Victoria McGeer

In Building Better Beings, Vargas develops and defends a naturalistic account of responsibility, whereby responsible agents must possess a feasibly situated capacity to detect and respond to moral considerations. As a preliminary step, he also offers a substantive account of how we might justify our practices of holding responsible—viz., by appeal to their efficacy in fostering a ‘valuable form of agency’ across the community at large, a form of agency that precisely encompasses sensitivity to moral considerations. But how do these accounts relate to one another? Though I find much that is appealing in Vargas’s general approach, I challenge his insistence that these accounts should be treated as ‘conceptually independent’, arguing that this generates an objectionable “justification gap”: on his analysis, someone could remain an appropriate target of our responsibility practices and yet fail to be a morally responsible agent. In closing, I offer a potential solution to this problem, though it means re-visioning how the account of moral responsibility is conceptually tied to the justification of our responsibility practices

In the philosophies of language and mind, "externalists" argue that the meanings of words and the contents of beliefs are determined by factors external to individual agents. "Social" externalists emphasize that the meaning-determining features of an individual's environment include what others say and do. "Physical" or "perceptual" externalists disagree, arguing that basic constraints on meaning are set by an individual's history of causal interactions with her physical environment. Communication is explained by a radical interpreter's ability to discern the causes of a speaker's utterances and, thereby, the contents of her beliefs. Shared meanings are inessential, and languages are best understood as theories adequate for interpreting individual speakers. ;My aim is to defend a thoroughgoing social externalism. In Chapters I and II, I review Putnam's original Twin Earth thought experiment, considering how externalists divide on the relationship suggested between meaning and belief. In Chapter III, I concentrate on what externalist thought experiments imply about how we can go wrong in what we think and about what we mean. My conclusion is that the thought experiments supporting perceptual, but not social, externalism are fundamentally misconceived. ;In Chapter IV, I examine what some so-called social externalists must share with perceptual externalists in order to endorse the thought experiments I reject. I claim it is a "realist" vision of language use. Such a vision is fundamentally compatible with the idiolects framework of linguistic analysis, but, ultimately, it cannot be defended. Yet, without this realist foundation, the idiolects picture of language is as counter-intuitive as the positivist account it was supposed to replace. ;My proposed alternative, discussed in Chapters IV and V, denies the priority of individual speaker meaning. Meaning is an essentially social concept, describing the stable linguistic practices of a community of speakers. This genuinely social picture of language allows for two things: reintroducing normativity as an essential feature of meaning, thereby making philosophical sense of our common sense notions of error; and recognizing the fact philosophers too often ignore, that natural languages are also dynamic "living" languages, evolving as a consequence of our changing interests, knowledge and abilities