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Why Be an Anti‐Individualist?
Author(s) -
SCHROETER LAURA
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
philosophy and phenomenological research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.7
H-Index - 39
eISSN - 1933-1592
pISSN - 0031-8205
DOI - 10.1111/j.1933-1592.2008.00178.x
Subject(s) - individualism , epistemology , agency (philosophy) , identity (music) , subject (documents) , sociology , philosophy , aesthetics , computer science , political science , law , library science
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, is ultimately grounded in a rational epistemic agent’s commitment to refining her own representational practices in the light of new and surprising information about her environment. Since anti‐individualism is an implicit part of responsible epistemic practices, we cannot abandon it without compromising our own epistemic agency. The story I tell about the regulation of one’s own representational practices yields a new account of the identity conditions for anti‐individualistic concepts.