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Show Chapter VII. Pseudorationality 312 each "self" into one more comprehensive one, and eliminates those that are strictly incompatible with it. Reconsider, finally, the gray blob on West Broadway. There are, obviously, a variety of ways of making sense of this entity, and we have considered some of them. But it is equally easy to construct a rather arid theory of one's experience in which there is simply no room for such things: a theory, say, in which there are two sexes, three races, a circumscribed set of acceptable roles and relations among them, an equally circumscribed set of acceptable norms of behavior, dress, and creative expression, and a further division of the human race into those who observe these standards and those who do not. Not only gray blobs, but much else that is of interest, not just in our contemporary subcultures, but in other ones as well, will then fall outside the pale of this theory. Again, someone with a personal investment in such a theory similarly will tend to dissociate such phenomena from the realm of the meaningful and important, and consign them instead to the status of intrinsic and uninteresting conceptual enigma - assuming that these perceived enigmas do not allow their existence to be denied altogether. 7. Rationalization as Biased Predication I described rationalization as a degenerate form of vertical consistency. Recall that vertical consistency requires us to preserve transitivity from the lower-order concepts by which we identify something to the higher-order ones they imply. Relative to a favored theory of our experience, this is to require, first, that the lower- and higher-order concepts of the theory be vertically consistent, and second, that any experience recognizable in terms of its lower-order concepts instantiate the relevant higher-order ones as well. Now any theory even ostensibly worth its salt must include, among its lowerorder concepts, the observational concepts by which we commonsensically interpret our experience: of shape, color, size, and so forth, however otherwise provincial that theory may be. But this means that even a provincial theory of one's experience can exclude only genuine conceptual anomalies, of the kind that might trouble the naïf or the true skeptic, through its lower-order concepts. It cannot exclude gray blobs simply by fiat. This may explain the valid objection, noted in Section 2 but not addressed there, to the case of the gray blob on West Broadway as originally narrated: Surely, we felt, if we have the lower-order concepts of grayness, shapelessness, mooing things, and so forth, we can recognize the thing in question as a gray blob, even if we cannot say what higher-order kind of gray blob it is. Indeed, provincial theories were characterized as precisely those that made into conceptual anomalies things that were well within the range of rational intelligibility from a theoretically disinterested perspective. The need for rationalization arises because the commonsense rational intelligibility of these things at lower conceptual orders puts pressure on the theory's higher© Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
