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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 609 Taken together, then, these seven reductive dogmas - the Humean conception and the six metaphysical dogmas with which it is interdependent - exclude by fiat the very possibility that anything other than desire might be conceptually or psychologically significant for moral theory; indeed, that any conative state of the agent other than desire might truly be said to exist. It thus makes the case for egocentric rationality by denying not only the philosophical legitimacy but also the metaphysical existence of the cognitive and behavioral capacities that constitute transpersonal rationality. Under the weight of these radically exclusionary and repressive dogmas, it is little wonder that Kantians seem at a disadvantage in making their case. These overly restrictive and reductive dogmas are examples of what I describe in Volume II, Chapter VII as pseudorationality. That is, they deny, dissociate or rationalize the exclusion of the very data of moral experience that are most in need of analysis and explanation, in order to preserve the illusion of rational intelligibility for those which remain. In Chapters VII, VIII, X, and XI respectively of Volume II, I offer four detailed test cases of pseudorationality, of increasing degrees of seriousness, realism and applicability to real-life circumstances, which illustrate the problems - for selfknowledge, knowledge of others and of the world, and for a realistic and effective moral response to them - that attachment to the mere illusion of rational intelligibility can precipitate. The price of attachment to these seven reductive dogmas of Humeanism is to leave unresolved the pressing problems of moral motivation and rational justification with which most Socratic metaethicists, not only those who are Humean devotees, are justifiably preoccupied. I have tried to suggest - and in Volume II try to demonstrate - that if we want to resolve them, we must leave all of these dogmas behind. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
