In this section, I’ll sum up the similarities and differences between Wright’s and Johnston’s accounts of response-dependence, and place some other authors on response-dependence with respect to the issues discussed, thus creating a sort of map of positions (though without going into detail about the views).
Response-dependence of concepts or subject matter?
Wright (like Pettit) formulates his view as a view about certain kinds of concepts, while Johnston mostly puts his view in terms of properties (though he talks about
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concepts and ‘conceptual identities’ in his early papers on response-dependence). However, this difference is less crucial than it might have seemed. Essentially, Johnston’s and Wright’s accounts are both theses of response-dependence of subject matter, not only of the concepts involved. In this, they differ from Pettit’s version of response-dependence (and Haukioja’s (2000) development of it), but side with most other authors on response-dependence. A notable example is Wedgewood (1998), who argues that response-dependent properties are those with response-dependent essences. Another is DeClercq, who aims to capture the distinction between response-dependent and -independent properties in a way that, unlike Wright’s, makes morality come out as response-dependent as expected. On DeClercq’s view, ‘a property is response-dependent [...] if there is an a priori guarantee that if the property is instantiated, we will come to possess a concept of it in due course’52(i.e. at some point during the history of humankind). The idea is that such a close connection between concept and property will obtain only for response-dependent subject matters.
Lopez de Sa’s (2003) view is a mixture between the two paradigms; he thinks that response-dependent concepts with flexible specifications of subjects and C- conditions go with response-dependence of subject matter, while those with
rigidifiedspecifications go with low level location (though he doesn’t put it in those terms). On his view, the latter but not the former sort of account vindicates realism.
Response-dependence and realism
Johnston and Wright share the motivation outlined in Ch. 1: reconciling subject- relatedness with a moderate realist stance towards the subject matters under discussion. More precisely, for response-dependent domains, they give affirmative answers to the realism questions about 1) truth-aptness, 2) epistemic access, and 3a) existence of the disputed subject matter. Question 3b) on subject-independence is answered in the negative, but in slightly different ways. Johnston’s view is, of course, that response-dependence means that the properties in questions are response-dispositions. Wright’s view is that the properties in question are merely deflationary, and have their extensions determined by the extensions of criterially
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governed concepts with responses in C-conditions as main criterion; best opinions determine the extensions of both concepts and properties. On Johnston’s view, by contrast, there is a slightly more substantial referent in the picture, even if this referent is not a low level property, but a response-disposition.
With respect to the question of realism, Wright’s and Johnston’s versions differ strongly from Pettit’s, which is consistent with low level reference, and thus with realism in more respects, or degrees, than Wright’s and Johnston’s versions (more on this shortly). Wright’s and Johnston’s views both amount to high level locations. While low-level properties may have a role to play, e.g. a causal one, they are not essential for the concepts, and are not their referents.
(As already stated, Lopez de Sa distances himself from Wright and Johnston on the issue of realism and subject-relatedness: for response-dependent concepts with rigidifiers in the specifications of subjects and C-conditions, we get realism, but not (any interesting) subject-relatedness, and no response-dependence of subject matter, but rather camouflaged low-level reference. For those with flexible specifications, we get response-dependence of subject matter (and subject-relatedness), but no realism. Powell (1998) also argues that realism is incompatible with response- dependence of subject matter, though see Wright (1998) for a convincing response to his criticism.)
Equations and conditions
Wright and Johnston employ similar materials to capture their distinctions, but also differ on some points. One point of difference is the shape of the equations. Johnston, like most other authors on response-dependence, employs basic equations or something close, whereas Wright relies on provisional equations in the hope that these will be immune to conditional fallacy problems. Johnston hopes to solve these problems by formulating the equations in overtly dispositional terms, while Wright sticks with subjunctive conditionals. (Other authors are more or less equally divided between the two options.)
As to the conditions that the biconditionals must meet in order to be a sign of
response-dependence, Wright and Johnston agree on the almost53 universally
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accepted a priority and substantiality conditions. Johnston supplements this with a necessity condition, whereas Wright adds the independence and extremal conditions in order to capture the distinction he wants. These differences are not too important, though; the differences in philosophical content, not those in formal apparatus, are what makes the real difference between the accounts.
Applications
Lastly, there are differences with respect to intended application areas. Wright and Johnston agree (with most others) in using colours as a paradigm case of response- dependence. Johnston thinks of values as response-dependent, while this domain doesn’t fit the requirements of Wright’s version (though he admits that a response- dependence view of it would be attractive). Johnston’s application to accessible truth does not have a parallel in Wright, except in the uninteresting sense that Wright, too, takes some truths to be dependent on responses. Wright’s applications to intentional states and rule-following, on the other hand, do not have a parallel in Johnston. On the whole, the missing explanation argument probably makes Johnston more sceptical towards the idea of widespread response-dependence than Wright (pace Johnston’s response-dependence thesis of accessible truth), though both agree that global response-dependence is an unpalatable and strongly anti-realist conclusion.
The differences between Johnston’s and Wright’s accounts are all relatively minor compared to the differences between these views and Pettit’s, which is the subject of the next chapter. With the results from that chapter in place, we shall return to response-dependence of subject matter in Ch. 6.
Ch. 5: Pettit’s ethocentric story and its
potential
This chapter explores Philip Pettit’s version of response-dependence, which is very different from Johnston’s and Wright’s – so different that their sharing the term ‘response-dependence’ may be more confusing than useful. In Pettit’s version, response-dependence is a property of concepts only, and is neutral on the nature of the corresponding properties, objects, or states of affairs. The core of the proposal is an account of concept acquisition which was proposed in response to the Wittgensteinian problem of rule-following. In the first half of the chapter, I present Pettit’s views. In the second half, I apply Pettit’s account of the concept-acquisition of individuals to the concept-acquisition of entire communities. This yields an account of concept evolution that promises answers to some hard questions about concepts, linguistic practices, reality, and the relation between them. I discuss some of the prospects and problems of the account, and its relationship to Pettit’s account.