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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 173 prefer an alternative most at one moment and least the next, his preference would be intertemporally logically inconsistent. In that case he would have no genuine preference at all. In interpreting the canonical language of preference, we instead make the correct but extranotational assumption that in selecting F over G at t1 and G over H at t2, Horace is applying a time-independent, logically consistent rule, namely the concept of a genuine preference, in the selection behavior he enacts. (T)'s horseshoe should be understood as expressing the conceptual implication that by ranking F over G and G over H, one thereby ranks F over H, and so expresses a genuine preference. On this reading, (T) implicitly expresses a conceptual truth. An agent like Horace who has a genuine preference for F over H will be constrained by the concept of a genuine preference to select F over H at t3. Similarly, the concept of a genuine preference (henceforth the CGP) is the time-independent rule that a cyclical ordering violates. To the same extent that one may violate the law of noncontradiction in one's speech behavior by sequentially verbalizing contradictory beliefs without intentional operators, one may also violate the CGP in one's selection behavior by sequentially making contradictory - i.e. cyclical - pairwise comparisons. And just as we may conclude in the belief case that under these circumstances, the agent has no intelligible belief at all, similarly, in the preference case, we may conclude that the agent has no CGP at all. In rejecting the distinction between a genuine preference and the selection behavior that may or may not reveal it, the canonical language of preference thereby conflates the distinction between an abstract, time-independent rule and its physical, time-dependent application. Moreover, the CGP is the rule violated by Clyde, who, you will recall, sacrificed psychological consistency in order to preserve transitivity in the canonical form of (T). What enabled Clyde to alter all his priorities from moment to moment was an inability to compare and recognize his present ordering as the same as or different from previous ones. And this inability stemmed from an absence of perceived enduring similarities between present and previous alternatives that would have motivated him to recall them to mind at present. Clyde might have had some volatile and transient preferences, but he would not have known it. For like Wallace, he would be incapable of inductive generalization over his experiences to the CGP. Only an abstract rule such as the CGP furnishes could have provided Clyde with a criterion of consistency for recognizing such similarities from moment to moment, and therefore for conforming his preferences to this criterion. But the criterion of consistency any genuine concept or rule provides is in the end always one and the same, i.e. that some concrete particular shall not exemplify both it and its negation at one and the same time and in one and the same respect. That is: the criterion of consistency a genuine concept provides is a criterion of logical consistency. The psychological inconsistency of Clyde's preferences, © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
