Scholarly works in the Objectivist and Austrian Traditions
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Epistemological Foundations of the Free Society
Ayn Rand's Theory of Universals Applied to Science, Sigmund Freud's Psychology, and Ludwig von Mises's Economics
by Jerry Kirkpatrick, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of International Business and Marketing, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (Cal Poly Pomona)
How can a valid theory of universals provide a defense of the free society?
By defending our ability to know reality—to guide our choices and actions to grow, thrive, and prosper.
Such a theory allows us to validate all the essential concepts required to explain and fight for the free society, the social system of laissez-faire capitalism, because every word we use, excluding proper nouns, is universal.
“Human,” “dog,” and “rocket” in the English language apply to all humans, dogs, and rockets, past, present, and future.
If the concepts underlying those words are false, approximate, or capable of being known only by an elite—Plato’s philosopher-kings—or worse, are Thomas Hobbes’s true-in-name-only arbitrary and subjective “words and breath,” we cannot rely on our knowledge when we move to more abstract ideas of philosophy, psychology, and economics.
This book presents an epistemological defense of the free society by summarizing Ayn Rand's theory of universals, or concepts as she calls them, and demonstrates that her theory answers what in philosophy is called the problem of universals.
The theory is applied to science, identifying the essence of scientific method as conceptualization—not controlled experimentation or statistical inference and probabilities, as the current positivist-influenced science insists. Her theory is further applied and illustrated in the work of Sigmund Freud and Ludwig von Mises demonstrating that these authors are, respectively, and contrary to their critics, scientists of psychology and economics.
Ayn Rand’s theory of concepts is an improvement on Aristotle’s form and matter, providing all scientists today, especially those working to establish a free society, a needed and sound epistemological foundation.
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