A Function-Based Account of Fittingness

A great variety of responses—such as believing, desiring, blaming, apologizing, thanking, laughing—are fit-assessable. Given this diversity, is there anything that unifies fittingness? Here I explore the prospects of offering a constitutive account of fittingness in terms of proper functions. Put roughly, fittingness is the relation that holds between a response and its object just when and because the object has the properties that an object of that response needs to possess for the response to non-deviantly fulfill its function.