The Scenic Sublime: (Post)structuralism & Ecomimetics in Invisible

On Fairy Tales & Meta-Narratives

Peter Import

I

princes, princesses, dragons

*

According to structuralist ontology, ‘archetypes’ function not only as foundational, a priori elements of a cultural text, they reveal how identity and genre are established within a narrative. Why are texts such as Cinderella, Hansel & Gretel, and Snow White fairy tales? Beyond the norms and morals they endorse, what is it about the form, structure, and discourse of each text that establishes them within the ‘fairy tale’ tradition?

While a hermeneutic reading might reveal ethical norms and tropes these works hold in common, a structuralist reading will look to uncover similarities in both plot (narratology) and how language functions within and between each text. Plot themes such as interdiction/violation, mediation, and villainy inform the structure of a collection of stories, establishing them within the folktale tradition.

The concept of identity, for example, within a fairy tale is—much like the semiological concepts of signifier/signified—formed only relationally, when considered in the context of other identities within the story. The antagonist is only an antagonist through their interaction with the protagonist; the protagonist is only a protagonist through their interactions with—struggles against, ultimate conquest of—the antagonist. Considered in isolation, a character has no discriminating self, no personal agency: without a fair-haired maiden to rescue from the clutches of a nefarious fire-breathing dragon, the concept of the ‘prince’ means nothing—he might be a character, but he is no longer recognizable as a prince. Similarity and difference are what imbue a story with meaning, just as, in structuralist linguistics, a signifier and signified are only comprehensible when considered in relation to every other signifier and signified. The signifier house signifies house only because house doesn’t signify sky.

Thus the deterministic plot structure of a folktale functions as a macrocosm of the linguistic foundations of structuralism itself. The stable, objective (and Formalist and New Critical-influenced) concept of langue—the structure of language—might be interpreted as the myth/fairy tale genre itself; parole—the speech act—could be each unique story, its plot a structure within a structure, the linguistic form a structure within that structure, etc.

Extrapolating beyond the realm of myth, it’s useful to explore how these mythic archetypes spill over into other cultural texts. Does every story (with a conventional narrative structure) contain such archetypes, even obliquely veiled, as ‘prince’ or  ‘dragon?’ Do these archetypes exist as non-human, non-sentient significations within a text; and if so, why?

The character of Soley, in Invisible, enacts the narratological archetype of the Return Home. Her quest (like virtually every other protagonist in the history of fiction) is one of personal redemption, her reluctance to return to Alaska signifying her subconscious aversion to accepting the truth of her sister’s death. Certain other images and plot functions within the story serve to signify ‘returning’: Soley discovering the doors to Graham’s house, and Benidikt’s cabin, open (and Erik’s front door having been discovered open the night he died)—both times Soley encounters a door open, she hesitates, fearing what she might encounter passing through it. The unbelievable—paranormal—circumstances of Erik’s death signify the physical unsettledness Soley feels in returning to Alaska; and the guesthouse (a sort of meta-home), where Soley simultaneously is and isn’t (in her own room, still able to hear her father and Lisebet puttering in the lobby and dining hall, while remaining isolated) signifies presence and absence, thereness and not-thereness, paradigmatic of Soley’s character in the narrative.

While narratological readings of fairy tales might be concerned with plot construction, structuralism in general is more concerned with word choice and sentence structure. It’s at this micro-level of the text that the concept of voice—that of the narrator, not the author—emerges; and where the magic lies.

II

Metaphysics of Voice

*

Structuralism, like aestheticism, considers language to be world-creating; reality-constructing. The Kantian notion that reality (phenomena) conforms to categories of the mind carries over (according to some critics, too much[1]) into structuralist/linguistic theories of sentence structure. Barthes, for example, claims that to every signifier there is attached a second, more ambiguous meaning—a ‘connotation’—which can vary according to reader and context. Consequently there exists an additional layer of conceptional meaning to be interpreted in the text, one that varies from reader to reader.

The relations of signs in a sentence are known as axes. The syntagmatic axis refers to the location of each word in a sentence; the paradigmatic axis refers to a sentence’s word choice: which signs are chosen over others, and how these choices affect the meaning of the sentence. Though the paradigmatic axis is of more interest to structuralists, the syntagmatic axis is just as important in the construction and analysis of a text’s voice.

In creating a voice for a narrative (in Invisible, Soley’s) there’s an element of the metaphysical—bringing to life an identity through language—though to construct that voice is to privilege a linguistic structure, a set or ‘series’ of words for the character to use. In this context each utterance of the narrator becomes a signifier; the narrative self the signified. What the narrator wouldn’t say is never said; the identity of the narrator (like the role of signified/signifier) is defined by difference. The voice is that specific voice as much because of the words they don’t use, as much as the words they do.

Of note as well is the unique role voice plays in formulating ‘creative play’ along the paradigmatic axis. By establishing a ‘quirky’ or singular metaphysical voice, possible word choices, turns of phrase, and other literary gestures can be deployed without seeming distracting or out of place.

As regards the metaphysics of identity, a classic paradox invoked (but not advanced) by thinkers such as Heraclitus and Plato is the story of the Ship of Theseus. Though the paradox is most often cited in the context of personal identity theory, it remains relevant in the context of structuralist linguistics.

At what stage, if one by one a ship’s (S1) planks were replaced, does the ship become another ship (S2)? If every plank of the ship is refurbished and replaced with another, is the ship still the Ship of Theseus (S1)? Hobbes further complicated the paradox by proposing that one take the old planks of S1  and reconstruct the original Ship of Theuseus S1. According to Hobbes, the original ship S1  and the refurbished ship S2 share the same form, and the original ship S1 and the reconstructed ship S3 share the same matter.[2] This is all to say (circuitously) that that the paradigmatic axis of a text is crucial to defining a metaphysical voice; and that replacing a signifier with one that is aesthetically at odds with the text’s overall voice is to alter it irrevocably.

Though critical analysis is at its heart metalingual (it employs metaphor and analogy to analyze metaphor and analogy) it might be useful to imagine the voice of a first-person text as a brick wall: remove a brick, replace it with another brick, and the wall (while remaining a wall) changes. Is it the same wall? If the wall has changed, what about it has changed—its essence, or appearance? In a similar way the voice of a first-person text changes inherently when the paradigmatic axis does.

The implications of this drift into critical theories such as Reader Response Theory. A reader, their first time encountering a text, experiences the first-person narrator by degrees, sentence by sentence, until (however long it might take) they have some general notion of the voice as a metaphysical presence. However, if a reader encounters a word they don’t believe the character (the metaphysical self invented by the text) would use, their immersion in the text and their faith in the constructed self it creates can be disrupted.

Linguistic devices such as metaphor and metonymy not only add layering and ambiguity (what might be considered Russian Formalist conceptions of ‘literariness’) to a text, they help add depth to a text’s metaphysical voice. In Invisible, Soley often uses metaphor to express her inner subjective states, giving her voice an ontological depth (introducing signifiers that might not be used if not for the use of metaphor), and straying from the first-person voice’s tendency to directly relay feelings and emotions. To wit: “I could feel my heart beating quickly”; vs. “My heart was beating like a drum.” There were bumps in the road when creating Soley’s voice: in early drafts of the manuscript, Soley would employ what one reader called ‘Britishisms’—words and phrases an American (or Canadian) wouldn’t use. Though in this case, many of these phrases bled into Soley’s voice from outside texts (presupposing a poststructuralist blurring of meanings and contexts), this was a lesson in the importance of establishing a realistic, accurate associative—paradigmatic—context for a first-person voice: readers, sometimes better than writers, notice when a brick in the wall doesn’t fit.

III

Benidikt as the Postmodern

*

Postmodernism, though an involuted term (used often interchangeably with the term poststructuralism, though poststructuralism implies some relation to linguistics) influencing disciplines ranging from geography to gastronomy to architecture, broadly rejects foundationalism and a stable, objective idea of Truth. The Nietzschean claim that ‘God is Dead’ (the death of the ideal, of the Kantian notion of the noumenal, of the Platonic form) anticipated Barthes’s conception of the Death of the Author, and heralded poststructuralism’s skepticism towards the real and given. Belief in meta-narratives such as Marxism, free market capitalism, and science were eschewed in favor of artistic gestures such as irony, disruption, and self-reference.

It was the Derridean practice of deconstruction, however, that upset the presumed-to-be fixed (objective) relationship between signified and signifier. To deconstruct a text is to look for contradictions or silences; to read for meanings that might otherwise have been overlooked or denied. The Derridean ideas of différance (the difference, or deferral, of meanings of a signified: i.e., can one imagine ‘sky’ without imagining cloud, blue, sun?) and trace (other signifiers that a signifier is ‘haunted’ by) permit the reader access to deeper meanings of a text that have been obscured.

Derrida, in his work Spectres of Marx—an examination of the ‘atemporal nature of Marxism’[3]—introduced the term ‘hauntology’: the idea that the past lingers in the present (a term ostensibly influenced by Marx’s remark in the Communist Manifesto “A spectre is haunting Europe…”). This idea of ‘hauntology’—of a temporal and ontological dislocation[4]—is handy when examining the silent/unseen/neglected characters of a text. A character who never speaks, for example, nevertheless leaves their ‘trace’ on the rest of the characters and plot.[5] In Invisible, Soley’s sister Asrun is a living, present ghost: she ‘haunts’ the text as a presence never seen, but referenced often and essential to Soley’s journey in the story. Soley’s ability to recall fragments of memory about her and Asrun unsettle Soley’s stability and reliability as a character; living with Asrun’s ‘ghost’ renders her similarly volatile, spectral, erratic. The conception of the past ‘haunting’ the present, of voices being intentionally (or not) silenced in a text, spills over into critical theories such as feminism, queer theory, and postcolonialism.

A nexus where postmodernism as a cultural phenomenon and literature overlap is in the author’s treatment of the culturally specific: objects, brand names, pop/media figures. Sooner or later every author writing contemporary fiction is going to have to choose whether to employ mimetic gestures in their fictional worlds or eschew them entirely (if this is even a decision authors still get to make: DeLillo, Lethem, and Foster Wallace have argued, in their works and directly, that it might no longer be); Dickens, famously, did not shy away from including references to Victorian-era London in his works. Foster Wallace has referred to the space in which pre-postmodern (or traditionalist) authors view their fictional worlds as the ‘Platonic Always:’[6] that is to say, a realm in which a text isn’t fraught by temporal and cultural reference. Names of television stars, corporate brands, etc. to these authors were what distinguished ‘high art’ works from those they considered ‘low art’—literature stood outside of culture, flirted with it but never stooped to outright reference. It is, however, this intermingling of ‘high art’ and pop/media/brand allusion that postmodernism celebrates; and thinkers such Baudrillard (viz., his notion of the simulacrum—of copies lacking an original) have suggested this is due to the fact of the world’s present hyperreality; of the blurring of the real and not real.

The character of Benidikt in Invisible signifies the postmodern, thoroughgoingly so: from his persona (plugged-in, ironic, paranoid, removed, distrustful), his spatial orientation in the story (high up in the mountains, overlooking the conventional and given; there, but simultaneously removed); to his capability to transform the natural and pure to the artificial/digital (his recordings of the ís tónlist) and his rejection of the naturalized world (in every scene, he’s either speaking about, or in close proximity to, his microphones, computers, or cables).

The townspeople, of course—unaccustomed to his Matrix-esque attire, to his penchant for nighttime roamings (with his equipment in tow)—believe he has an ulterior motive; that he isn’t just there ‘to record’. Which—of course—he isn’t! And while to the town he’s the consummate outsider, an interloper with an unsettling postmodernist capacity to disrupt and disturb, we learn that he is, in fact, one of them: his family lived in Sitka Fjord until his sister died when he was ten, and his family—like Soley’s—moved away.

Benidikt’s shiftiness, his multivalence, in the context of the narrative is ‘poststructuralist’ (again, pertaining to linguistics) as his character is inherently obscuring and complicating, representing everything the town of Sitka Fjord is not: rebellious, outspoken, troublesome—what Lewis Hyde might describe as a Trickster character, one who disrupts the status quo irretrievably. His Foucouldian subversion of the town’s conservatism and norms—its power structure; its conformist dogmas and conservative politics—is, in the words of Lewis Hyde, “what makes this world.”[7]

Notably, Benidikt’s ability to capture the ís tónlist, to digitize the natural and biological and pure, unsettles the traditional idea that human and nature are inherently separate; and the ís tónlist’s persistent presence in the text introduces themes of biocentrism: though Soley’s voice comprises the text, spaces exist where the ís tónlist speaks for itself.

IV

Ecomimesis & the Ís Tónlist: the Scenic Sublime

*

Ecocriticism examines the relationship of text and physical environment, favoring the natural, biological, and environmental over the human and humanistic perspective. By treating ‘place’ as ‘category’ (such as ethnicity or societal class) nature and landscape become a viable signifier within a text: how is nature treated, intentionally or unintentionally, by the author in a text? Are there scenes lacking a human presence, ones in which environment and place are privileged over the anthropocentric? If so—why?

While early ecocriticism frames nature and the human as binary opposites, more recent criticism has treated the two as inherently interrelated; more political discourses can frame the two in opposition or allude to human presence and enterprise as a threat. This conflict between the human and the environmental mirrors Hegel’s dialectical idealism—his notion of the thesis and antithesis conflicting to create synthesis—though lacks this teleological perspective (perhaps due to the recency of ecocriticism as a critical discipline).

Ecocriticism distinguishes four (interrelated) categories of nature/environment according to scale: wilderness (the sea; places humans can’t inhabit), the scenic sublime (mountains, lakes), countryside (meadows, farms), and the domestic picturesque (gardens, orchards, commons).[8] Invisible is set mostly within the scenic sublime, the town of Sitka Fjord being located as it is in the mountains, surrounded by fjord and rocky highlands. Soley’s treatment of the landscape is mostly romantic: the mountains, the fjord, the ice fields affect her not only aesthetically but idealistically, as her surroundings invoke memories of Asrun and her childhood. At one point, notably, Soley remarks that she can sense Asrun’s face ‘superimposed over the landscape’—implying a blurring of the dichotomy between human and environment, reinforced whenever Soley describes the ís tónlist as a ‘whisper’ or a ‘voice’.

The presence of the ís tónlist in the story—a sound produced by the environment—affords the landscape a ‘voice’, theoretically allowing discourse between human and nature (indeed, Soley once remarks that the ís tónlist reminds her of Asrun’s voice).

Ambient poetics, a phrase coined by philosopher Timothy Morton, is concerned with the idea of how texts treat space and landscape.[9] Ecomimesis (Morton’s term) is the privileging of nature over human in a text: whenever Soley reflects upon the ís tónlist, or in instances when the ís tónlist distracts her or intrudes upon her thoughts, the reader is drawn away from Soley (the human) and drawn to landscape/nature/environment. According to Morton, the process by which nature and place are privileged or become the focus of a text is in the creation of an impression, ‘to simulate reality itself’: ‘fiction that engages with the ecocritical cannot be…realist.’[10] This could be read as asserting that every text engaging with ambient poetics is employing some method or device of  ‘magical realism’—which Invisible is—or that, in its reconstruction of the environment, a text’s world becomes inherently surreal. In either case, this favoring of the marginal and conferral of a ‘voice’ to that which can’t speak overlaps (like poststructuralism) with critical theories such as feminism, query theory, and postcolonialism.

One of the themes in Invisible is artificialization of nature, the naturalization of artificiality. Benidikt’s capturing of the biological and transforming it to digital signal is indicative of a ‘domination model’ treatment of the natural (i.e., human-as-threat); though underlying themes of environmentalism (Declan’s conservationism, the UNESCO designation safeguarding the town from overfishing and exploratory drilling) conversely implies a ‘caretaking model’ of human vs. nature. This dichotomy remains unsettled in the story, emblematic of the dual nature of the ís tónlist: one of the sounds people hear is fake, emitted by a sound machine; the other is real, and produced by nature. Of course, these sounds are indiscernible from each other.

The authorial tendency toward anthropocentrism is obviously difficult, if not impossible, to escape. However the presence of nature/the biological in a story (in Invisible, Sitka Fjord; the ís tónlist) can help to disrupt the humanist perspective, rejecting such literary and cultural meta-narratives as the hero’s quest and the bildungsroman.

While much early critical theory focused on the human, on phenomenology, ethics, and ideology, future critical analysis can, by exploring post- and non- human spaces in literary discourse, produce new methods of signification and meaning.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuralism#cite_note-27

[2] “22.” Just the Arguments 100 of the Most Important Arguments in Western Philosophy, by Michael Bruce and Steven Barbone, Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.

[3] Gallix, Andrew (17 June 2011). "Hauntology: A not-so-new critical manifestation". The Guardian.

[4] Gallix, Andrew, prev. cit.

[5] Upstone, Sara. Literary Theory: a Complete Introduction. John Murray, 2017.

[6] Wallace, David Foster. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments. Abacus, 2013.

[7] Hyde, Lewis. Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010.

[8] https://blogs.setonhill.edu/jamieleighkegg/2013/03/20/barry-chapter-13-ecocriticism/

[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Morton

[10] Upstone, Sara, prev. cit.

 (Philosophy)

Paradoxical Beliefs: Coherence in Thought & Agency

Peter Import

One.

Introduction

In an intuitive sense, the content of our beliefs and objective facts about ourselves should to some degree cohere. Put another way, if an agent A comes to form a belief, Я, such that Я frames their identity or subject position (be it gender, political leanings, or religious beliefs) in a pejorative way, this should seem to A to be problematic. This claim, while intuitive, is intended to be a foundational, a priori tenant of what it means to be a rational agent with a coherent sense of self.

To follow, I defend the idea that an agent who holds a derogatory belief—call such a doxastic attitude DB—and is a member of the group towards whom the derogatory belief is directed, is acting in way that is epistemically irrational or problematic. There is a wealth of literature on the subject of coherentism as it relates to an agent’s doxastic state (or wider belief system), but my interests in this case are in specific and temporally local instances in which agents transparently or publicly reveal (ostensible) paradoxes in their belief systems: further, when they see no issue with the conflicting claims they make themselves. Examples of those[1] who might fall under this category are athletes who have endured abuse at the hand of a coach or mentor, yet continue to support or promote the coach/mentor; a feminist (male or female) who proselytizes or otherwise attempts to convert others to a faith that has a history of marginalizing women; or a voter who votes, supports, or performs other such private or public endorsements of a political figure who has publicly marginalized those groups to whom the voter belongs, be it through their speech or their actions. My arguments should also be taken as distinct from the ongoing philosophical debate concerning the foundations of knowledge, or what precisely constitutes rational belief. That being said, I will advance the claim that holding two jointly exhaustive, axiologically-conflicting views puts one in a problematic state epistemically. After presenting two paradigmatic cases, I propose an explanation for why otherwise rational agents find themselves in epistemically troubling positions; later, I propose a simple, actionable method to reframe one’s views so that they don’t conflict in such a way.[2]

Two.

A Paradigmatic Case

Paradigmatic cases in which an agent holds a doxastic attitude that is at odds with their subject position can be framed as follows:

An agent x who falls into a social group s is behaving in an (epistemically, socially unacceptable) way when they endorse or support the views and/or ends of agents who treat s in a demeaning or otherwise morally objectionable way.

Call this the Principle of Identity Coherence.[4] It is not uncommon, in our lives, to find ourselves holding two beliefs that do not rationally cohere. We may be proud of our singing voices and wish to hold a concert to perform for thousands while knowing that our stage-fright would never let us near the stage; we may wish (and still privately be cheering for) our favorite sports team to lose a match so we can win a bet; we may plan on eating seven doughnuts after dinner while still fully expecting to beat our weight-loss target by the end of the month. However, while holding such mutually-exclusive, rationally-incoherent beliefs may be routine—and do not necessarily violate any established philosophical principle—I claim that the same cannot be said for agents who hold doxastic attitudes of support towards ideologies, groups, or agents who hold beliefs that discriminate or demean those agents. This general idea can be applied to other genres of thought beyond cases of theoretical reasoning; i.e., an agent who acts irrationally in willfully choosing the dominated strategy of a matrix set, an agent freely expressing attitudes of appreciation or gratitude towards their oppressor(s), or an agent engaging in a risky, socially unacceptable, or harmful behavior at the same time an agent knows their later self will regret or distance themselves from it.[5]

Consider the case of Marie. Marie’s mother’s mother and father were born in France. Her father’s mother and father immigrated to America in the 1940s. Though Marie was born in America, French culture, and the unpretentious, yet prideful sense of belonging to a social group/society outside of the United States, has been a part of her life for as long as she can remember. Marie is proud to have French roots. In fact, whenever she has the opportunity, Marie is happy to explain to her friends and fellow students at her university what it’s like to have French parents and grandparents, and how much she enjoys going to visit France and experiencing its culture during the summer.

That being said, Marie has recently found herself entranced by conservative politics. She finds appealing the policies advanced by state officials who advocate nationalist policies like stringent border controls, America-first ideologies (think: MAGA), and concerns about minorities becoming the majority in America. Importantly, Marie may or may not understand[6] that these views are difficult (or impossible) to reconcile with her diverse background. She has arrived steadfastly at the decision that America is at its best when there is a strict nationalistic policy on who is allowed to cross its borders and establish roots. Either Marie doesn’t give much thought to (or, more problematically) sees no contradiction in the fact her own grandparents immigrated from a foreign country; she likes the America as she knows it, and would be unhappy to see it be flooded by those who may not value it as she does.

Regardless of whether Marie is falling victim to a simple (but no less unpardonable) case of xenophobia, her beliefs—her pride in being a foreigner, while also subscribing to a political agenda that is (at best) unwelcoming to foreigners and supports stringent border controls—are, I claim, at odds.

Leaving Marie aside for a moment, the basic form of the argument I’m making is that of the law of noncontradiction: it cannot be true that P is the case and P is not the case simultaneously. The foundation of this claim dates back to Aristotle and contains three different cases or types: a linguistic or semantic type, a doxastic type, and an ontological type.[7] For our purposes, we’re concerned with the doxastic type: that is, contradictions as they pertain to our beliefs. According to Aarnio 2013, many philosophers view it to be uncontroversial that ‘in cases where one judges that it would be irrational to __ , while nevertheless going on to __ , (it is an) egregious violation of rationality.’[8] Importantly, we’re maintaining that Marie is not disavowing her roots. She still is deeply fond of her lineage and background, and is planning on visiting France with her mother and father this fall. But that doesn’t change the fact that she thinks America, despite her background, would be better off allowing fewer immigrants past its borders.

In brief, this seems like a model case of an agent who fails to be in a rational doxastic state.

Three.

Another Paradigmatic Case

We’ll return to Marie later. Her case, after all, might be considered a more defendable instance of an agent who holds conflicting doxastic attitudes: rightly, one may argue that it’s impossible that all of our beliefs align in a rational way at one temporally local moment, even when they concern attitudes regarding our identity and Deep Self. Who knows—maybe Marie’s present beliefs are strong enough to make her wish that her family had stayed in France; perhaps she has yet to come up with a solution for immigration and overpopulation that she hasn’t refined yet. Perhaps her epistemic state is in flux. Remember, however, her views co-align with movements that do not welcome foreigners. Hers isn’t a situation where she is acknowledging that immigrants need a place to live freely and safely; she had adopted to the belief that immigrants (like her family once was) should not be allowed in the United States. There is a discriminatory flavor to her beliefs that seem to betray her own identity, regardless of whether it is recognized as such.

Let us now introduce Philip, the Dedicated Political Dad. For as long as he can remember, Philip has loved politics. Now in his late forties, with a wife and two daughters, keeping up with political news comes in second behind supporting his family in things that he most loves to do. Philip lives in a red (traditionally conservative) state. By his own admission, Philip would characterize his politics as conservative: his values include free market capitalism, traditional family values, and a strong national defense. Recently, Philip has been following a particular conservative presidential candidate who represents his views, Philip thinks, quite well. Philip plans on voting for him during the upcoming presidential election.

However—and this is known to Philip—this candidate of his dreams has a few negatives when it comes to his policies and personal behavior. Over the last year, it’s come to light that he has sent emails containing derogatory language towards women and minorities. The candidate is also staunchly against permitting the free, anonymous availability of birth control to women. Again, Philip is aware of these facts. Yet still—though the proud father of two teenaged daughters, and a happily married husband who values his wife’s rights, independence, and autonomy—he still plans on voting for this candidate.

Now, some may claim that there’s nothing wrong with Philip’s doxastic state when it comes to his decision to support his candidate. Often, we’re forced to endorse things that aren’t without faults or flaws (especially in the political realm). I won’t detour into a discussion on when it’s problematic to endorse a thing, act or person, outside of whether one has personal ties to (or is the object of) that thing, act, or person’s directed prejudice. For our purposes, though, there’s useful literature on the topic: Alida Lieberman (2013) proposes an answer to the problem of whether an agent may unproblematically support a person, cause, event, or idea, etc., by introducing the Doctrine of Double Endorsement. In her view, there are at least three restraints on unproblematic endorsement: proportionality, separability, and constrained choice. If more good[9] comes of voting for, to use her example, Hilary Clinton, as opposed to voting for a different candidate who didn’t commit an act of negligence by sending emails on an unsecured network, then it is acceptable to cast your vote for Hilary; watching a film that uses racial slurs to bring to life the lingering force of hate and prejudice in post-slavery America is acceptable, due to the fact the worthiness of film’s message (denouncing hate, widening awareness of racial prejudice) can be separated from the hateful speech used in the film. Finally, the concept of constrained force applies when an agent has a limited choice of options to endorse other than the one that is morally problematic (unless the option is problematic enough).

Here’s a problem, though. Let’s add a few additional features to Philip’s case. Say one of his recent prerogatives is encouraging friends and neighbors to vote for his favorite candidate too. He even encourages the friend of his eldest daughter to rethink her decision to vote for a rival candidate, one who has opposing, more moderate views, because he thinks her generation would do well to consider his more traditional views. In this case, it seems Philip is overstepping his bounds—it might even be said that is committing a sort of epistemic injustice. In encouraging a friend of his daughter’s to vote for a candidate who has both denigrated women in private and advocates for constraining their rights, he is failing to recognize his own subject position—in addition to the logical premises of his invitation. Also—most importantly—it can be claimed that Philip is violating our Principle of Identity Coherence. Philip is a father to daughters; he is a married husband; being sensitive or taking into consideration the self-respect and right to choice of the women who are a part of his life is a crucial aspect of being a father. Philip’s very identity can be said, in a way, to constrain his doxastic attitudes. To return to our Principle of Identity Coherence:

Philip (agent x), who falls into a social group (s; that of being a father, with a duty to bring about the best possible moral outcome for his daughters and wife)[10] is behaving in an (epistemically, socially unacceptable) way when he endorses the views of agents who treat s in a demeaning or otherwise morally objectionable way.

In the above case, framed in this way, Philip seems to be clearly in violation of the PIC.

In Marie’s case, we can frame her position as follows:

Marie (agent x) who falls into a social group (s; that is, of belonging to immigrant grandparents, and thus having a responsibility[11] to grasp or at least sympathize with the struggles and plight of immigrants) is behaving in an (epistemically, socially unacceptable) way when she supports the ends of agents who treat s in a demeaning or otherwise morally objectionable way.

Again, in the above case, Marie also seems clearly to be in violation of the PIC.

Four.

Possible Solutions

To reiterate, I am not claiming that rational agents must always exhibit coherent, non-contradictory doxastic states. Recall that the problem is that an agent (x) is violating a principle of rationality by supporting or endorsing those agents who discriminate against s, while x are themselves members of s.

I propose, in response to both Marie’s and Philip’s cases, that they aren’t rationally juxtaposing their beliefs with their subject positions. In both cases, I argue that the cause of their inconsistent epistemological states can be traced to a move that misaligns their doxastic states with their subject positions: that is, either being improperly susceptible to being influenced by others’ beliefs; or improperly relying on the testimony/ideology of those close to them.

Let’s unpack this a bit. In Marie’s case, we might look for empirical evidence supporting answers as to why, with her diverse background, she believes that others shouldn’t have the same privileges and rights her grandparents have had. It might be illuminating to ask how, first, Marie first heard of strict border control policies: after all, it’s likely she didn’t simply stumble on such information on her own. That is, she heard it from someone; and in that exchange of views, Marie found that testimony convincing enough to either relinquish her prior ones or to accept them without examining more closely how they might align with her other views. In fact, this is likely more common than we think: too easily we are swayed by other’s belief without giving proper consideration to how they align with our existing ones. Maybe Marie found herself hanging out with a conservative-minded group at her university; maybe the sense of belonging she felt by being included weighed more prominently in her mind than the impulse to pause to realize that—just as easily—it could be her grandparents her new, nationalistic views affect or constrain. We are social animals, for better or worse; there are innumerable instances throughout history of of humans doing terrible things because everyone else was, too.

Another solution we can introduce to explain cases of PIC concerns the phenomenon of epistemic responsibility. In Philip’s case, though by most lights a fully autonomous agent, his actions (if not his doxastic states) are nevertheless constrained by the circumstances of his subject position: he is a father, he has daughters. Arguable, those social roles comprise a part of his identity. Thus, as belonging to s—qualify that membership set as a group of fathers who are concerned to bring about good outcomes for their daughters (within the scope of reason)—Philip is obligated not to subscribe to views that are in contradiction of the principles of s. That is, of fathers who are concerned to bring about good outcomes for their daughters. This might also be considered a case in which Philip has found himself too susceptible to the political or social testimony of others: by listening to cable news television at night, and reading the Facebook posts of his conservative-tending friends and neighbors, he accepts their views without judging them critically.

Notably, an important feature of PIC cases is that they involve agents who truly care about some feature of their culture, background, or other defining aspect of their Self. These are agents who do not renounce their beliefs in order to form new beliefs. Whether or not they realize their beliefs are mutually exclusive, such agents would still claim to be members of s. A more extreme view (one I won’t defend here) could be that agents who violate the PIC are committing a very severe kind of normative ideal, especially in cases like Philip’s, where an agent is prioritizing their own views and thereby making others worse off in the process. But for now, it should suffice simply to claim that holding mutually exclusive views (even at your own expense) is a basic, indefensible rational mistake.

It’s not easy to assess our beliefs to confirm they align with our subject positions. Often, it’s a stark fact of life that our social communities and public roles help us to form our epistemological stances. But—in Philip’s and Marie’s cases—reflecting on their previous roles, beliefs, and social positions can aid them in avoiding doxastic attitudes that violate their existing doxastic states.

Five.

Conclusion

In our everyday lives, there may be innumerable (but hopefully not that many) instances when our doxastic attitudes do not cohere. This is a feature of being fallible human agents: rarely, whether in our beliefs or rational attitudes, are we one-hundred-percent, incontrovertibly right. Part of the beauty of being human is being able to learn from our mistakes, so might be better sons, daughters, grandparents.

That being said, there does seem to be something normatively problematic when we endorse views that degrade or belittle features of ourselves. These particular cases seem to go beyond quotidian slip-ups that can color our everyday. It isn’t necessarily a rational error to find ourselves lured by views that are at odds with some deep, inviolable feature of ourselves; it becomes a violation of a normative rational principle when we do not think deeply enough to understand we’re committing an act of epistemological gymnastics that we can’t logically defend.

Violating the Principle of Identity Coherence is—at some point in our lives—a mistake of thinking most of us have committed. It speaks to the lights of our rational nature, however, that most of us have realized that holding such paradoxical beliefs isn’t us. Whether or not we believe in fixed, invariable categories of identity, gender, or selfhood when it comes to recognizing our own struggles and plights, it benefits us as rational agents to adhere to the PIC.

[1] That is, those who hold a derogatory belief, DB, while being a member of a group towards whom the DB is directed.

[2] At least, to such a degree.

[3] Hereafter, PIC.

[4] Theories of time-slice epistemology deal with agents holding similar paradoxical, diachronic beliefs; see S. Moss, 2013.

[5] That is, she may find the views appealing enough she doesn’t bother to try and make them fit or cohere with the rest of her views/beliefs, or, whether subconsciously or not, she doesn’t even consider it necessary to align them with the hard facts of her background/subject position.

[6] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-noncontradiction/

[7] Aarnio 2013. Emphasis her’s; parentheses mine.

[8] Understood locally, as it pertains to the agent who is doing the deciding. This would be the proportionality constraint.

[9] As can be expected.

[10] Or, more weakly: an awareness or sensitivity.