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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception 307 Third, denial may function as it does for the dogmatist or the ideologue, whose theory may or may not receive consensual validation, but the biases of which in any case would not survive disinterested critical scrutiny. In this case we may, but need not, appeal to rational experimental method in order to determine this. Our commonsense, serviceable criterion for distinguishing that which is so obscure or genuinely enigmatic as to be rationally inaccessible from that which is intersubjectively obvious is third-personal disinterested recognition. If a third party, similarly equipped both culturally and cognitively, but lacking the dogmatist's personal investment in his favored theory, can make the thing rationally intelligible relative to her perspective, whereas the dogmatist cannot relative to his, then the dogmatist's difficulty is not that the thing in question is theoretically anomalous, but rather that his favored theory is just too restrictive or provincial to accommodate it. In this case, his denial of the thing in order to preserve the rational intelligibility of his theory is a pseudorational strategy, and the rational intelligibility thus preserved is degenerate. Note that the test of third-person disinterested recognition tracks pseudorationality rather than provinciality. The favored theory that saturates a dogmatist's perspective and mediates his relation to his experience may be the most cosmopolitan one available. Yet his personal investment in it may cause him to fail that test when confronted by a particular phenomenon. Conversely, an agent's favored theory may be relatively provincial, thus multiplying the likelihood of encountering theoretical anomaly and therefore the opportunities for pseudorationality - yet survive that test in a particular case. Because the dogmatist identifies his experience with his theory, rather than conceiving his experience as subordinate to it, he has further cognitive resources for meeting such challenges, in addition to pseudorational denial, that the ideologue lacks. We have already seen that because the ideologue lacks a necessary condition of agency, she lacks the conception of herself as actively doing things like thinking, inferring, and searching her memory. This is not to say that she does not do these things at all; just that she does not conceive herself as doing them. Hence by contrast with the true skeptic, the ideologue does not conceive herself as capable of revising or rethinking her favored theory - or, by contrast with the dogmatist, as capable of rearranging it to fit the facts. Thus the ideologue is inclined to avoid incorrigibly anomalous experiences at all costs - through psychological self-insulation, skillful circumnavigation, or, when all else fails, simply shutting her eyes very tightly and magically thinking the anomaly away. The dogmatist has the same cognitive resources for conceptually rearranging things as he had for arranging them in the first place, in order to satisfy the consistency requirements of rational intelligibility. And he is more highly motivated to do so, by the fragility and constriction of his theory, and © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
