CF·Dictionary

Traditions 41 of 217 entries

Objectivism

Oism

Ayn Rand’s philosophy: reason as the means of knowledge, oriented to an objective, context-bound reality.

  1. № 002 Arbitrary/Possible/Probable/Certain Scale Peikoff's Objectivist scheme rating an idea arbitrary, possible, probable, or certain, with ideas climbing toward certainty as evidence accumulates.
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  2. № 005 Automatization The process by which consciously-learned ideas and skills become fast, low-error, subconscious responses that need little conscious attention.
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  3. № 008 Axioms (Existence, Identity, Consciousness) Objectivism's three self-evident bases of all knowledge: existence exists, every existent has identity, and consciousness is awareness of existence.
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  4. № 020 Cargo Culting Adopting sophisticated terminology and high-level concepts without having built the foundational knowledge beneath them, leaving empty jargon instead of real understanding.
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  5. № 022 Certainty (Contextual) Objectivism's idea that one can be certain relative to one's full context of knowledge, rather than with absolute or infallible finality.
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  6. № 026 Concepts (Concept-Formation) Mental integrations that unite many particulars into a single unit, formed by distinguishing essentials from non-essentials.
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  7. № 027 Conceptual Hierarchy The layered structure in which advanced concepts depend on, and are built up from, simpler and more basic ones.
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  8. № 028 Conceptual Unit A single mental whole formed by integrating two or more ideas or dimensions so the mind can treat them as one item.
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  9. № 031 Conscious Ideas Mental content you can put into words and deliberately attend to, operating under a tight limit on how much can be held in focus at once.
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  10. № 035 Context (Objectivist) The discipline of holding every idea within the body of relevant knowledge and circumstances that makes it apply, and tracking that context as it changes.
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  11. № 036 Contextual Knowledge The view that an idea is always evaluated relative to a goal and context, so whether it succeeds or fails is context-dependent and a changed context can demand reassessment.
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  12. № 039 Critical Fallibilism Elliot Temple's rational philosophy that evaluates ideas in a binary, error-correction way and acts only on ideas with no known refutation, synthesizing Critical Rationalism, Theory of Constraints, and Objectivism.
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  13. № 068 Essentials vs Non-Essentials Distinguishing a concept's defining, fundamental features from its merely incidental ones, especially when forming and judging definitions.
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  14. № 070 Evasion The willful refusal to look at, think about, or engage relevant facts and criticisms — a deliberate suspension of the mind that blocks error correction.
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  15. № 079 Fallible Ideas Elliot Temple's pre-CF body of philosophy and its discussion community, synthesizing Popper, Rand, Deutsch, and Godwin, which Critical Fallibilism develops further.
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  16. № 084 Focus The volitional choice to direct one's mind to full, active awareness and clear thinking, as opposed to drifting or evading.
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  17. № 092 Habits Automatized behaviors or skills run on autopilot with little conscious attention, which become harder to change as their mechanics drop out of awareness.
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  18. № 093 Hierarchy of Ideas Knowledge organized in layers from concrete details up to high-level concepts, cross-connected so any idea can be unwrapped to inspect what it was built from.
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  19. № 105 Integration Combining several ideas into a single, more powerful conceptual unit, where the more layers built on an idea, the lower its tolerable error rate must be.
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  20. № 108 Introspection Understanding yourself by analyzing your own ideas, emotions, and traits, which is hard mainly because you must untangle decades of poorly-learned, uncriticized ideas.
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  21. № 109 Intuition Subconscious or inexplicit ideas, including emotions, hunches and gut feelings, that influence judgment but resist being put into words.
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  22. № 123 Mastery The level of proficiency at which an activity is done reliably, with few errors and minimal conscious attention, using resources efficiently.
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  23. № 124 Measurement Omission Rand's theory that a concept is formed by grouping things that share an attribute while omitting the specific measurements of that attribute, which may vary within a range.
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  24. № 128 Moral Judgment The Objectivist principle that one must never fail to pronounce moral judgment where it is warranted, and must be prepared to justify it.
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  25. № 131 No Inherent Conflicts of Interest The thesis that the rational interests of people do not inherently clash, so win/win solutions are generally available.
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  26. № 133 Non-Contradictory Integration The aim of combining all of one's knowledge into a single consistent whole with no contradictions left standing between its parts.
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  27. № 137 Objective Truth The view that reality exists independently of our minds and that we can gain real, though always fallible, knowledge about it.
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  28. № 138 Objectivity Recognizing that reality exists independently of any mind and can only be known by reason applied in accordance with logic, against subjectivism and relativism.
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  29. № 139 Objectivity in Filtering Filtering which debates to accept by measurable, public criteria such as word counts or demonstrated effort, rather than vague or biased personal judgments.
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  30. № 156 Practice Doing an activity deliberately for the purpose of learning and improving, until a known-correct method becomes automatic.
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  31. № 157 Practice and Mastery (Objectivist Integration) Deliberate, repeated use of an idea or skill that drives it toward automatic, low-attention competence — an Objectivist learning theme CF integrates into Critical Rationalism.
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  32. № 161 Primacy of Existence The Objectivist principle that reality exists independently of and has metaphysical priority over any consciousness that perceives it.
  33. № 171 Reason The best ways of using your mind to find and correct errors, judging ideas by whether they solve their problem in context rather than by any guarantee of truth.
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  34. № 172 Reason vs Emotion Emotions are the products of one's value judgments and ideas, not a separate faculty for perceiving reality, so reason rather than feeling should guide cognition.
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  35. № 173 Reason vs Observation The rejection of any forced choice between thinking and observing: both pure rationalism and pure empiricism are mistaken extremes, since reason and observation work together.
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  36. № 190 Subconscious Ideas Inexplicit knowledge below conscious awareness that runs most of the brain's computation and shows up as intuitions, emotions, and automatic responses.
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  37. № 191 Subconscious Truth-Detection A well-trained subconscious registers obvious reality automatically, making it harder to lie to yourself about things you have mastered.
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  38. № 199 The Arbitrary Peikoff's category for a claim made with no evidence, treated as a separate plane of badness to be dismissed without argument.
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  39. № 206 Truth Correspondence to a reality that exists independently of us and that we can come to know about, while never being certain we have reached it.
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  40. № 210 Unit Economy (Crow Epistemology) The mind can actively hold only a few items at once (roughly seven), so concepts economize by collapsing many concretes into single units.
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  41. № 211 Values What one acts to gain or keep; in Objectivism the standards behind one's choices, and the source of emotions, which reflect one's value judgments.
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