Crow-epistemology

The crow epistemology is Ayn Rand's name for the fact that a consciousness can hold only a small number of separate items in awareness at one time, and for the conclusion she drew from it: that concepts exist to break that limit, by condensing an unlimited number of units into a single item a mind can carry.

“In connection with the assertion that the idea of number seems to be understood by the higher orders of animals ... "Leroy mentions a case in which a man was anxious to shoot a crow. To deceive this suspicious bird, the plan was hit upon of sending two men to the watch house, one of whom passed on, while the other remained; but the crow counted and kept her distance. The next day three went, and again she perceived that only two retired. In fine, it was found necessary to send five or six men to the watch house to put her out in her calculation."”
   ~ Levi Leonard Conant, The Number Concept: Its Origin and Development (1896), quoting Sir John Lubbock

The observation

The anecdote, as reported in the nineteenth-century literature on the origins of counting, is that a crow watching men enter a hide can keep track of them up to about three or four. Past that the birds lose the count, and one more man leaving than entered is not noticed.

Rand's use of it was not zoological. She took it as a vivid illustration of a limit that human consciousness also has, differing in degree rather than in kind: a person can hold only a handful of separate, unintegrated items in focus at once. Try to keep six unrelated numbers in mind while doing something else and the failure is immediate and familiar.

The name stuck, and "the crow" has since been used in Objectivist writing as shorthand for that ceiling.

What follows from it

If awareness has a fixed capacity measured in units, then the way to increase what a mind can handle is not to enlarge the capacity but to make each unit carry more.

That is what a concept does. "Table" is one item in awareness, and it stands for every table there is. Integrating particulars into concepts, and concepts into wider concepts, means the same small number of slots can hold an indefinitely large body of knowledge. Rand called this unit-economy, and treated it as the reason a conceptual consciousness is possible at all rather than as a convenience.

Several consequences run through the rest of the epistemology:

• Definitions matter. A definition condenses a concept's essentials into something retainable. Without it, the concept has to be carried as a list, and lists exceed the crow.
• Hierarchy matters. Knowledge has to be organised so that each level can be held as a unit and unpacked when needed.
• Principles matter. A principle does for a body of conclusions what a concept does for a body of particulars. Trying to live by case-by-case calculation is an attempt to exceed the crow, and it fails.
• It is why reason is not automatic. A limited focus has to be directed, and directing it is a choice. See Volition.

Common misunderstandings

• That it is a claim about crows. The bird supplies the image. Nothing in the epistemology depends on the accuracy of a Victorian anecdote about corvids, and modern work on animal numerical cognition neither supports nor undermines Rand's point about human awareness.
• That the crow number is a fixed constant of human psychology. Rand was making a philosophical point about a limit, not asserting a value for it. How many items a person can hold varies with the material, the practice and how far it has already been integrated.
• That it implies men and animals differ only in capacity. The opposite conclusion is the one drawn. An animal is stuck at the ceiling; man escapes it by forming concepts, which is a difference in kind. See Consciousness and Man.
• That more knowledge means a more crowded mind. Integration works the other way. A person who has integrated a subject holds it in fewer units than a beginner, not more.

See also

• Unit-economy · Concept · Concept formation · Unit
• Hierarchy · Principle · Knowledge · Measurement omission
• Consciousness · Perception · Reason · Volition · Man

Discussion

• Do humans have instincts?
• Human vs animal consciousness
• Altering one's psycho-epistemology

References

• Rand, Ayn. "The Cognitive Role of Concepts", Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. The Objectivist, 1967.
• Conant, Levi Leonard. The Number Concept: Its Origin and Development. Macmillan, 1896 — the source of the crow anecdote, quoting Sir John Lubbock.
• Peikoff, Leonard. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, chapter 3.