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Show Chapter VII. Pseudorationality 304 motivations to alter it. Because the ideologue accepts no responsibility for the particular character of his experience, in fact he does not fully grasp the concept of the self-consciousness property. Hence he abdicates a necessary condition of motivationally effective agency: His thoughts, feelings, and impulses are to him a series of aha-Erlebnisse, forced upon him by his situation; and he is, to varying degrees, propelled into action by impersonal forces that are beyond his interior control. For the ideologue, theoretical anomaly is intolerable. By threatening the rational intelligibility of his favored theory of his experience, it threatens, so far as he is concerned, not only the rational intelligibility of that experience itself, but thereby the rational intelligibility of the universe and his predestined place in it. Because he regards his own experience as an instance of his theory, rather than the other way around, it is not open to him to rethink his perspective on the world as independent of that world itself. His perspective is such that he views it as fully determined by that world, in the ways specified by the theory that purportedly describes it. To undermine the theory, then, is to undermine everything at once. For the ideologue, theoretical anomalies do not exist. I say more below about some more subtle pseudorational mechanisms by which they are made to disappear. 4.3. The True Skeptic Like the ideologue, the character I shall describe as the true skeptic also attempts to make all her experiences rationally intelligible, relative both to her favored theory, and to the concept of the self-consciousness property. I describe this character as a true skeptic rather than merely as a skeptic, in order to distinguish her attitude toward theoretical anomaly from that derisive and dismissive one adopted under the guise of skepticism by the merely provincial. By contrast with the ideologue, the true skeptic reverses the relation between her favored theory and the concept of the selfconsciousness property; for she recognizes her favored theory, and its confirmation by her experiences, as itself an experience she has. So even if her theory that, say, it's a jungle out there, or that she is a serious person does, in fact, make all of her experience rationally intelligible, she conceives it as doing so in virtue of her nature, i.e. as itself an experience she has: Her favored theory is subordinate to the highest-order concept of the self-consciousness property. Because of this order of priorities, the true skeptic's investment in any such theory can never be more than tentative, and her attitude toward it never more than pragmatic. If the theory makes sense of what is already rationally intelligible as her experience, well and good. If it is undermined by theoretical anomaly, then it is to be revised or replaced. But this is merely to restate what we already know about true skeptics, namely that on the one hand, they are, indeed, inclined to skepticism about higher-order explanatory theories; and © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
