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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception 89 wired, and what their content must be. It does not seem too controversial to suppose that any viable system of concepts should enable its user to identify states of affairs by their properties, since concepts just are of corresponding properties, and to ascribe a property to an object just is to subsume that object under the corresponding concept. So any system of concepts should enable its user to ascribe to objects those properties of which she has concepts. My proposed requirements of horizontal and vertical consistency are a further extension of this neo-Kantian revision. They are weak enough that they may even be defensible in the face of anthropological evidence that languages considerably remote from Indo-European ones evince a cognitive structuring to the user's experience that is so different from our own as to be almost unintelligible to us. It would be an argument in favor of (HC) and (VC) if it could be shown that the subject-predicate relation held regardless of the other ways in which culturally specific conceptual organizations of experience 23 differed among themselves. (HC) and (VC) imply that if we do not experience something in such a way as to allow us to make sense of it in terms of a set of coherent concepts that structure our experience at a particular moment, whatever those concepts are, we cannot consciously experience that thing at all. On this thesis the innate capacity would consist in a disposition to structure experience conceptually as such, but not necessarily to do so in 24 accordance with any particular list of concepts, provided that the particular, culturally specific set S of concepts c1, c2, c3 … cn that did so satisfied (A) - (C), i.e. (HC) and (VC). These two requirements, of horizontal and vertical consistency, illuminate further the sense in which nonsentential intentional objects are psychologically fundamental in the structure of the self. In Section 2.2 I claimed that nonsentential intentional objects do not necessarily imply the agent-independence of that which they represent from the agent whose intentional objects they are. The holistic regress implies that in order for the question of a thing's agent-independence to arise, one must first have made that thing - be it event, particular, state of affairs, or mistaken perception of any of these - rationally intelligible to oneself. And one can do that only by 23 In Section 6, below, I offer some further reasons for preferring my neo-Kantian revision to Kant's original formulation. Its application within a decision-theoretic conception of preference in a variable term calculus is discussed in Chapter III.9, following. 24 This thesis is elaborated in the contemporary context by Gerald M. Edelman, Neural Darwinism: The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection (New York: Basic Books, 1987) and The Remembered Present: A Biological Theory of Consciousness (New York: Basic Books, 1989). See the review of Edelman and others by Oliver Sacks in "Neurology and the Soul," The New York Review of Books XXXVII, 18 (November 22, 1990), 44-50. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
