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Show Chapter II. Reason in the Structure of the Self 94 deploring it. This substance-property relationship then may be expressed in declarative categorical propositions such as (16) To go to the store is what I intend. Hence intentional objects and our attitudes toward them are subject to the requirements of horizontal and vertical consistency. Now review these requirements of rational intelligibility: I make something rationally intelligible by recognizing it as a certain kind of thing. According to (16), I recognize going to the store as an intention I have. But if we rephrase (13) as declarative categorical proposition (13e) To go to the store and not go to the store is what I intend, we find that we clearly cannot predicate anything of its subject, because that subject violates the requirement of horizontal consistency. The subject of (13e) describes an event that is both what it is and what it is not. And we already know that we can recognize no such event as rationally intelligible in the first place. Here are some further examples of self-contradictory intentional objects that violate the requirement of horizontal consistency but are invisible to the propositional view: (17) My strongest gustatory desire is for the martini and not the martini. (18) Clive and not Clive is the best cyclist in town. Now HVTR would no doubt respond to these further examples by attempting the same sort of sentential reduction as it has for (13), and I would respond by mounting against them the same sorts of objections as I already have. But one final consideration against the primacy of sentential reduction may furnish at least an intermission in the debate. This is the spectre of an infinite regress of such reductions; a regress far less benign than the holistic one. If even atomic subsentential constituent intentional objects, like those in (1), (7) or (8) can be reduced to sentential judgments, it is difficult in principle to see how we can ever accurately identify the mental states and cognitive processes necessary in 26 order for us to learn to construct such judgments in the first place. HVTR might retort that if I recognize something as a certain kind of thing, it is surely 26 A variant on this criticism is made by E. Moody of Porphyry's interpretation of Aristotelian logic (see E. Moody, The Logic of William of Ockham (New York: Russell and Russell, 1965), 70-75). I am grateful to Thomas McTighe for directing me to this source. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
