- Differentiation and Integration as the Means to a Unit-Perspective
- Concept-Formation as a Mathematical Process
- Concepts of Consciousness as Involving Measurement-Omission
- Definition as the Final Step in Concept-Formation
- Concepts as Devices to Achieve Unit-Economy
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An excerpt from chapter 3 on Concept-Formation from Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand by Leonard Peikoff.
For man, sensory material is only the first step of knowledge, the basic source of information. Until he has conceptualized this information, man cannot do anything with it cognitively, nor can he act on it. Human knowledge and human action are conceptual phenomena.
Although concepts are built on percepts, they represent a profound development, a new scale of consciousness. An animal knows only a handful of concretes: the relatively few trees, ponds, men, and the like it observes in its lifetime. It has no power to go beyond its observations—to generalize, to identify natural laws, to hypothesize causal factors, or, therefore, to understand what it observes. A man, by contrast, may observe no more (or even less) than an animal, but he can come to know and understand facts that far outstrip his limited observations. He can know facts pertaining to all trees, every pond and drop of water, the universal nature of man. To man, as a result, the object of knowledge is not a narrow corner of a single planet, but the universe in all its immensity, from the remote past to the distant future, and from the most minuscule (unperceivable) particles of physics to the farthest (unperceivable) galaxies of astronomy.
A similar contrast applies in the realm of action. An …
Read the rest in Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand.
