Consider a person whose evaluative stance toward life is riddled with a particular kind of affective conflict: he is attracted to seemingly incompatible goods; he values various things that he knows cannot co-exist; he is drawn to ways of life that are not compatible or reconcilable. I have in mind here not the hypocrite, who says one thing and does another, nor the waffler, who feels differently at different times and in different circumstances. Nor am I concerned here with mere conflicts of desire. Instead the person I am describing is one who has an honest, stable, but inconsistent evaluative stance toward the world-not divided merely about what he wants, but about what he feels is worth wanting. This person may not be logically inconsistent-he does not believe any contradictions-rather, his endorsed attitudes and desires fail to add up to an internally coherent, unified, evaluative outlook on life. He cares about things that essentially conflict, about things that cannot fit together. He is, in a sense I define more precisely below, valuationally inconsistent.Of course, this person will find it hard to be satisfied with the world. But some philosophers think there is something else wrong with such inconsistency, and something worse: that such inconsistency is somehow intrinsically bad for an agent, rendering him irrational, self-undermining, or non-autonomous. Here I argue against this view: there is nothing much wrong, I claim, with valuational inconsistency, at least from the point of view of the self. In particular, such ''inconsistency'' raises the same difficulties for an agent as ordinary conflictedness, of the kind most of us, with our multiple life roles and overlapping concerns, experience every day. Of course, claims of rationality are always difficult to assess, given the plasticity of the term. I will argue here for four specific conclusions about valuational inconsistency: it does not AMBIVALENCE, VALUATIONAL INCONSISTENCY, AND THE DIVIDED SELF 41
Correspondence theories are frequently charged with being either implausible-metaphysically troubling and overly general-or trivial-collapsing into deflationism's " 'P' is true iff P." Philip Kitcher argues for a "modest" correspondence theory, on which reference relations are causal relations, but there is no general theory of denotation. In this article, I start by showing that, understood this way, "modest" theories are open to charges of triviality. I then offer a refinement of modesty, and take the first steps toward articulating a modest correspondence theory, giving a particular account of the relation between predicates, properties, and extensions. Finally, I argue that my account does not collapse into a deflationary one. RÉSUMÉ : Les théories correspondantistes de la vérité sont souvent critiquées soit de douteuses -discutables sur le plan métaphysique et trop générales -soit de triviales -n'offrant plus qu'une variante du déflationnisme, selon lequel «'P' est vrai si et seulement si P». Philip Kitcher a proposé une théorie correspondantiste «modeste», selon laquelle les rapports de référence sont des rapports causaux, sans pourtant l'accompagner d'une théorie générale de la dénotation. Je montre tout d'abord qu'ainsi comprises les théories «modestes» peuvent être critiquées pour leur trivialité. Expliquant ensuite en quoi consiste cette modestie, j'amorce l'articulation d'une théorie correspondantiste modeste, en donnant une description des rapports entre prédicats, propriétés et extensions. Je montre enfin que cette version de la théorie ne tombe pas dans le déflationnisme.
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