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This chapter explores differences between conversational exercitives and standard exercitives. Although both enact norms, standard exercitives do so via an exercise of speaker authority. Moreover, with standard exercitives, the speaker intends to enact a norm and intends for the hearer to recognize that intention. Standard exercitives are communicative. Conversational exercitives work differently. The speaker does not need to have or exercise authority; the speaker need not consciously intend to enact a norm and participants need not consciously recognize that a norm is enacted. With conversational exercitives, norms are enacted simply in virtue of contributing to the norm-governed activity of conversation.

This chapter argues that the essential manifestness account of the mind-dependence of colour enables us to make sense of the textual evidence that appears to pull in contrary directions with respect to the interpretation of transcendental idealism. It is argued that this account enables us to make sense of Kant’s saying that appearances are representations in us that have an essential connection to possible experience, at the same time as saying that appearances are appearances of the very things which have a way in which they are independently of us, which grounds the way they appear. Kant’s notion of possible experience is examined and it is argued that the essential manifestness account fits it better than does phenomenalism. It is argued that Kant limits spatio-temporal reality to what can, in principle, be presented in a conscious experience to minds like ours—to what can be given in intuition.

This chapter shows how my essential manifestness account enables us to see how Kant can combine a genuine form of mind-dependence with a genuine empirical realism that sees objects as existing outside our minds in space. It compares his position to three contemporary positions: meaning-theoretic anti-realism; anti-realism in philosophy of science, and structural realism. It is argued that Kant’s idealism about appearances can be understood as the rejection of experience-transcendence about spatio-temporal objects. Kant denies that there is any part of spatio-temporal reality which, in principle, could not be presented to us in a possible intuition. Kant also argues that spatio-temporal appearances are essentially relational, and contain nothing absolutely intrinsic or categorical.