Anyway, if Objectivists are claiming to have reached morality from tautology, I’m inclined to throw that in with all the other nonsense they spout that I know for a fact to be wrong. Now that you say it, I do recall seeing something along the lines of “the fundamental truth that A=A” in an Objectivist … I don’t want to say rant, it was pretty short … but I don’t recall noticing an actual, rational argument in there so it’s probably trivially wrong.
Incidently, the mid-20c school of thought called “General Semantics” held that A != A (or at least not always), and their logo was an A with a bar over it; I think it may have helped inspire the early cognitive psychologist Albert Ellis to invent a new language called E Prime which was simply English with all forms of the verb “to be” removed. He is supposed to have written one book in E Prime, and as far as I know that was the end of it.
Anyway General Semantics preceded Ayn Rand, so maybe it ticked her off.
… wow.
Anyway, if Objectivists are claiming to have reached morality from tautology, I’m inclined to throw that in with all the other nonsense they spout that I know for a fact to be wrong. Now that you say it, I do recall seeing something along the lines of “the fundamental truth that A=A” in an Objectivist … I don’t want to say rant, it was pretty short … but I don’t recall noticing an actual, rational argument in there so it’s probably trivially wrong.
Incidently, the mid-20c school of thought called “General Semantics” held that A != A (or at least not always), and their logo was an A with a bar over it; I think it may have helped inspire the early cognitive psychologist Albert Ellis to invent a new language called E Prime which was simply English with all forms of the verb “to be” removed. He is supposed to have written one book in E Prime, and as far as I know that was the end of it.
Anyway General Semantics preceded Ayn Rand, so maybe it ticked her off.
Is that where van Vogt’s Ā come from?
Yes.
Sorry, no idea.