I'm going to brazenly post a section

of a chapter from Tibor Machan's book Ayn Rand. I don't think he can be said to misunderstand her here. [Edited - all indented paragraphs are Machan's, all bracketed comments are mine. Parentheses outside brackets are Machan's.]

Here is another exerpt, adapted from the book and published as an article here, which will help a little to establish some context.

Aristotle and Ayn Rand have something in common. They repeat the obvious.

The First Principles of Ayn Rand
by Tibor R. Machan
(Adapted from Dr. Machan's forthcoming book, Ayn Rand)
(First published on TDO October 20, 1999)

In Ayn Rand's philosophy a central place is occupied by axiomatic concepts: roughly, ideas that we cannot do without anywhere, any time (even if we don't identify them explicitly). They are basic because they point to a fact that is ubiquitous, omnipresent.

Rand's concern with axioms has often been ridiculed. As one author, Leon Wieseltier, puts it, "A=A. Big deal." Yet her claims for the role and function of axioms are sweeping. If those claims are justified, her stress on the importance of axioms is not at all misplaced.

According to Rand, the formulation "Existence exists" is a way of "translating into the form of a proposition, and thus into the form of an axiom, the primary fact which is existence." (Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. [The original link was to Laissez-Faire Books, but they seem to have stopped carrying it I've switched it to The Ayn Rand Bookstore]) "But," Rand goes on to add, "explicit propositions as such are not primaries; they are made of concepts. The base of man's knowledge—of all other concepts, all axioms, propositions and thought—is axiomatic concepts." [Emphasis mine.] It is axiomatic concepts that serve as the first principles of Rand's philosophy. She defines an axiomatic concept as:

…the identification of a primary fact of reality, which cannot be analyzed, i.e, reduced to other facts or broken into component parts. It is implicit in all facts and all knowledge. It is the fundamentally given and directly perceived or experienced, which requires no proof or explanation, but on which all proofs and explanations rest.

This squares with common sense: we learn first and foremost what there is—not statements or propositions about what there is. And while a good deal of later learning—as well as human communication—occurs via propositions, the experiences we have provide us with plenty of brute facts that we access directly by means of our perceptual organs and minds.

RTWT - read the whole thing.

And a bibliographic biography of Ayn Rand can be found at Laissez-Faire Books.

Pages 125-126 in the paper back:

Rand's Alleged Rationalism

It is, furthermore, wrong to label Rand a rationalist - that means someone who proposes to derive all truths from first principles alone and usually by merely thinking them up in the unaided human mind (as per Descartes, Spinoza)!

[Or like Marx did with political economy.]

For example, nowhere does Rand claim that "We know a priori that all events have a cause." This is [Norman] Barry's [Classical Liberalism and Libertarianism (Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1989).] imposition of a view on Rand that she rejects - she is, as we have already seen, neither an empiricist nor a rationalist.

Rand does hold that "the law of causality is the law of identity applied to action," meaning that the fact of X being I (having this identity) will necessarily condition the way X will interact with the surrounding world, something that isn't true a priori - based on some pre-experiential understanding - but on the plain fact that nothing can be produced by nothing. (In other words, when X is a,b and c and a, b, and c can produce x, y, and z but not p,q, and r, this is because results other than p, q, and r would have no source - they would simply pop into existence.)

[That must be a typo. Either the second p, q, and r should be x, y, and z or there's a missing line.]

Thus, Rand would hold, that a hammer enables us to make a dent in a car's fender but a softly spoken word will not. Our understanding of hammers and cars and dents provides us with this knowledge. (And the "necessity" involved is the realistic - not fantastic or socalled "logical" - necessity of all scientific-engineering claims.) [Because their logical arguments are based on Logical Positivism these days?] Similarly, given what a human being is, force will not produce morally good behavior but personal resolve can do this. [My emphasis.]

Certainly, our engineering sciences rest on such facts of reality, rather than on some supposed contingency that Barry thinks obtains. Our political and other social sciences, in turn, are going astray - rational analysis is precluded from them - because they fail to heed the point.

Rand adheres to a pluralistic conception of what there is and thus of how we might come to know it. The simplistic division of the world into the empirical and the rational sectors is alien to Rand's way of thinking. Barry's efforts to use the division to classify Rand's views just will not succeed in those terms. Indeed, by the common sense (as distinct from radical) understanding of "empirical," Rand takes the law of causality as an empirical principle - I.e., a principle of how the world actually works discovered in part by the utilization of one's sensory organs.

For Barry and Co., however, "empirical" means, most significantly, contingent, i.e., a state of affairs that does not have to be so and might just be otherwise - anytime, anywhere. Contingent used to mean, in philosophy, "dependent upon the will of God." When God became unfashionable, it was retained to mean "conditional and not necessary, could be otherwise, not having to be the case or "not logically impossible." But all this is dependent heavily upon a very rich and questionable theory in terms of which, for example, "certainty" came to mean "incorrigible," "infallible," "true beyond a shadow of a doubt." Once one accepts this theory and its language, there is no telling what else you must buy into and usually it leads (logically) to the conviction we find in Paul Feyerabend and Richard Rorty, namely, that every belief is equally good and we must leave it all up to small democratic assemblies or "our" communities to decide what will prevail. It recalls the old Greek thinker, Cratylus, who stopped talking because he realized that talk assumes some measure of consistency of meaning of terms over time, and skeptics are not entitled to this.

I chose this passage because it seems to me to be an exceptionally clear, concise and fairly comprehensive explication of Rand's epistemology.