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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception 91 that denoting term, it could not enter into any analytic truths. In short, this would be like cooking up a special noise to denote only one state of affairs on the single occasion of its occurrence; precisely thus can the prelinguistic noises of infants be interpreted. In such a case the enterprises of denotation and meaning themselves would fail. Similarly, it is not possible for the concepts that constitute my perspective to be vertically consistent without being horizontally consistent. Imagine, for instance, what it would be like to be confronted by a particular thing such that its concept satisfied (B) and (C) but not (A), i.e. such that it enabled us to identify its properties in terms of concepts in the set, but the application of those concepts themselves was internally or mutually inconsistent. In that event, it would be possible to violate (VC), i.e. to ascribe to the thing the conjunction of some predicate F and some other one, G, that implied the negation of F. Again the enterprise of identification itself would fail. If we were finally to fail to identify the thing or state of affairs in question as having a consistent set of properties, we would fail to identify it altogether. And then it could not be part of our conscious experience. For example, a friend of mine - let's call her Joan - related the following true story. One night while she was lying in her bed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, reading, her bed tipped sharply upwards. As Joan describes this happening, she "immediately forgot that it happened." She did not "remember" that it had happened until a few days later, when she heard on the weather report that, at that very moment, New England had experienced its first major earthquake in decades. Joan accounted for her "amnesia" by saying that because she had had no possible explanation for her bed tipping, as far as she was concerned the event had not happened. I would suggest that her account was almost right, but too strong. First, it is not that she was momentarily conscious of her bed tipping and then forgot it until she found the appropriate explanation. After all, how could one simply forget such a momentously anomalous event, merely for lack of an explanation of it, when one would have thought it would be precisely its cryptic and inexplicable character that would fix it in one's mind? My proposed account is different. Rather than having forgotten her bed tipping upward, Joan did not consciously experience that event in the first place, even though it happened to her. Second, it was not an explanation she needed in order to register that event as an object of her experience. Rather, she merely needed a relevant higher-order concept that enabled her intelligibly to identify it as having happened to her earlier. Keep in mind that among the concepts that constitute an agent's perspective are concepts of properties of things. So if you do not have any higher-order concepts under which to subsume the event, you cannot even ascribe properties to it. It often happens that we do not register certain events in consciousness until long after the fact, when © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
