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Show Chapter II. Reason in the Structure of the Self 96 propositions that satisfy the requirement of vertical consistency thereby satisfy at least some of the (less controversial) requirements of quantificational logic. The requirements of horizontal and vertical consistency are therefore not qualitatively different from the familiar ones. My objective in spelling them out has been to frame these familiar canons in such a way as to call attention to their applicability, not just to complex premises, arguments, and theories, but also to the most basic concepts in terms of which we understand the world around us. The implication is that all normal human agents are theoretically rational to some degree. 6. The Self-Consciousness Property Next I take up what may seem to be some obvious objections to the claims defended in the preceding sections. First, is there really a holistic regress in the concepts by which we make sense of things? Why could we not minimally understand a number of different things by recognizing each as having just one, or a few lower-order properties? Or, more plausibly, perhaps: Why can we not more fully understand many different things in the world, ultimately in terms of a few, very comprehensive categories - life, death, human nature, physical forces, say - that themselves cannot be made rationally intelligible in terms of any more comprehensive ones? First we must keep in mind that the question is not about the higherorder, comprehensive properties that may in fact sort things in the world into natural kinds. Instead, it is about what conditions are necessary so that we can make these things rationally intelligible to ourselves. Kant's answer to this was that we are naturally disposed to the holistic regress by the nature of our theoretical reason itself, to ask repeatedly for increasingly comprehensive, unifying principles by which to identify and explain things; to subsume them under higher-order, increasingly comprehensive concepts; and finally to "cap" the regress by subsuming them all under the highest-order concepts of God, freedom, and immortality (1C, A 299/B 356 - A 314/B 371, A 321/B 378 - A 328/B 385, A 330/B 387 - A 341/B 399). My own embellishment on Kant's answer is to argue that he was right about the holistic regress, but wrong about the highest-order concepts to which it inevitably leads us. Suppose I did sort my experiences into the higher-order concepts of life, death, human nature, and physical forces, without recognizing those things as instances of some yet higher-order concept. Recall first that one advantage of acknowledging nonsentential intentional objects was that intentional attitudes then could be conceived as properties of the things to which such intentional objects correspond. Now an intentional attitude is a property of the thing I have the intentional attitude toward, whether or not I am empirically selfaware of my own intentional attitudes. A concept can be part of my current perspective even though I am not empirically self-aware of it as such. For any © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
