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Show Chapter II. Reason in the Structure of the Self 90 conceiving it in a way that satisfies the requirements of horizontal and vertical consistency. A thing must be rationally intelligible to us before we can formulate declarative propositional beliefs about it; a close look at Kant's account of concept-formation and -application, particularly in the A Deduction, and his rather obscurely argued claims in the Dialectic as to the relation between intuition, understanding, and reason, might show this to be 25 Kant's thesis as well. It would therefore be unilluminating to explain the rational intelligibility of a thing to an agent by imputing sentential beliefs to that agent. 4.4. The Interdependence of Horizontal and Vertical Consistency It may not seem necessary to satisfy both horizontal and vertical consistency. It may seem that I could recognize a thing as having some lowerorder property, as similar to other things that have that property and different from other things that lack it (i.e. requirement (A)), without that property itself being rationally intelligible to me in terms of some higher-order property it has at a given moment (i.e. requirements (B) and (C)). In that case, the requirement of horizontal consistency would be satisfied, although that of vertical consistency did not apply. Thus, for example, in the early stages of concept-formation, an infant may be able to recognize certain things as threedimensional, without being able to recognize three-dimensional things as spatiotemporal. At the same time, I could not have concepts of the lower- and higher-order properties by which I recognize something, without simultaneously having other concepts of what they are not. So in theory, it may seem, my concepts of the things that are rationally intelligible to me at a particular moment might be horizontally consistent without being vertically consistent, but could not be vertically consistent without being horizontally consistent. However, it is not possible for the concepts that constitute my perspective to be horizontally consistent without being vertically consistent. Suppose, for example, that we were to be confronted with some particular thing such that the concepts it instantiates satisfied (A) but violated (B) and (C), i.e. such that we could invoke a concept in identifying it consistently with the application of our other concepts; but that that concept itself bore no instantiation-relation to others in the set (i.e. aside from that trivial one of being a concept in the set). In this case, that which we invoked as a "concept" would in fact not be one at all, since the corresponding predicate would by definition denote only the single state of affairs it had been invoked to identify. Since there would be no further concepts in terms of which we might understand the meaning of 25 Also see Roderick Chisholm's Person and Object: A Metaphysical Study (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1976). © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
