Jussi Haukioja

The extensions of response-dependent concepts are a priori connected with the subjective responses that competent users of that concept have in normal conditions. There are two strategies for specifying normal conditions for response-dependent concepts: topic-specific and topic-neutral. On a topic-specific specification, a characterization of normal conditions would be given separately for each response-dependent concept (or a non-trivial subset of response-dependent concepts, such as our colour concepts), whereas a topic-neutral specification would be given in a uniform way for all response-dependent concepts. In this paper I argue, using a thought experiment, that only topic-neutral specifications will deliver the a priori knowledge constitutive of response-dependence.

David Bloor and Crispin Wright have argued, independently, that the proper lesson to draw from Wittgenstein's so-called rule-following considerations is the rejection of meaning Platonism. According to Platonism, the meaningfulness of a general term is constituted by its connection with an abstract entity, the (possibly) infinite extension of which is determined independently of our classificatory practices. Having rejected Platonism, both Bloor and Wright are driven to meaning finitism, the view that the question of whether a meaningful term correctly applies to a given entity is not determined in advance of anyone's judgement about the matter. I argue that the two views do not form a dichotomy - there is room for a middle position which can account for the correct applications existing in advance of anyone's judgements without being committed to meaning Platonism. Furthermore, I will show how such a middle position arises quite naturally from the view that our competence with semantically basic terms is response-dependent.

A recent strategy for defending physicalism about the mind against the zombie argument relies on the so-called conditional analysis of phenomenal concepts. According to this analysis, what kinds of states our phenomenal concepts refer to depends crucially on whether the actual world is merely physical or not. John Hawthorne, David Braddon-Mitchell and Robert Stalnaker have claimed, independently, that this analysis explains the conceivability of zombies in a way consistent with physicalism, thus blocking the zombie argument. Torin Alter has recently presented three arguments against the conditional analysis strategy. This paper defends the conditional analysis strategy against Alter’s objections

We argue that the term “intuition”, as it is used in metaphilosophy, is ambiguous between at least four different senses. In philosophy of language, the relevant “intuitions” are either the outputs of our competence to interpret and produce linguistic expressions, or the speakers’ or hearers’ own reports of these outputs. The semantic facts that philosophers of language are interested in are determined by the outputs of our competence. Hence, philosophers of language should be interested in investigating these, and they do this by testing what we would say or understand in hypothetical communication situations. In the final section of the paper we suggest some methods for investigating these outputs which are independent of whether subjects report them, and hence which might be used as an alternative to the standard use of hypothetical cases