ON BRANDS | An Investigation into the Nature of Consumer Brands | Are they real or constructed?

Abstract

This thesis investigates the nature of consumer brands in the context of the contemporary realism debate. It comprises three chapters. The first chapter introduces the what, the why and the how of brands, to wit: I describe what brands are and why brands exist, as well as how they are designed. In the second chapter, motivated by my pursuit to answer the question: Are Brands Real? I review three influential proposals by Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, Michael Dummett and Crispin Wright about how to distinguish realist from anti-realist views about disputed entities within particular domains, in order to develop a toolkit, which I will employ in the third Chapter to answer that key question. The result of this investigation shows that the answer, which prior to the inquiry might have struck some as obvious, is somewhat more nuanced and complex.