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Show Chapter III. The Concept of a Genuine Preference 160 For Kant, all classical logic was intensional because it structured the most fundamental categories of our cognition and experience. Classical logic for Kant mirrors the limits of logical possibility in empirical reality for the same reason Euclidean geometry mirrors the limits of spatiotemporal experience in empirical reality: both are necessary and constitutive mental preconditions for experiencing an empirical reality at all, and both presuppose the agent's perspective the structure and outer limits of which they circumscribe. Because predicate logic provides structure and constraints to the objects of possible experience within an agent's perspective, it first-personally expresses the logical limits of that experience in general. By contrast, the special case of it developed here as a variable term calculus first-personally expresses the logical limits of consistent preference in particular. Now I contended in Section 1 that formulation of a rule of transitivity for preferences requires that the intensional conditions under which it holds be fully spelled out. I also argued that orthodox decision-theoretic formalizations were at a loss to do this because (1.9) holds neither for an actual empirical chooser, nor an ideally rational chooser under conditions of uncertainty, nor for an ideally rational chooser under conditions of full information. With the aid of the variable term calculus we are in a better position to spell out the intensional conditions under which the rule of transitivity holds for preferences. (Asy), (Con), (Irr) [that is, (HC)], (T3), (O'), and (VC) conjointly formalize the two necessary conditions of conscious and intentional choice listed in Section 2: (a) A chooser must be able to form and apply consistently through time the concept of a thing's ranking superiority - and therefore some other thing's ranking inferiority - over a series of pairwise comparisons; and (b) she must remember the relation of the two alternatives she is presently ranking to the third she is not. (a) is satisfied just in case (VC), (Irr) [or (HC)], (T3), and (O') are; and (b) is satisfied just in case (VC), (Asy) and (Con) are. That is, a chooser forms and applies consistently through time the concept of an alternative's ranking superiority over a series of pairwise comparisons if and only if that alternative is subsumed under that concept, is not self-contradictory, is consistently preferred to all other alternatives in the set, and is well-ordered relative to the least member of the set. A chooser remembers the relation of the two alternatives she is presently ranking to the third she is not if and only if the status of the preferred alternative as preferred is identifiable (i.e. by the concept of ranking superiority), stable relative to the rejected alternatives, and has been compared to the other alternatives in the set. Satisfaction of these criteria neither requires nor precludes a chooser's empirical actuality, ideality © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
