Response-Dependence Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

One might think that to be a muppet is just to be something that the Jim Henson Company decides is a muppet. After all, they have copyright on "muppet," (or rather, had, until they sold the rights to Disney). I argue, however, for a dispositional account of muppetationality - that to be a muppet is to be an appropriately created puppet character who is disposed towards engaging in muppetry, which includes the tendency to act absurdly.

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- Metaphysics, Dispositions, Response-Dependence, Muppets

I provide an account of response-dependence and consider how the concept of joint intention and some other concepts might be explained in terms of response-dependence. The paper was written for the Nagel/Dworkin colloquium in 2010 and... more

I provide an account of response-dependence and consider how the concept of joint intention and some other concepts might be explained in terms of response-dependence.
The paper was written for the Nagel/Dworkin colloquium in 2010 and is in very rough form. It replaces a previous version posted on Academia, which was indecipherable.

- by Kit Fine
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- Response-Dependence, Concept of Law, Prisoners Dilemma, Joint Intentionality

This paper offers a new strategy for defending response-dependent accounts of moral value. One part of the strategy is to use the machinery of response-dependence in an account of the notions that form our normative bedrock, and then to use these primitive notions to build up a more conceptually complex account of moral value that is not directly response-dependent. Another feature of the current proposal is the nature of the response that it takes to be central: a salient failure of automatic first-pass psychological interpretation, which I call 'puzzlement'.

- by Jussi Haukioja
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- Response-Dependence

This paper is a response to David Sobel's response to my "Why Idealize?".
Because this looks like history of philosophy, I need to explain: "Why Idealize" was published in 2005, and Sobel's reply in 2009. I proceeded to immediately write this response, and send it to Ethics. After getting a rejection (and after some helpful correspondence with David Sobel), I let it be. But Sobel's paper has now been included in his recent collection "From Valuing to Value", and I've had another look at the exchange as I'm writing a review on Sobel's book (as it happens, for Ethics). I still think my response is of value, so I thought I'd make it available here.

- by David Enoch
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- Metaethics, Moral Realism, Idealization, Response-Dependence

In a number of papers, Holton has argued that those response-dependent concepts that are judgement-dependent, users’, and echo concepts automatically confer infallibility on those using them and that only these concepts with this combination of features can do so. He argues for this claim by giving examples and by showing how the users of a concept, which does not have all these three features at the same time, can be in error. I will argue that Holton’s claim is implausible since he fails to distinguish between infallibility per se and infallibility-in-optimal-conditions. The legitimate conception of infallibility is obviously infallibility-in-optimal-conditions. If so, I will argue that even those concepts that Holton views as lacking one or more of these features and thus as conferring no infallibility on their users may be taken to be conferring infallibility-in-optimal-conditions on their users.

- by Ali Hossein Khani
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- Colour Theory, Infallibility, Crispin Wright, Response-Dependence

Response-dispositional accounts of value defend a biconditional in which the possession of an evaluative property is said to covary with the disposition to cause a certain response. In contrast, a fitting-attitude account of the same property would claim that it is such as to merit or make fitting that same response. This paper argues that even for secondary qualities, response-dispositional accounts are inadequate; we need to import a normative notion such as appropriateness even into accounts of such descriptive properties as redness. A preliminary conclusion is that the normativity that appears in fitting-attitude accounts of evaluative properties need not have anything to do with the evaluative nature of those properties. It may appear there because evaluative properties -- or at least those for which fitting-attitude accounts are plausible -- really are so much like secondary qualities that it might well be appropriate to think of them as a subclass of secondary qualities. In the second half of the paper I discuss the views of three of the philosophers who have been most influential in discussions of response-featuring accounts of evaluative notions and who explicitly distinguish response-dispositional accounts of value from fitting-attitude accounts: John McDowell, Simon Blackburn, and Crispin Wright. I highlight some of the theoretical temptations that can be associated with the assumption that the response-dispositional/fitting-attitude distinction parallels the secondary quality/evaluative property distinction.

- by Joshua Gert
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- Value Theory, Response-Dependence, Buck-Passing, Secondary Qualities

This paper explores a distinction between two types of response-dependence (RD) account (shallow vs. deep). This distinction is inherent in much of the existing literature, however it is neither widely nor well understood, and has never been drawn explicitly. The distinction is often taken to be a metaphysical, or ‘realism-relevant’ one—i.e. deep RD accounts entail qualified realism (or perhaps anti-realism), while shallow RD accounts are metaphysically neutral. I argue that the distinction is not reliably realism-relevant. I formulate a weaker version of the distinction that may help prevent some common and understandable confusion about RD biconditionals and their relationship to realism. The weaker distinction rests on the different roles assigned to RD biconditionals by the two types of account.

- by Andrew W Howat
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- Metaphysics, Philosophy Of Language, Response-Dependence, Secondary Qualities

King (2007, 2009, 2012) argues that nothing has truth conditions except by being taken to be true or false by rational agents. But—for good reason—King claims that propositions possess truth conditions intrinsically and essentially. I will argue that King cannot have both: if the truth conditions of a proposition depend on the reactions of rational agents, then the possession of truth conditions can’t follow from the intrinsic nature or existence of the proposition. This leaves two options. Either, nothing can do the job that motivates positing propositions. Or, there is no need to explain what bestows a truth condition on a proposition.

Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons have recently presented a series of papers in which they argue against what has come to be called the 'new wave' moral realism and moral semantics of David Brink, Richard Boyd, Peter Railton, and a number of other philosophers. The central idea behind Horgan and Timmons's criticism of these 'new wave' theories has been extended by Sean Holland to include the sort of realism that drops out of response-dependent accounts that make use of an analogy between moral properties and secondary qualities. This paper argues that Holland's extension depends crucially on the fact that his target is a direct response-dependent account of moral value. His argument does not work against such accounts of more basic normative notions such as 'harm' or 'benefit'. And these more basic notions may then serve as the basic normative building blocks for an indirectly response-dependent moral theory.

- by Joshua Gert
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- Moral Semantics, Response-Dependence, Moral Twin Earth
- by Andrew W Howat
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- Metaphysics, Pragmatism, Truth, Response-Dependence

Absstrad Inspired by an analogy between moral and secondary properties, some moral philosophers have argued that moral properties are dispositions. According to one version of this view, most clearly represented by Jonathan Dancy, a moral property is the property of being such, having base properties such, that an entity with the property elicits morally merited and motivating responses. Its proponents have argued that this notion can explain how moral judgements can be objective in the sense of expressing properties that are independent of will and yet imply motivation by those who assert them. In special consideration of Dancy's Moral Reasons, I argue that the dispositional account does not save the idea of objectivity in the required sense and implies an unten-able view of moral motivation. I therefore conclude that the dispositional account fails to explain the two features of moral judgements.

This article explains and motivates an account of one way in which we might have substantive a priori knowledge in one important class of domains: domains in which the central concepts are response-dependent. The central example will be our knowledge of the connection between something's being harmful and the fact that it is irrational for us to fail to be averse to that thing. The idea is that although the relevant responses (basic aversion in the case of harm, and a kind of interpretive failure in the case of irrationality) are produced by independent psychological mechanisms, they have distal causes that turn out to be related in ways that -- once language enters the picture -- yield epistemically accessible necessary connections between the referents of their corresponding terms.

- by Joshua Gert
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- A Priori Knowledge, Moral Epistemology, Response-Dependence

According to Wright’s Judgement-Dependent account of intention, facts about a subject’s intentions are viewed as constituted by the subject’s best opinions, or judgements, about them formed under certain optimal conditions. If such conditions hold, the subject has an intention if and only if she judges that she has that intention. Boghossian, however, has objected that this account faces a problem: How can the content of such fact-constituting judgements get determined? Wright’s account, thus, has to deal with a dilemma: either it would be trapped in a vicious regress of appealing to higher-order judgements or it should treat such a content-determining process as a mysterious process. In order to respond to Boghossian, Wright invites a Davidsonian Interpretationist Proposal, according to which the content of the subject’s judgements gets fixed by the judgements of an interpreter. In this talk, I will argue that Wright’s manoeuvre is hopeless as it either fails to resist Boghossian’s objection or results in a collapse in the account as a First-Person-Based Judgement-Dependent account of intention.

- by Ali Hossein Khani
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- Interpretation, Intention, Crispin Wright, Response-Dependence

Contemporary comedy audiences are accused by some comedians of being too morally sensitive to appreciate humor. To get a better sense of what this might mean, I will first briefly present the argument over audience sensitivity as found in the nonphilosophical literature. Second, I then turn to the philosophical literature and begin from the idea that “funny” is a response-dependent property. I present a criticism of this response-dependence account of “funny” based in the claim that funniness is not de- termined by what normal audiences actually laugh at, but by what merits laughter. Third, I argue that excessive or deficient moral sensitivity distorts audience receptivity to humor. Fourth, I turn to candidates for ideally sensitive audiences. I conclude by returning to the particular cases of supposed oversensitivity or undersensitivity to jokes to see how we might judge them.

- by Phillip Deen
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- Stand Up Comedy, Philosophy of Humor, Response-Dependence, Moral Sensitivity

This article explains and defends the existence of value constancy, understood on the model of color constancy. Color constancy involves a phenomenal distinction between the transient color appearances of objects and the unchanging colors that those objects appear to have. The existence of value constancy allows advocates of response-dependent accounts of value to reject the question "What is the uniquely appropriate attitude to have toward this evaluative property?" as containing a false uniqueness assumption. Rejecting this assumption allows response-dependent accounts of value to deflect or answer a host of popular objections.

- by Joshua Gert
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- Value theory (Philosophy), Moral Realism, Response-Dependence, Philosophy of Color
- by Duncan McFarland and +1
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- Metaphysics, Causation, Response-Dependence