Thomas Walker-Werth

I’m still struggling with this, on two fronts:

Firstly, I’d [hesitantly] disagree with Seamus that the statement “A blood is compatible with A blood” is still true, with exceptions/conditions. Rather, I’d say the statement “Some A blood is compatible with some A blood” is true. The previous belief that all A blood is compatible was simply false. It’s not akin to the balloon example. “Things fall down” is only a true statement if you interpret “things” to mean “some things” not “all things.” The actual fact is “things which are heavier than air fall down in the absence of another force”—this is and will always be true on any body with mass and an atmosphere. “Things fall down” is an imprecise generalization, a partial identification of truth, but “some things fall down” is an accurate statement in context and always will be. Both are fully true lower-level understandings of the fact that gravity attracts all matter and that attraction can be resisted by sufficient force (e.g. buoyancy in air or water, thrust, lift, molecular cohesion, etc.). To my mind, a thought is only “true” if it is “a recognition of reality,” that is, a recognition of what is actually the case, not a misidentification of it as in the A blood example.

Secondly, I’m not sure LP is even right to treat “truth” as a purely epistemological concept. Did Rand ever do that? Rand’s definition seems to treat “truth” as the mind identifying actual facts of reality—a mixture of epistemology and metaphysics—not merely statements which appear true in a given context of knowledge. Truth is contextual insofar as a given fact will only be true in a given context—things won’t fall down when they’re on the ground or in orbit around a body—but they don’t become true just because you lack the knowledge necessary to see why they’re untrue. This is one of a couple of instances in which I think Peikoff’s definitions in this book drift away from Rand’s ideas, and where I suspect she would’ve red-lined the hell out of his drafts.