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Show Chapter VII. Pseudorationality 300 4. Denial and Theoretical Investment From Chapter II.2 and the case of the gray blob just discussed, we have seen how denial might operate in cases in which the arsenal of concepts constitutive of an agent's perspective is completely inadequate to identify a conceptual anomaly. If one has no concepts even remotely appropriate for coping cognitively with the thing in question, one will simply fail to recognize that thing as an experience one has. Here the preservation of rational intelligibility, i.e. literal self-preservation, requires that one remain oblivious to its presence. So when I said above that in denial one fails to recognize the thing as an experience one has, I meant that one fails to identify the thing that violates the concepts constitutive of one's perspective even as an instance of the concept, "violation of the concepts constitutive of my perspective." One certainly may have that concept, and apply it appropriately. But not in this case. For denial eradicates recognition of the anomalous object, event or state of affairs completely. Because the particular unavailable to conscious recognition rationally ought to be, I described denial above as biased nonrecognition, and its preservation of rational intelligibility as degenerate. 4.1. The Naïf But now contrast the case of the gray blob on West Broadway with some in which denial is required, not in order to preserve the rational intelligibility merely of one's experience as such, but rather the rational intelligibility of a certain interpretation or theory of one's experience. The distinction can be limned as follows. I may be able to make sense of everything I experience as my experience, just in case I can subsume each such lower-order concept of that experience under the highest-order concept of the self-consciousness property, i.e. of its being an experience I have. It is not impossible that I might do this without trying or being able to make sense of it as confirming the theory that, say, it's a jungle out there, or that everything happens for a reason, or that I am a serious person, or some more sophisticated theory of human nature, or the physical world, or myself. In the first case, the rational intelligibility of my experience is a function of its horizontal and vertical consistency relation to the highest-order concept of the self-consciousness property simpliciter: All the experiences I have are mutually consistent with one another relative to the concept of their being my experiences. This is the only highest-order concept that unifies all of them. I shall describe someone who conceives her experience in this way as a naïf. The naïf lacks what I described in Volume I, Chapter VIII.3.2.2.2 as a personal investment in any particular theory of her experience. To review, an agent A is personally invested in something t if (1) t's existence is a source of personal pleasure, satisfaction, or security to A; © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
