The Stolen Concept

[chriscase]

The assertion of the "stolen concept" fallacy is something I have seen almost exclusively from Objectivists. I guess that might be because it originates from Objectivist writings. Here is a decent introduction:

http://www.nathanielbranden.com/cata...n_concept.html

The first few paragraphs introduce the definition of the "stolen concept" fallacy. It seems to me that rejection of the stolen concept can be used to dismantle any number of philosophical stances.

Later in the article, the author attempts to do just that, with (in my opinion), dubious success. By dubious, I mean that, riddled as the rest of the article is with the usual Objectivist cant and quotes from Atlas Shrugged, it's hard to take it all that seriously.

Be that as it may, I am interested in this supposed fallacy of the stolen concept. It is really fallacious? Can we prove it?

[Lord Romanus III]

Could you elaborate further on why you consider it dubious? It fell in rather nicely for me (the quotes).

[Playfishpaste]

This isn't typically referred to as anything other than Ill-formedness in the books I've read. E.g. It's just a specific instance of contradiction, much like there can be many different kinds of "non sequitor" fallacies which don't have names because they are arbitrary.

I trust you've seen the wiki on it already, which employs the name "self-refuting idea", a much more appropriate label.

But yes, it's certainly a fallacy since it implies a contradiction.

[chriscase]

Could you elaborate further on why you consider it dubious? It fell in rather nicely for me (the quotes).

Well, when someone makes the claim that an axiom like the principle of non-contradiction (or its negation, the law of identity) cannot be questioned because any discussion of such a principle assumes it, I think we have to view the claim with some suspicion. Objectivists seem to want to use this type of argument to claim some sort of metaphysical status for their axioms. This runs counter to the usual pragmatic approach I am most familiar with, which accepts such axioms provisionally (or as J&M says, "ostensively"), and does not pursue any further argument regarding their metaphysical truth precisely because any attempt to use logic to prove such axioms is logically flawed.

And really there is no point to the metaphysical assertion unless one wants to use it to reach even less justifiable metaphysical claims. For the purposes of modelling the world, it is sufficient that the axioms we have allow us to construct a rich and consistent mathematical model. For others, their compulsion to argue the metaphysical truth of such axioms tells me that they wish to prove something further, something that is not logically supported by the axioms alone.

And as others have pointed out, even the "property is theft" example does not line up very well with the real world. You'd think philosophers obsessed with objectivity would have a clearer sense of how badly pure logic and semantics can miss the mark when put into the field. Consider the perspective of a villager on the concept of "property" during one of the periods of privatization of the commons. Hunting, fishing, and grazing grounds that had been commonly accessible became "property" of someone. For the owner that may not have meant much of a change in terms of his personal access to the resource, but in terms of everyone else, it meant potentially or practically restricted access. So, when the privatization of a grazing ground means that virtually everyone who used to have access to that resource in the past now has no right to it without the owner's permission, that certainly starts to look like someone has lost a valuable resource to me.

I also think this idea of the stolen or smuggled concept has an appeal. In fact, I have found myself using it in arguments. However, I'm not entirely clear exactly how to prove a particular argument is truly using the fallacy. What I'm trying to get to is a more rigorous definition of this fallacy so it's easier for me to see when someone is really making a self-refuting argument.

[Lord Romanus III]

Well, when someone makes the claim that an axiom like the principle of non-contradiction (or its negation, the law of identity) cannot be questioned because any discussion of such a principle assumes it, I think we have to view the claim with some suspicion. Objectivists seem to want to use this type of argument to claim some sort of metaphysical status for their axioms. This runs counter to the usual pragmatic approach I am most familiar with, which accepts such axioms provisionally (or as J&M says, "ostensively"), and does not pursue any further argument regarding their metaphysical truth precisely because any attempt to use logic to prove such axioms is logically flawed.

And really there is no point to the metaphysical assertion unless one wants to use it to reach even less justifiable metaphysical claims. For the purposes of modelling the world, it is sufficient that the axioms we have allow us to construct a rich and consistent mathematical model. For others, their compulsion to argue the metaphysical truth of such axioms tells me that they wish to prove something further, something that is not logically supported by the axioms alone.

And as others have pointed out, even the "property is theft" example does not line up very well with the real world. You'd think philosophers obsessed with objectivity would have a clearer sense of how badly pure logic and semantics can miss the mark when put into the field. Consider the perspective of a villager on the concept of "property" during one of the periods of privatization of the commons. Hunting, fishing, and grazing grounds that had been commonly accessible became "property" of someone. For the owner that may not have meant much of a change in terms of his personal access to the resource, but in terms of everyone else, it meant potentially or practically restricted access. So, when the privatization of a grazing ground means that virtually everyone who used to have access to that resource in the past now has no right to it without the owner's permission, that certainly starts to look like someone has lost a valuable resource to me.

I also think this idea of the stolen or smuggled concept has an appeal. In fact, I have found myself using it in arguments. However, I'm not entirely clear exactly how to prove a particular argument is truly using the fallacy. What I'm trying to get to is a more rigorous definition of this fallacy so it's easier for me to see when someone is really making a self-refuting argument.

I see now. I've honestly been waiting for J&M to post his response here, but he has yet to show.....

[Taiji]

...that certainly starts to look like someone has lost a valuable resource to me.

Property is theft when it happens to sharing, maybe.

[chriscase]

Property is theft when it happens to sharing, maybe.

It's the maybe that bothers me the most about the construction of this (stolen concept) type of argument. Logical fallacies aren't supposed to be maybe sorts of affairs. Something is either fallacious or it isn't.

@Playfishpaste:

I'm still thinking over the formalism. I think I would break it down into smaller chunks, but that's probably just my short attention span.

[Playfishpaste]

The informal one seems more rigorous to me anyway, as the definitions are more precise. One could formally define atomic sentences but I don't see the need to:

Every sentence is either complex or atomic. If its complex it can be broken up into smaller sentences. If its atomic it cannot. If an argument contains one or more complex sentences, and those sentences either themselves contain atomic sentences which contradict each other (A and ~A) or each contain one such sentence that is the negation of another atomic sentence among them, then the complex sentence(s) (or atomic sentences if the argument contains them) is/are contradictory and commit the stolen concept fallacy.

The reason things are not clear here is not because the Stolen Concept fallacy is problematic, it's because we're not sure about the meaning of property. Here is a clear case of the stolen concept fallacy:

There are no points, there are only spheres.

Since the complex sentence "there are only spheres" can be broken up into the conjunction of atomic sentences "there exist points and there exists 3-space and there exist loci of points some distance r from another point in 3-space and these things are all that exist.", there is an atomic sentence in the sentence "there are only spheres" (namely, "there exist points") which contradicts the first sentence (which in this case happens to be an atomic sentence, so we do not need to break it up) "there exist points".

It's not really true that "there exist points" is an atomic sentence, since this can be further broken up. But you get the idea here.

[Phier]

The assertion of the "stolen concept" fallacy is something I have seen almost exclusively from Objectivists. I guess that might be because it originates from Objectivist writings. Here is a decent introduction:

http://www.nathanielbranden.com/cata...n_concept.html

The first few paragraphs introduce the definition of the "stolen concept" fallacy. It seems to me that rejection of the stolen concept can be used to dismantle any number of philosophical stances.

Later in the article, the author attempts to do just that, with (in my opinion), dubious success. By dubious, I mean that, riddled as the rest of the article is with the usual Objectivist cant and quotes from Atlas Shrugged, it's hard to take it all that seriously.

Be that as it may, I am interested in this supposed fallacy of the stolen concept. It is really fallacious? Can we prove it?

Interesting essay. I'm not sure how one proves something like this, it sounds like a task for people who still need to get their thesis done, but the idea I think is sound.

If your argument against something existing/being valid requires that something exist/be valid to have any meaning, you are guilty of a stolen concept fallacy.

I found the bit on faith, which I've seen invoked here that evolution requires 'faith' to be quite fitting for it.

[Denny Crane!]

Nathanials first example is crap and a sure sign that someone picked out a random popular phrase from Proudhon but I'm guessing never read any of his books. Proudhon thought that individual claims to property were theft because they were the property of the commons, a concept that is actually built in undeniably in English law and of that I am absolutely sure but also as a concept collective ownership has existed for a long time. I might not necessarily agree with it but Brandans over simplification of Proudhon is trite.

[Phier]

"The sky can not be blue because color does not exist. "

[Playfishpaste]

Hows this? Let P(y,x): y is a premise in an argument and contains atomic sentence x, let A, B, C and so on (except for P) be the set of atomic sentences.

∀x∀y(x∈{A,B,C...}⇒(P(y,x)⇔~∃c(P(y,c)^P(y,x)⊨⊥)))

Perhaps you still would need a more rigorous definition of what it means for two atomic sentences to entail a contradiction, but I mean, this is pretty trivial stuff no? They contradict if one is the negation of the other. I feel including that is just weird. Perhaps what might need to be more rigorous is what it means for something to be atomic to a complex premise y?

[magickyleo101]

As with most of what Ayn Rand and her ilk wrote, most of this essay is a lot of tripe. Despite writing at the same time as a lot of the developments in modern logic were taking place, Ayn Rand and her followers really didn't know much about or have very much concern for formal logic as modern philosophers think of it today. Her theory of "logic" is laid out in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology where she develops a largely psychological account of how "concepts" work. In particular, she tells this story about how an infant would build up certain concepts with later concepts being built out of earlier ones.

Thus, for the objectivists, some concepts really are "prior" to others in the sense that some concepts have to be formed by a person before others can be. There's a contrast, then, between her notion of a concept of negation and an actual logician's notion of the same thing. While for a modern logician many of the parts of logic are inter-definable (e.g. I can start with negation and conjunction and get to the Sheffer stroke or start with the Sheffer stroke and get to negation and conjunction), for the objectivist at least one of those is actually, necessarily "prior" to the other.

Thus, you get statements out of Branden like:

All of man’s knowledge and all of his concepts have a hierarchical structure. The foundation or ultimate base of this structure is man’s sensory perceptions; these are the starting points of his thinking. From these, man forms his first concepts and (ostensive) definitions—then goes on building the edifice of his knowledge by identifying and integrating new concepts on a wider and wider scale. It is a process of building one identification upon another—of deriving wider abstractions from previously known abstractions, or of breaking down wider abstractions into narrower classifications. Man’s concepts are derived from and depend on earlier, more basic concepts, which serve as their genetic roots. For example, the concept “parent” is presupposed by the concept “orphan”; if one had not grasped the former, one could not arrive at the latter, nor could the latter be meaningful.


The hierarchical nature of man’s knowledge implies an important principle that must guide man’s reasoning: When one uses concepts, one must recognize their genetic roots, one must recognize that which they logically depend on and presuppose.

Of course, a major problem here is in determining which concepts actually come "first." For example, Branden writes:

To declare that the axioms of logic are “hypothetical” (or merely “probable”) is to be guilty of the same contradiction. The concept of the “hypothetical (or the “probable”) is not a primary; it acquires meaning only in contradistinction to the known, the certain, the logically established. Only when one knows something which is certain, can one arrive at the idea of that which is not; and only logic can separate the latter from the former.

But why is it that the concept of "the certain" comes first rather than the concept of "the probable"? After all, it's hard to tell someone what "certain" means unless you have things that aren't certain to contrast against. At the very least, the objectivist would want some kind of empirical evidence to support the claim that one concept is formed before the other, but the objectivists (for obvious reasons) never quite manage to produce anything of the sort. [My personal guess is that both "possibility" and "certainty" are hard-wired into the brain in some sort of Chomsky sense, but that's a question for another day.]

So at the end of the day what you really have out of the objectivist theory of logic is either (a) an empirical hypothesis for which no meaningful empirical support has been produced or (b) a speculative system which has far less useful application than the "competing" (to give Rand altogether too much credit) system of modern, post-Kripke formal logic. After all, there's a reason that objectivism is a philosophy popular among high school students rather than actual linguists or logicians.

(And it's a petty point, but I can't help but note that the "stolen concept" business isn't properly a fallacy at all. A fallacy is an invalid or unreliable inference (like the fallacy of affirming the consequent). It's not the same thing as an inconsistent or logically false statement. Contradictions can't be fallacious; only arguments can. But, as we've said, the objectivists never really gave a about logic anyways.)