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Show Chapter VIII. First-Person Anomaly So far I have focused on pseudorational responses to third-person conceptual anomalies. These attempt to restore the rational intelligibility and coherence of our perspectives on the world against the threat posed by conceptual anomalies in the external environment, by tinkering with the contours of the favored theories that mediate those perspectives. Our pseudorational responses to first-person anomalies are more complex, because the entity trying to restore rational intelligibility and coherence to the favored theory is identical to the entity violating them. First-person anomaly violates the theoretical rationality of that part of a favored theory that explains sentient, animal, specifically human behavior of the even more specific sort that the agent conceives herself to instantiate - with respect to gender, ethnicity, physical type, character, personality, social stratum, occupation, and so on. In short, first-person anomaly violates the agent's interior, morally inflected self-conception. This interior self-conception is the agent's favored theory of herself; and attitudes or behavior that remain rationally unintelligible in its terms are theoretically anomalous relative to it. Our own theoretically anomalous attitudes, emotions and behavior pose a more immediate - or better, a more entirely unmediated - threat to our selfconception as unified agents than do enigmatic external events. Of course this does not mean that they qualify as true conceptual anomalies in the sense defined in Chapter VII.4.1. From Chapter VII.4.1 - 4 we have seen that not all agents necessarily have a personal investment in their favored theories. Hence not all agents necessarily have a personal investment in their self-conceptions. I explore this kind of case further in Section 1.1, below. But we also saw in Chapter VII that the mechanisms of pseudorationality are prompted only when an agent does have such an investment; and are most poignantly and complexly prompted when that investment in his favored theory is a dogmatic one in the sense defined in Chapter VII.4.4. So the same considerations mentioned about dogmatists in general apply with special force in the case of dogmatic responses to first-person conceptual anomaly. This case is the focus of the following discussion. First-person conceptual anomaly relative to an agent's favored theory of himself does not necessary render the enterprise of literal self-preservation self-subverting. But it does create unintelligibility in the agent's self-conception. The threat of interior disintegrity therefore ramifies much farther in the first-person case: not only between one's theory-laden perspective and veridical perception, but also between the cognitive mop-up operations of pseudorationality and the internal cognitive, conative and affective anomalies that require them. |
