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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception 53 …The proposition that no predicate contradictory of a thing befits it, … holds of knowledge, merely as knowledge in general, irrespective of content; and says that the contradiction completely cancels and invalidates it (1C, A 151). Section 1 clears the way for defending this thesis, by critiquing an interpretation of Kant's views about cognitive structure that appropriates them into the inferentialist/ representationalist debate. I raise some objections to Brandom's inferentialism, and offer exegetical reasons - from a nonrepresentationalist perspective - for resisting his claim that Kant can be understood as an inferentialist. I situate my own analysis in an interpretation of Kant that comprises both inferentialist and representationalist elements. Section 2 begins this analysis by dislodging nonsentential intentional objects from the propositional attitudes in which they are conventionally embedded. I argue that nonsentential constituents of propositions are much more intimately constitutive of the self than the sentential propositions in which they figure. This view isolates and makes nonsentential intentional objects available for logical manipulation and for reference by singular terms both within the framework of classical logic, and also within the revised decisiontheoretic notation I propose in Chapter III. By describing certain kinds of theoretical inconsistency that cannot be explained by applying the law of noncontradiction only to sentential propositions, I call into question the assumption, shared by inferentialists and representationalists alike, that the minimal consistency requirements of theoretical rationality - basically observation of the law of noncontradiction - apply only to the relations among sentential propositions as the atomic and irreducible bearers of sense 1 and meaning that it is the task of logic properly to combine. Section 3 offers a contemporary version of a Kantian model of theoretical reason. I impose on cognitively accessible things and properties in general a Kantian requirement of rational intelligibility, i.e. that we should be able to recognize them as instances of concepts that constitute our perspective; and I introduce a few basic elements of the variable term calculus to be developed in Chapter III, by way of Quine's schematized axioms of identity. Section 4 derives from the requirement of rational intelligibility two further, formal consistency requirements that a coherent agent's perspective must satisfy, i.e. horizontal and vertical consistency; and shows how they can be formalized 1 David Lewis makes a valiant attempt to replace propositions as objects of intentional attitudes with self-ascriptions of the corresponding properties in "Attitudes De Dicto and De Se,"in Philosophical Papers, Volume I (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). Also see Brian Loar, "The Semantics of Singular Terms," Philosophical Studies 30 (1976), 353-77; and John Perry, "The Problem of the Essential Indexical," Nous 13 (1979), 3-21. The following arguments apply to propositions whether analyzed in terms of states of affairs, possible worlds, or situations, provided only that they are sentential in form. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
