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Can mere conceptual competence explain the apriori? Many contemporary theorists believe that conceptual competence grounds apriori conceptual truths – and that this fact helps explain how thinkers can have apriori justification for accepting these truths and reasoning in accord with them. In this chapter, I'll examine several contemporary defenses of the conceptual approach to apriority in order to clarify their core commitments about the nature of concepts. The common thread, I'll argue, is a picture of concepts that combines a conceptual role model of conceptual competence with a rationalizing approach to the determination of semantic contents. My first aim is to show how this model of concepts has the potential to ground apriori truth and justification. My second aim is to show how the model involves problematic commitments about concepts, which can be avoided on an alternative relational model of concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 properties to be (i) mind‐independent and (ii) causally inert. The problem is that these metaphysical commitments seem to make normative knowledge impossible. We suggest that bringing metasemantics into play can help to resolve this puzzle. We propose an independently plausible metasemantic constraint on reference determination and show how it can provide a plausible response to (GIC) for this brand of normative realism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]