In Rand’s defense, she does define the terms “altruism” and “selfishness” i her works, at length, from every possible angle, at nauseam. Its impossible to read more than one page of her work and still confuse her definitions for standard ones.
The confusion usually comes up through a game of telephone, when people opposed to Objectivism comment on things written by fans of Rand, without ever actually reading the source material.
I assume you mean “in her works”, and “ad nauseam”?
If so, I don’t think the rate of readers who comprehend the idiosyncratic definitions are anywhere near 100% of even those who actually finish the first few chapters.
Maybe not even 90% of all readers, though of course this is just a hunch.
Just recognizing there exists some vague difference is not sufficient for comprehension.
The problem is not a purely literary issue but a logistical and logical one too, since altering even just one word is actually quite difficult, without introducing additional logical errors at least, when it’s enmeshed in a work of many hundreds of thousands of words that mostly adhere to the dictionary meaning.
The phenomena can even be seen on some far shorter LW posts of only a few tens of thousands of words.
In Rand’s defense, she does define the terms “altruism” and “selfishness” i her works, at length, from every possible angle, at nauseam. Its impossible to read more than one page of her work and still confuse her definitions for standard ones.
The confusion usually comes up through a game of telephone, when people opposed to Objectivism comment on things written by fans of Rand, without ever actually reading the source material.
I assume you mean “in her works”, and “ad nauseam”?
If so, I don’t think the rate of readers who comprehend the idiosyncratic definitions are anywhere near 100% of even those who actually finish the first few chapters.
Maybe not even 90% of all readers, though of course this is just a hunch.
Just recognizing there exists some vague difference is not sufficient for comprehension.
The problem is not a purely literary issue but a logistical and logical one too, since altering even just one word is actually quite difficult, without introducing additional logical errors at least, when it’s enmeshed in a work of many hundreds of thousands of words that mostly adhere to the dictionary meaning.
The phenomena can even be seen on some far shorter LW posts of only a few tens of thousands of words.