Laura Schroeter

Can mere conceptual competence explain the a priori? Many contemporary theorists believe that conceptual competence grounds a priori conceptual truths—and that this fact helps explain how thinkers can have a priori justification for accepting these truths and reasoning in accord with them. This chapter examines several contemporary defences of the conceptual approach to apriority in order to clarify their core commitments about the nature of concepts. The common thread, the chapter argues, is a picture of concepts that combines a conceptual role model of conceptual competence with a rationalizing approach to the determination of semantic contents. The chapter’s first aim is to show how this model of concepts has the potential to ground a priori truth and justification. The chapter’s second aim is to show how the model involves problematic commitments about concepts, which can be avoided on an alternative relational model of concepts.

What is it for thoughts to redeploy the same concept? Elsewhere, we have argued for a specific relational model of concept identity, the _connectedness model_. Our aims in this chapter are to explain the motivations behind that account, to address worries about transitivity and vagueness, and to contrast our approach with closely related accounts of concept identity. What’s distinctive of our approach to sameness of concept is that we seek to vindicate the first-person epistemic perspective of concept users on logical relations and epistemic self-regulation. Concepts, we argue, play a crucial normative role in setting _regulative ideals_ for the representational practices in which individual subjects participate. This focus on the normative role of concepts—as opposed to a purely causal-explanatory role—motivates our approach to concept identity and our approach to borderline cases of concept identity.

A standard objection to pure cognitivism is that it cannot adequately explain the distinctive action-guiding role of moral judgments and of normative judgments in general. On a cognitivist approach, we are told, the link between normative judgment and motivation will be purely external and contingent. This chapter outlines a new cognitivist account of normative judgment. The account is grounded in a general model of concepts, according to which concepts are individuated by something like anaphoric relations among thoughts. Although the model applies across the board to concepts about any topic, this chapter shows how it can help explain why the link between normative judgment and motivation is not purely external and contingent, even on a pure cognitivist account of the semantic values of normative judgments.

ABSTRACT We extend Haslanger’s model of the way social meanings shape our beliefs and desires to discuss the ways in which they shape our emotional responses. We argue that emotional regulation is a core mechanism by which we are made fit for participation in unjust social practices, whether as dominants or subordinates. Recognizing this, liberation movements develop strategies for emotional counter-regulation in order to create agents capable of engaging in sustained liberatory praxis and capable of participating fluidly in the new social relations that they try to bring into being. We explore some of the strategies used in emotional regulation and counter-regulation with particular attention to the ways in which naming our affective responses (e.g., as resentment versus indignation at injustice) shapes the ways they unfold and inducts us into locally current evaluative practices, whether for better or for worse.

What is it to share the same concept? The question is an important one since sharing the same concept explains our ability to non-accidentally coordinate on the same topic over time and between individuals. Moreover, concept identity grounds key logical relations among thought contents such as samesaying, contradiction, validity, and entailment. Finally, an account of concept identity is crucial to explaining and justifying epistemic efforts to better understand the precise contents of our thoughts. The key question, then, is what psychological and social facts could play these roles? Elsewhere, we have argued for a specific relational model of concept identity, the connectedness model (e.g. Schroeter 2012, Schroeter and Schroeter 2014, 2015). Our aim in this chapter is to further explain the motivations behind that account, to address worries about transitivity and vagueness, and to contrast our approach with closely related accounts of concept identity developed by François Recanati and Simon Prosser. What’s distinctive of our approach is that we seek to vindicate the first-person epistemic perspective of concept users. Concepts, on our account, play a crucial normative role in setting regulative ideals for the representational practices in which individual subjects participate. This focus on the normative role of concepts – as opposed to a purely causal explanatory role – motivates our approach to concept identity and our toleration of vagueness and borderline cases.

A characteristic form of philosophical inquiry seeks to answer ‘what is x?’ questions. In this paper, we ask how philosophers do and should adjudicate debates about the correct answer to such questions. We argue that philosophers do and should rely on a distinctive type of pragmatic and meta-representational reasoning – a form of rationalizing self-interpretation – in answering ‘what is x?’ questions. We start by placing our methodological discussion within a broader theoretical framework. We posit a necessary connection between epistemic methodology and metasemantics. In our view, the correct semantic assignment for a representation must be justifiable from the epistemic perspective of the subject herself, given suitable empirical information and cognitive powers. So the upshot of your own ideal, fully informed epistemic methods will determine the correct answers to ‘what is x?’ questions. The bulk of the paper is devoted to articulating and defending our rationalizing self-interpretation account of philosophical methodology. By working through a specific example, we seek to isolate the relevant inputs into deliberation and the methods for adjudicating between competing answers to a ‘what is x?’ question. We suggest that the self-interpretive methods we isolate generalize across the board as a way of identifying the real nature of familiar topics. We also explain how these methods undercut the case for a priori conceptual analysis.

Can mere conceptual competence explain the apriori? Many contemporary theorists believe that conceptual competence grounds apriori conceptual truths – and that this fact helps explain how thinkers can have apriori justification for accepting these truths and reasoning in accord with them. In this chapter, I'll examine several contemporary defenses of the conceptual approach to apriority in order to clarify their core commitments about the nature of concepts. The common thread, I'll argue, is a picture of concepts that combines a conceptual role model of conceptual competence with a rationalizing approach to the determination of semantic contents. My first aim is to show how this model of concepts has the potential to ground apriori truth and justification. My second aim is to show how the model involves problematic commitments about concepts, which can be avoided on an alternative relational model of concepts.

According to philosophical orthodoxy, the parties to moral or legal disputes genuinely disagree only if their uses of key normative terms in the dispute express the same meaning. Recently, however, this orthodoxy has been challenged. According to an influential alternative view, genuine moral and legal disagreements should be understood as metalinguistic negotiations over which meaning a given term should have. In this paper, we argue that the shared meaning view is motivated by much deeper considerations than its recent critics recognize, and that much would be lost in opting for the explanation of normative disputes as metalinguistic negotiations.

The first part of this introductory chapter introduces and discusses four core theses of moral rationalism: (i) the psychological thesis that reason is the source of moral judgment, (ii) the metaphysical thesis that moral requirements are constituted by the deliverances of practical reason, (iii) the epistemological thesis that moral requirements are knowable a priori, and (iv) the normative thesis that moral requirements entail valid reasons for action. The chapter sketches different—stronger and weaker—versions of each thesis, and tentatively examines whether specific versions of the different theses can be recombined into attractive rationalist packages, in which the various strands are mutually supporting. The chapter’s second part provides an overview of the contributions included in this volume.

Traditional normative realists are committed to the idea that different individuals manage to pick out on the very same property with terms like ‘morally right’, despite variations in their understanding and use of the term. How is this possible? In this chapter, we sketch a metasemantic account that promises to vindicate traditional normative realism within a broadly rationalist framework. We will first introduce a metasemantic principle that ties reference determination to what is justifiable from the perspective of the conceptually competent subject. This type of metasemantic approach has been andstill is the most influential general model of reference determination. We explain how this metasemantic principle can help vindicate something close to the traditional rationalist claim that normative truths can be known a priori. We will then show how an anti-individualist version of this principle can handle the problem of radical disagreement among competent speakers. Finally, we explain how the principle can help to vindicate the traditional rationalist thesis that moral requirements entail valid reasons for action.

What does it take for lawyers and others to think or talk about the same legal topic—e.g., defamation, culpability? We argue that people are able to think or talk about the same topic not when they possess a matching substantive understanding of the topic, as traditional metasemantics says, but instead when their thoughts or utterances are related to each other in certain ways. And what determines the content of thoughts and utterances is what would best serve the core purposes of the representational practice within which the thought or utterance is located. In thus favoring a “relational model” in metasemantics, we share Ronald Dworkin's goal of explaining fundamental legal disagreements, and also his reliance on constructive interpretation. But what we delineate is a far more general and explanatorily resourceful metasemantics than what Dworkin articulated, which also bypasses some controversial implications for the nature of law that Dworkin alleged.

It's widely accepted that social facts about an individual's linguistic community can affect both the reference of her words and the concepts those words express. Theorists sympathetic to the internalist tradition have sought to accommodate these social dependence phenomena without altering their core theoretical commitments by positing deferential reference-fixing criteria. In this paper, we sketch a different explanation of social dependence phenomena, according to which all concepts are individuated in part by causal-historical relations linking token elements of thought.

The Generalized Integration Challenge is the task of providing, for a given domain of discourse, a simultaneously acceptable metaphysics, epistemology and metasemantics and showing them to be so. In this paper, we focus on a metaethical position for which seems particularly acute: the brand of normative realism which takes normative properties to be mind-independent and causally inert. The problem is that these metaphysical commitments seem to make normative knowledge impossible. We suggest that bringing metasemantics into play can help to resolve this puzzle. We propose an independently plausible metasemantic constraint on reference determination and show how it can provide a plausible response to for this brand of normative realism.

Twenty years ago, Hilary Putnam first proclaimed that meaning ain't in the head. Since then, semantic externalism---the thesis that a subject's intrinsic states, described independently of her physical and social environment, do not fully determine the semantic properties of her words or concepts---has become the new philosophical orthodoxy. Despite this popularity, I believe the underlying motivations for semantic externalism and its philosophical significance have been widely misunderstood. Semantic externalism has been accepted on the basis of a series of powerful thought experiments which elicit our everyday intuitions about how to interpret a subject's thoughts and words. However, these thought experiments alone don't really establish that internalist accounts of reference are unacceptable---for internalists can offer a debunking pragmatic explanation for why we have the interpretive intuitions we do. Why, then, should we accept semantic externalism? ;I argue that the real rationale for semantic externalism is to be found in certain very basic intuitions about our fallibility and the efficacy of rational inquiry. Common sense tells us one needn't know exactly what it takes to count as an instance of gold in order to refer to it. Moreover, we think one can discover the defining characteristics of gold through careful empirical inquiry. Semantic externalism can vindicate these epistemic convictions, internalism cannot. These basic intuitions about rational inquiry, I contend, explain the appeal of Putnam's externalism about natural kind terms. ;I then consider whether semantic externalism is compatible with our apriori access to how the reference of our concepts is fixed. This compatiblist view is attractive since it provides a clear epistemic account of how rational inquiry into the nature of familiar objects and properties is possible. However, I argue that this position cannot ultimately be reconciled with the epistemic intuitions which I take to motivate semantic externalism in the first place. ;Finally, I consider Tyler Burge's argument for the external determination of thought content. Burge backs up his initial appeal to thought experiments with a principle of methodological conservatism. I argue that this strategy is flawed: Burge must give a positive argument in favor of his position

This paper articulates what it would take to defend representationalism in the case of emotions – i.e. the claim that emotions attribute evaluative properties to target objects or events. We argue that representationalism faces a significant explanatory challenge that has not yet been adequately recognized. Proponents must establish that a representation relation linking emotions and value is explanatorily necessary. We use the case of perception to bring out the difficulties in meeting this explanatory challenge

Anti-individualists claim that concepts are individuated with an eye to purely external facts about a subject's environment about which she may be ignorant or mistaken. This paper offers a novel reason for thinking that anti-individualistic concepts are an ineliminable part of commonsense psychology. Our commitment to anti-individualism, I argue, is ultimately grounded in a rational epistemic agent's commitment to refining her own representational practices in the light of new and surprising information about her environment. Since anti-individualism is an implicit part of responsible epistemic practices, we cannot abandon it without compromising our own epistemic agency. The story I tell about the regulation of one's own representational practices yields a new account of the identity conditions for anti-individualistic concepts

What does it take to count as competent with the meaning of a thin evaluative predicate like 'is the right thing to do'? According to minimalists like Allan Gibbard and Ralph Wedgwood, competent speakers must simply use the predicate to express their own motivational states. According to analytic descriptivists like Frank Jackson, Philip Pettit and Christopher Peacocke, competent speakers must grasp a particular criterion for identifying the property picked out by the term. Both approaches face serious difficulties. We suggest that these difficulties derive from a shared background assumption that competence conditions must be explained in terms of a determinate conceptual role. We propose a new way of characterizing competence with evaluative terms: what's required for competence is participation in a shared epistemic practice with a term. Our approach, we argue, better explains the nature of evaluative inquiry and the extent of disagreement about evaluative questions.

In Epistemic Two-Dimensional Semantics, David Chalmers seeks to develop a version of 2-D semantics which can vindicate the rationalist claim that there are constitutive connections between meaning, possibility and a priority. Chalmers lays out different ways of filling in his preferred epistemic approach to 2-D semantics so as to avoid controversial philosophical assumptions. In these comments, however, I argue that there are some distinctively rationalist commitments in Chalmers's epistemic approach to 2-D semantics. I start by explaining why Chalmers's approach requires a canonical language that affords subjects accurate a priori access to the space of possibility. I then argue that traditional worries about rationalism will simply re-emerge as worries about whether there can be a canonical vocabulary and how we could come to recognize one if there were. The moral is that Chalmers's 2-D semantic framework builds in substantive metaphysical and epistemological commitments which stand in need of further defense

This paper proposes a new relational account of concepts and shows how it is particularly well suited to characterizing normative concepts. The key advantage of our ‘connectedness’ model is that it explains how subjects can share the same normative concepts despite radical divergences in the descriptive or motivational commitments they associate with them. The connectedness model builds social and historical facts into the foundations of concept identity. This aspect of the model, we suggest, reshapes normative epistemology and provides new resources for a vindication of realism in ethics