The context for this page: this is the third of a series of pages. The first is the Third Wave page, which links to Epistemology 101, which links to this one. The link to the fourth page is given below. To get the most out of this, you should at least go back and read Epistemology 101 before reading this page.
After I graduated from the University of Texas, I knocked around for awhile and ended up in Palo Alto, California. I decided to go back to school. I enrolled in the summer session at Stanford and took a course in Wittgenstein's philosophy. I met a Stanford student who was interested in some of the same things I'm interested in. We met regularly and wrote long letters about philosophy (this was before e-mail, so we wrote letters). He was an Objectivist, i.e. a follower of Ayn Rand, and I was still more or less Objectivist at that time, although I didn't really take it that seriously anymore. At one point the Law of Identity came up in our discussions, and it occurred to me that I had never looked up what Aristotle actually said.
First I turned to my own bookcase. I had several of Aristotle's books, and at least three books about him, including two recommended by Ayn Rand (Randall and Ross). None of them said anything about the Law of Identity. It wasn't even listed in the index. This was quite a puzzle to me. It was as if I opened an atlas (no, three atlases) and tried to find a map of Australia, and found that there was no mention of Australia, even in the index. I have never been to Australia, but it never occurred to me that it might not exist. Of course, Australia exists! But then why isn't it in the atlases????
The Wittgenstein course was over, but my student ID was still valid until about the middle of September, so I had access to the main library at Stanford (which wasn't open to the public). I went to the philosophy section. They had shelf after shelf of books about Aristotle. I started looking through them. They didn't say anything about the Law of Identity. Finally I found one that did. It was about a hundred years old. The author was George Grote, a professor at Cambridge. In the chapter on Posterior Analytics, he listed the three "laws of thought," starting with the Maxim of Identity, as he called it.
So I read Posterior Analytics again, and it's just not there. The Law of Non-contradiction and the Law of the Excluded Middle are there, but not the Law of Identity.
I tried the logic section of the library. Again, I looked at book after book, and found nothing. Finally I found something in a book by Susan Stebbing, published in the 1920's. She said, in passing, that apparently Aristotle didn't say that A is A after all. That's all she said. She didn't elaborate on what she meant by "after all." Reading between the lines, there must have been some controversy about this in the early 20th century, which concluded that Aristotle didn't say that A is A. In other words, somebody else had done the same thing I was doing, and discovered that Aristotle's famous law is not to be found in his writings. But then the controversy was forgotten. I looked in back issues of philosophy journals from around the turn of the century, but found nothing.
I tried to trace A is A back to its source. I discovered that there is no Greek expression for "law of identity." There is a Latin expression, principium identitatis. I drove up to the University of San Fransisco. It's a Catholic school, and their library has a lot of books about Thomas Aquinas. His collected works have been thoroughly indexed in both Latin and English. There was no mention of the Law of Identity. So it must have had its origin sometime after the 13th century (or at least after 1274, when Aquinas died).
In modern times, from the 17th century through the 19th, the Law of Identity was well known. Many philosophers referred to it. So it must have originated in the late middle ages.
I never succeeded in tracing it to its source. The relevant materials would be in Latin, and they didn't have a Latin collection at the main library at Stanford. I tried going to the classics library, but they wouldn't let me in. It's not open to anybody, not even Stanford students, unless you are in the classics department. (I minored in classics at the University of Texas, but that didn't make any difference.) I guess I could have gone farther afield, to other libraries, but I gave up at that point.
My conjecture is that it must have happened like this: In the late 13th century, Aristotle became part of the philosophy curriculum. But not many students (or professors) knew enough Greek to read Aristotle in the original. There was a Latin translation, but not many people wanted to read that, either. To save them the trouble, somebody wrote a textbook, and that's when the bogus law of identity was introduced. Everybody read the textbook instead of reading Aristotle. Then other textbooks were written based on the first one, and they kept repeating the myth of Aristotle's law for several hundred years. It became part of the folklore of philosophy. Finally somebody tried to look it up, and found that there is no such thing (this is what Susan Stebbing was referring to). But most people never heard about that, and the myth lives on. There are still philosophy professors who teach their students about Aristotle's Law of Identity.
I spent three solid weeks on this investigation. It was quite an event in my young life.
I'm making several points here:
1. You don't know what's in a book until you have read it. You cannot depend on hearsay. Ever. That applies to Aristotle's works, and to everything else. You have to check things out.
2. People who talk about "reason" and "critical thinking" don't mean what they say. Those are just code words. One afternoon in March of 1995 there was an Extropian meeting at Max More's apartment. He was just completing his dissertation and was about to receive a Ph.D. in philosophy from USC. He said he was going to teach courses in Critical Thinking, and write a book about it. Knowing he was an Objectivist, I asked him if he had ever looked up what Aristotle actually said about the Law of Identity. No, he hadn't.
"You've read Atlas Shrugged, though?"
"Yes."
"How long ago?"
"Fifteen years."
"But you never looked up what Aristotle said?"
"No."
But he and many others like him go on and on about "critical thinking."
Obviously Ayn Rand herself never looked up what Aristotle said. She believed what her professor told her about Aristotle and kept repeating it for the rest of her life. Her followers believed what she said, and they are still repeating it.
I recently discovered a web page which lists many criticisms of Objectivism - apparently all the criticisms the author could find. Looking through them, I don't see any mention of the Law of Identity. People have been arguing about Objectivism for more than 40 years, but how many have gone to the library and looked up what Aristotle said? (As of January 2005 the author of the Criticisms of Objectivism page has discovered this page and provided a link to it.)
3. The most important point is that the world we live in is an illusion. Aristotle's Law of Identity is just one example, a rather trivial example, of a general phenomenon. We live in a world of phantoms, on many levels, and that should be the starting point for epistemology. In other words epistemology shouldn't be concerned with questions such as "How do you know you are not dreaming?" or "How do you know that the external world exists?" It should start with the observation that we do in fact have false beliefs.
I read Atlas Shrugged when I was a senior in high school. It took me six years to look up "A is A." In the meantime, during my college years, I spent a lot of time in coffee houses where students talked about philosophy. Aristotle's Law of Identity was a subject that came up from time to time. Some of us said it was true and important, some said it was true but trivial, some said it was false, but it never crossed our minds that we might be arguing about something that doesn't exist. (Of course the law of identity itself exists, it just isn't due to Aristotle.)
Many other conversations are about nonexistent subjects. Going to college is supposed to be a journey from illusion to reality, but it seldom works that way. For many people it's a journey deeper into unreality.
Let's move on to a more important example of something "everybody knows."
My reply to Michael Shermer: This page is an analysis of Michael Shermer's attempt to prove that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz and the other Nazi concentration camps. I am not a historian. Neither is he. I am primarily concerned with the logical framework of the discussion. He says that is also his main concern. This page isn't about history per se, it's about epistemology.
Dr. Shermer says "I do not intend to prove the Holocaust so much as to demonstrate how the Holocaust is proven." So, what kind of proof does he use? - a "jumping together" argument.
The epistemological question is whether a jumping together argument can ever be a valid proof of anything. Is this logic, or is it something else?
As I said two pages back, on the Third Wave page, we are enmeshed in a web of lies, on many levels, and extricating ourselves is a nontrivial task. The Reply to Michael Shermer is part of my attempt to extricate myself. It is where I discuss the most important philosophical issue of our time.
I would be interested in hearing from anyone who can shed light on the origin of "A is A." Also, if someone is discussing this page in a forum, I would appreciate being notified.
I can be reached at the following address:
logic.to.lyle at the domain name, which is recursor.net
John Galt fans might be interested in a page in another part of the site - Coherent Energy from the Subatomic Domain.