Between deference and self-assurance: reconciling realism and response-dependence

Abstract

This thesis deals with response-dependence accounts of concepts - concepts the extensions of which are determined by our responses under certain conditions - and the possibility of realist construals of practices involving such concepts. Drawing attention to distinctions between different types of response-dependent concepts, Chapter I proposes an account of response-dependence that recognises a variegation of types of concept that can plausibly be identified as response-dependent. Chapter II continues the development of this account by considering matters relevant to the form and content of the biconditional theorems (basic equations) of which responsedependence accounts are comprised. The account I propose in these first two chapters attempts to abstract from the details of existing accounts. Nevertheless, the middle section of the thesis – Chapters III, IV, V and VI – provide critical exegeses of response-dependence accounts developed by three authors – Mark Johnston’s Response-Dispositionalism, Philip Pettit’s Global Response-Dependence account of basic concepts and Crispin Wright’s Order of Determination distinction - accounts that have been fundamental to and influential in the literature on response dependence. Consideration of Crispin Wright’s realism relevant distinctions provides a bridge to Chapter VII where I undertake a detailed analysis of realism, according to which realism is recognised as an array of commitments that are best understood as organised within three distinctive and largely independent clusters – semantic, ontic and epistemic. Finally, in Chapter VIII we are able to effect a productive engagement between realism, understood according to the taxonomic exercise undertaken in Chapter VII, and response-dependence, understood according to the account developed and promoted in Chapters I and II, an engagement that results in a more fine-grained and sophisticated analysis of the prospects for a reconciliation of realism and response-dependence than has yet appeared in the literature.