp of “drinking thing” by merely pointing is an implicit grasp of the concept of a bottle whereas the use of the word “bottle” when older would be an explicit one. “Implicit” means expressed in an indirect way (eg the child pointing to the parents’ bottle when wanting to drink). Only when older and speaking can the child be more clear about what he wants when he asks mom “can I have the bottle” ie explicit grasp. I believe Peikoff hints at this when he says the word is the “completion” of the integration stage ie that only when the concept is transformed into a (mental) entity by use of a word (Rand’s comment on page 11 of ITOE) is the process complete (explicit). This seems consistent with the observation we often make that we really do not fully understand something until we can write it down and/or express it to someone else clearly.
Thanks, Steve.
The passages in question are these:
“The first words a child learns are words denoting visual objects, and he retains his first concepts visually. Observe that the visual form he gives them is reduced to those essentials which distinguish the particular kind of entities from all others—for instance, the universal type of a child’s drawing of man in the form of an oval for the torso, a circle for the head, four sticks for the extremities, etc. Such drawings are a visual record of the process of abstraction and concept-formation in a mind’s transition from the perceptual level to the full vocabulary of the conceptual level” (ITOE, 13).
Peikoff writes, “A word is the only form in which a man’s mind is able to retain such a sum of concretes. If a man, deprived of words, were to perform only the steps indicated so far, he would have before his mind a complex, unwieldy phenomenon: a number of similar objects and a resolve to treat them and everything like them together. This would not be a mental entity or a retainable mental state. . . . A concept without a word is at best an ephemeral resolve” (OPAR, 79).
Rand says we retain our first concepts visually, whereas Peikoff says the only form in which we can hold concepts is via a word. Seamus’s answer, if I recall correctly, was that these don’t conflict because words are visual. However, “visually” is much broader than “in the form of a word,” and the stick-figure example Rand gives is not a word. I think, strictly speaking, these passages do conflict, but that the omission is an understandable choice given Peikoff’s goal of condensing the entire philosophy into one book. The issue, though, could have been avoided by simply cutting the world “only” from his first line above.
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