Laura Schroeter

Laura Schroeter
University of Melbourne | MSD · School of Historical and Philosophical Studies

About

40
Publications
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Introduction
Laura Schroeter currently works at the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne. Laura does research on concepts, reference and metaethics. She has written extensively on the limitations of two-dimensional semantics and proposed an alternative relational model of concept individuation and an interpretivist account of of how semantic contents are assigned to relationally individuated concepts. She is currently working on a monograph, with François Schroeter, on normative concepts.

Publications

Publications (40)
Article
Full-text available
According to philosophical orthodoxy, the parties to moral or legal disputes genuinely disagree only if their uses of key normative terms in the dispute express the same meaning. Recently, however, this orthodoxy has been challenged. According to an influential alternative view, genuine moral and legal disagreements should be understood as metaling...
Article
Full-text available
According to Ardent Normative Realists, reality favors certain ways of valuing and acting. Matti Eklund has recently argued that Ardent Normative Realists are committed to Referential Normativity, i.e., the thesis that the action-guiding and motivational roles associated with normative predicates determine their reference. In this paper, we argue t...
Article
Our main focus in this paper is Herman Cappelen’s claim, defended in Fixing Language , that reference is radically inscrutable. We argue that Cappelen’s inscrutability thesis should be rejected. We also highlight how rejecting inscrutability undermines Cappelen’s most radical conclusions about conceptual engineering. In addition, we raise a worry a...
Article
What does it take for lawyers and others to think or talk about the same legal topic—e.g., defamation, culpability? We argue that people are able to think or talk about the same topic not when they possess a matching substantive understanding of the topic, as traditional metasemantics says, but instead when their thoughts or utterances are related...
Article
We extend Haslanger’s model of the way social meanings shape our beliefs and desires to discuss the ways in which they shape our emotional responses. We argue that emotional regulation is a core mechanism by which we are made fit for participation in unjust social practices, whether as dominants or subordinates. Recognizing this, liberation movemen...
Chapter
This chapter sketches a metasemantic model that promises to vindicate a broadly rationalist version of normative realism. It introduces a metasemantic principle that ties reference determination to what is justifiable from the perspective of the conceptually competent subject. The chapter explains how this metasemantic principle can help vindicate...
Article
In this paper, we argue that ordinary judgments about core normative topics purport to attribute stable, objective properties and relations. Our strategy is first to analyze the structures and practices characteristic of paradigmatically representational concepts such as concepts of objects and natural kinds. We identify three broad features that g...
Article
Full-text available
The Generalized Integration Challenge (GIC) is the task of providing, for a given domain of discourse, a simultaneously acceptable metaphysics, epistemology and metasemantics and showing them to be so. In this paper, we focus on a metaethical position for which (GIC) seems particularly acute: the brand of normative realism which takes normative pro...
Article
It's widely accepted that social facts about an individual's linguistic community can affect both the reference of her words and the concepts (or idiolect meanings) those words express. Theorists sympathetic to the internalist tradition have sought to accommodate these social dependence phenomena without altering their core theoretical commitments...
Chapter
Full-text available
A characteristic form of philosophical inquiry seeks to answer a ‘what is it?’ question. When philosophers ask such questions, they are looking for an informative analysis of the nature of the topic in question: what does it take for something to be knowledge? or a morally right action? or an instance of free will? or a member of a biological speci...
Article
This paper articulates what it would take to defend representationalism in the case of emotions - i.e. the claim that emotions attribute evaluative properties to target objects or events. We argue that representationalism faces a significant explanatory challenge that has not yet been adequately recognized. Proponents must establish that a represen...
Article
In Constructing the World, Chalmers seeks to articulate and defend an important epistemic accessibility thesis, the Scrutability of Truth, which is crucial to Chalmers’ rationalist approach to meaning and modality. Chapters 3 and 4 of the book are devoted to persuading us that the move from weaker to stronger forms of Scrutability is intuitively pl...
Article
This paper proposes a new relational account of concepts and shows how it is particularly well suited to characterizing normative concepts. The key advantage of our ‘connectedness’ model is that it explains how subjects can share the same normative concepts despite radical divergences in the descriptive or motivational commitments they associate wi...
Article
This paper is a response to Niklas Möller’s (Philosophical Studies, 2013) recent criticism of our relational (Jazz) model of meaning of thin evaluative terms. Möller’s criticism rests on a confusion about the role of coordinating intentions in Jazz. This paper clarifies what’s distinctive and controversial about the Jazz proposal and explains why J...
Article
This paper examines whether realists can explain co-reference without appealing to subjects' ideal convergence in judgment. This question is particularly pressing in the normative domain, since deep disagreement about the applicability of normative predicates suggests that different speakers may not pick out the same property when they use normativ...
Article
This note argues that Laura Schroeter's [2005] critique of David Chalmers's epistemic two-dimensional semantics is not touched by a reply by Edward Elliott, Kelvin McQueen, and Clas Weber [2013].
Article
In recent years, two‐dimensional (2D) semantics has been used to develop a broadly descriptivist approach to meaning that seeks to accommodate externalists’ counterexamples to traditional descriptivism. The 2D possible worlds framework can be used to capture a speaker’s implicit dispositions to identify the reference of her words on the basis of em...
Article
Full-text available
This paper articulates two constraints on an acceptable account of meaning: (i) accessibility: sameness of meaning affords an immediate appearance of de jure co-reference, (ii) flexibility: sameness of meaning tolerates open-ended variation in speakers’ substantive understanding of the reference. Traditional accounts of meaning have trouble simulta...
Article
This paper is a critique of Ralph Wedgwood's recent attempt to use the framework of conceptual role semantics in metaethics. Wedgwood's central idea is that the action-guiding role of moral terms suffices to determine genuine properties as their semantic values. We argue that Wedgwood cannot get so much for so little. We explore two interpretations...
Article
This paper sketches a right-maker account of normative practical reasons along functionalist lines. The approach is contrasted with other similar accounts, in particular John Broome's analysis of reasons as explanations of oughts.
Article
What does it take to count as competent with the meaning of a thin evaluative predicate like ‘is the right thing to do’? According to minimalists like Allan Gibbard and Ralph Wedgwood, competent speakers must simply use the predicate to express their own motivational states. According to analytic descriptivists like Frank Jackson, Philip Pettit and...
Chapter
Full-text available
Jackson often writes as if his account of public language meanings in terms of descriptivist conventions were just plain common sense. How else are we to explain how different speakers manage to communicate using a public language? And how else can we explain how individuals arrive at confident judgments about the reference of their words in hypoth...
Article
Anti-individualists claim that concepts are individuated with an eye to purely external facts about a subject’s environment about which she may be ignorant or mistaken. This paper offers a novel reason for thinking that anti-individualistic concepts are an ineliminable part of commonsense psychology. Our commitment to anti-individualism, I argue, i...
Article
It's generally agreed that, for a certain a class of cases, a rational subject cannot be wrong in treating two elements of thought as co-referential. Even anti-individualists like Tyler Burge agree that empirical error is impossible in such cases. I argue that this immunity to empirical error is illusory and sketch a new anti-individualist approach...
Article
According to David Chalmers and Frank Jackson, conceptual competence puts one in a position to have a priori knowledge of conditional claims of the form ‘If my environment is thus and so, then water = H2O’. The rationale for this position, I argue, rests on controversial semantic assumptions about the individuation of meanings or concepts. I sketch...
Article
This paper argues that David Chalmer's new epistemic interpretation of 2-D semantics faces the very same type of objection he takes to defeat earlier contextualist interpretation of the 2-D framework.
Article
Full-text available
In Thinking How to Live, Allan Gibbard claims that expressivists can vindicate realism about moral discourse. This paper argues that Gibbard’s expressivism does not provide such a vindication.
Article
  A priori conceptual analysis is once again part of the philosophical mainstream. Unlike their verificationist predecessors, modern conceptual analysts deny that we have armchair access to the essential nature of the objects and properties we think about. Instead, they claim we have access to how the reference of our words and thoughts is fixed. T...
Article
In Epistemic Two-Dimensional Semantics, David Chalmers seeks to develop a version of 2-D semantics which can vindicate the rationalist claim that there are constitutive connections between meaning, possibility and a priority. Chalmers lays out different ways of filling in his preferred epistemic approach to 2-D semantics so as to avoid controversia...
Article
Frank Jackson and David Chalmers have suggested that the diagonal intensions defined by their two-dimensional framework can play the two key roles of Fregean senses: they provide a priori accessible extension conditions for a representation and they provide the identity conditions for meanings and thought contents. In this paper, I clarify the natu...
Article
Full-text available
In his book From Metaphysics to Ethics, Jackson's defence of what he calls "conceptual analysis" proceeds in two stages. In the first stage, he argues for the existence of common knowledge shared by all speakers of a public language. He then brings this postulated common knowledge to bear on an array of philosophical problems, ranging from puzzles...

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