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Crunchytoast, you are apparently deliberately misinterpreting Rand's words. Either that or you failed to read all she said.

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If someone says "Rationality means the recognition and acceptance of snortmin as one's only source of knowledge," it is a meaningless statement without a definition of snortmin. Fortunately, Rand provides us that definition --

"By snortmin, I mean the faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by man's senses. "

Clearly you disagree with her definition of reason (snortmin). What is your definition?

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Experience alone tells us nothing. Reason is required to make sense of the experience.

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And reason by definition cannot even operate in the absence of something on which to operate -- experience. This is so self-evident a fact that Rand didn't feel the necessity to include an unnecessary extra tag phrase every time she uttered the word "reason".

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Rand was a conceptual thinker.

Once she had defined a concept (in this case, "reason") she expected the listener to understand that each time she spoke the word she was necessarily invoking the concept the word represents.

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Further, let's recognize another self-evident fact -- when Rand defines "rationality" as "the recognition and acceptance of reason as one's only source of knowledge, she is also implicitly stating that:

- recognizing and accepting divine revelation as a source of knowledge
- recognizing and accepting popular opinion as a source of knowledge
- recognizing and accepting one's emotional responses as a source of knowledge
- recognizing and accepting arbitrary speculation as a source of knowledge
- recognizing and accepting random picks from a list as a source of knowledge

are not examples of rationality.

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You have spent enormous amounts of time in this thread

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attempting to show Rand believes a concept she never believed -- that reason, divorced from experience -- provides knowledge.

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To bolster this erroneous view, you have deliberately isolated a single phrase from the sentence of which it was a part and misrepresented it as a statement made on its own, in isolation.

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Rand's entire sentence was a definition of rationality, not an exhortation for people to go forth and attempt to acquire knowledge through identifying and integrating nothing at all.

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Further, are we certain the transcript of the interview (and let's remember it was an INTERVIEW, not a philosophical essay) is accurate? Suppose the transcriber mistook "reasoning" for "reason", for example. Then her sentence reads: "Rationality means the recognition and acceptance of reasoning as one's only source of knowledge."

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Even if she really did say "reason" in that particular interview, taken in context her meaning is crystal clear.

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Expending vast amounts of time nitpicking an out of context sentence fragment in an attempt to prove your point shows in my opinion either intellectually dishonesty or a failure to grasp the concepts being discussed.

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oh give me a break.  i disagree with you so i must be intellectually dishonest or fail to grasp the concepts. 

such considerations are not only baseless, they are moot.  claims about my person do not invalidate my arguments.

after all, the innocent child who states that "2+2=4", even if he hasn't grasped the concept, certainly hasn't made a false statement.

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Like Skorp, I too give up on you.

There are only two alternatives here:

1) You cannot grasp a simple and thoroughly-explained concept
2) You grasp the concept but for whatever reason pretend you don't.

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It has been so thoroughly explained by Rand herself, Peikoff's commentary, the vast body of the rest of Rand's work, Skorp's words and my own that if you don't get it now you never will.

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You are crafting your entire argument by deliberately ignoring the definition of "reason" Rand provides. You instead substitute your understanding of the word "reason", then attack the resulting straw man. This is exactly the same thing I see almost every day in the other forum I moderate -- Politics, Activism & Law -- where the Lefties tear down "capitalism". Of course, what they are tearing down is not capitalism at all, but their warped understanding of it. Even after I provide the definition of capitalism, they ignore it -- and continue their rants against something which is the very antithesis of the definition I provide. And to point it out yet again, you are not even attacking an actual statement she made about knowledge, you are extracting a sentence fragment from her definition of "rationality" and attacking that instead.

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When Rand defines reason as "the faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by man's senses," only someone who hasn't grasped the concept or who is deliberately being obtuse would continue to rail on and on and on against a straw man manufactured out of whole cloth.

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If you had said she should have invented some new word to use, rather than "co-opt" crunchytoast's personal understanding of what "reason" means,

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I suppose I could see your point. But her definition of reason -- when used in the context of the acquisition of knowledge -- is consistent with dictionary definitions of reason.

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You will note that even the definitions provided by various dictionaries differ slightly from each other. And once she has defined "reason", you have no excuse for using anything other than that definition in an attempt to refute her point of view.

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I ask again -- what part of her definition of reason do you find incorrect? Are you saying that reason is not the faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by the senses?

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When people speak extemporaneously rather than in a formal essay, they will often use shortcuts -- particularly once the subject matter being discussed has already been explained earlier in the discussion.

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You're being bloody-minded about a nitpicky point.

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You are willfully misunderstanding what has been said, and it's obvious you have no interest in doing otherwise. I have better ways to spend my time than continuing this discussion.

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Enjoy your day.

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is it so unbelievable that rand thought that logic provides us with knowledge, or that knowledge must take a logical form?  you find this belief stated in this forum almost every day.

is it so unbelievable that a person with such faith in rationality, logic, and the powers of the mind, thought that the mind was the source of knowledge, not experience itself?

these are sensible beliefs to have; i don't begrudge her for it; nor do i begrudge the numerous p&s'ers who seem to hold these beliefs.  many intelligent people have had these beliefs, including numerous great philosophers throughout history.  yet they are wrong, as i have showed.  once i showed how wrong they were, all i get is this cop-out answer "rand didn't actually believe that"  which is totally contradicted by her actual words.

"Rationality means the recognition and acceptance of reason as one's only source of knowledge"

"By reason, I mean the faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by man's senses. "