About this topic
Summary ‘Conceptual Engineering’ is both the name of a philosophical method and the name of an increasingly popular field of metaphilosophical research. Although the method of conceptual engineering has arguably been practiced throughout the history of philosophy, it has not been until recently that conceptual engineering became the object of metaphilosophical research. The key idea of conceptual engineering is to take a normative approach to traditional philosophical questions: Instead of asking what our current concepts of say, knowledge, race or gender, do mean, conceptual engineers ask what these concepts should mean. The underlying assumption is that our actual concepts are not necessarily ideal and that improving them is an important desideratum of philosophy. The contemporary metaphilosophical debate about conceptual engineering involves questions regarding its normative foundations, its actual feasibility, its coherence with semantic externalism and its proper limits.
Key works The label 'conceptual engineering' was coined by Richard Creath in his Creath 1990. Like Creath, many contemporary authors in the field link their work to Rudolf Carnap’s method of explication (Carnap 1950), which is a kind of conceptual engineering designed for the purposes of science. Brun 2016 contains a very helpful discussion of Carnapian explications. Another important starting point for current discussions about conceptual engineering is Sally Haslanger's so called 'ameliorative analysis', introduced in Haslanger 2000 and further developed in Haslanger 2012. Burgess & Plunkett 2013Burgess & Plunkett 2013 approach more broadly what they call 'conceptual ethics'. The first monograph on conceptual engineering is Cappelen 2018.
Introductions Good introductory texts to conceptual engineering are Isaac et al 2022 and Cappelen & Plunkett 2020. See also the first two chapters of Cappelen 2018, Burgess & Plunkett 2013 and Burgess & Plunkett 2013 for helpful characterizations of the basic goals of conceptual engineering as well as a list of example cases. See Brun 2016 for a good introduction and discussion of Carnapian explications as a method of doing philosophy.There is a virtual conceptual engineering network that hosts a lecture series and provides ressources on conceptual engineering: https://www.conceptualengineering.xyz/Here is also a link to a an ongoing YouTube channel on conceptual engineering where you can find many recorded talks on the topic: https://youtube.com/c/ConceptualEngineering
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239 found
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  1. Conceptual Construction in Epistemology.Thomas Grundmann - manuscript
    Standard Analytic Epistemology typically relies on conceptual analysis of folk epistemic terms such as ‘knowledge’ or ‘justification’. A cross-cultural and cross-linguistic perspective on this method leads to the worry that there might not be universally shared epistemic concepts, and that different languages might use folk notions that have different extensions. Moreover, there is no reason to believe that our epistemic common-sense terms pick out what is epistemically most significant or valuable. In my paper, I take these issues as a starting (...)
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  2. Sameness of Subject Matter in Conceptual Replacement.Cyrill Mamin - manuscript
    Projects of conceptual engineering that aim to ameliorate concepts face the challenge of topic continuity. In some instances of conceptual amelioration, a particularly strong kind of continuity is needed: Sameness of subject matter. This paper examines how sameness of subject matter can be maintained in conceptual amelioration. It starts from a view that sees concepts as ways of thinking, implying that to change a concept is to replace it. At first sight, this view seems incompatible with maintaining sameness of subject (...)
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  3. Lexical Negotiations.Ryan Miller - manuscript
    The use of lexical signs like ‘knowledge’ has consequences. Not only do they have direct psychological resonances, but people ascribe beliefs and act based on their semantics. This paper proposes that such consequences are up for negotiation, and introduces a formal framework from financial theory to suggest constraints on those negotiations and implications of those constraints. The upshot is that changing language will be easier sometimes than others, and philosophers’ projects of linguistic change should be aware of those conditions.
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  4. Engineering Social Concepts: Labels and the Science of Categorization.Eleonore Neufeld - manuscript
    One of the core insights from Eleanor Rosch’s work on categorization is that human categorization isn’t arbitrary. Instead, two psychological principles constrain possible systems of classification for all human cultures. According to these principles, the task of a category system is to provide maximum information with the least cognitive effort, and the perceived world provides us with structured rather than arbitrary features. In this paper, I show that Rosch's insights give us important resources for making progress on the 'feasibility question' (...)
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  5. The New Philosopher-Kings: Conceptual Engineering and Social Authority.Nick Smyth - manuscript
    Many philosophers have recently become interested in conceptual engineering, or the activity of producing better conceptual schemes in human populations. But few, if any, are asking the question: what would it mean for actual human agents to possess the social authority to modify a conceptual scheme in this way? This paper argues for a deontological approach to conceptual engineering, wherein we have to secure social authority qua engineers before attempting to modify social concepts. I show that the dominant, consequentialist conception (...)
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  6. Intuitions about cases as evidence (for how we should think).James Andow - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Much recent work on philosophical methodology has focused on whether we should accept evidence: the claim that philosophers use intuitive judgments about cases as evidence for/against philosophical theories. This paper outlines a new way of thinking about the philosophical method of appealing to cases such that evidence is true but not as it is typically understood. The idea proposed is that, when philosophers appeal to cases, they are engaged in a project of conceptual engineering and that, within that project, intuitions (...)
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  7. Meanings Without Species.Josh Armstrong - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    In this paper, I critically assess Mark Richard’s interesting and important development of the claim that linguistic meanings can be fruitfully analogized with biological species. I argue that linguistic meanings qua cluster of interpretative presuppositions need not and often do not display the population-level independence and reproductive isolation that is characteristic of the biological species concept. After developing these problems in some detail, I close with a discussion of their implications for the picture that Richard paints concerning the dangers of (...)
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  8. Downplaying the change of subject objection to conceptual engineering.Delia Belleri - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Conceptual engineering projects have been criticized for creating discontinuities of subject-matter and, as a result, discontinuities in inquiries: call this the Change of Subject objection. In this paper, I explore a way of dealing with the objection that clarifies its scope and eventually downplays it. First, two strategies aimed at saving subject-continuity are examined and found wanting: Herman Cappelen’s appeal to topics, and the account in terms of concept function. Second, the idea is introduced that one can begin an object-level (...)
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  9. On Pluralism and Conceptual Engineering: Introduction and Overview.Delia Belleri - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy:1-19.
    Pluralism is relevant to conceptual engineering in many ways. First of all, we face the issue of pluralism when trying to characterise the very object(s) of conceptual engineering. Is it just concepts? Could concepts be pluralistically conceived for the purposes of conceptual engineering? Or rather, is it concepts and other representational devices as well? Second, one may wonder whether concepts have only one function in our mental life (representation) or, rather, a plurality of functions (including non-representational ones). Third, it is (...)
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  10. What is the Point of Persistent Disputes? The meta-analytic answer.Alexandre Billon & Philippe Vellozzo - forthcoming - Dialectica.
    Many philosophers regard the persistence of philosophical disputes as symptomatic of overly ambitious, ill-founded intellectual projects. There are indeed strong reasons to believe that persistent disputes in philosophy (and more generally in the discourse at large) are pointless. We call this the pessimistic view of the nature of philosophical disputes. In order to respond to the pessimistic view, we articulate the supporting reasons and provide a precise formulation in terms of the idea that the best explanation of persistent disputes entails (...)
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  11. What is Conceptual Engineering and What Should it Be?David Chalmers - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Conceptual engineering is the design, implementation, and evaluation of concepts. Conceptual engineering includes or should include de novo conceptual engineering (designing a new concept) as well as conceptual re-engineering (fixing an old concept). It should also include heteronymous (different-word) as well as homonymous (same-word) conceptual engineering. I discuss the importance and the difficulty of these sorts of conceptual engineering in philosophy and elsewhere.
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  12. Rational Conceptual Conflict and the Implementation Problem.Adam F. Gibbons - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Conceptual engineers endeavor to improve our concepts. But their endeavors face serious practical difficulties. One such difficulty – rational conceptual conflict - concerns the degree to which agents are incentivized to impede the efforts of conceptual engineers, especially in many of the contexts within which conceptual engineering is viewed as a worthwhile pursuit. Under such conditions, the already difficult task of conceptual engineering becomes even more difficult. Consequently, if they want to increase their chances of success, conceptual engineers should pay (...)
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  13. Conceptual Construction: Why the Content of Our Folk Terms Has Only Limited Significance.Thomas Grundmann - forthcoming - In Masaharu Mizumoto & Stephen Stich (eds.), Ethno-Epistemology.
    Standard Analytic Epistemology typically relies on conceptual analysis of folk epistemic terms such as ‘knowledge’ or ‘justification’. A cross-cultural and cross-linguistic perspective on this method leads to the worry that there might not be universally shared epistemic concepts, and that different languages might use folk notions that have different extensions. Moreover, there is no reason to believe that our epistemic common-sense terms pick out what is epistemically most significant or valuable. In my paper, I take these issues as a starting (...)
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  14. Which Method(s) for Conceptual Engineering?Manuel Gustavo Isaac, Belleri Delia, Brun Georg, Decock Lieven, Koch Steffen, Pollock Joey & Reuter Kevin - forthcoming - In Hanne Andersen, Benedikt Löwe, Hasok Chang & Tomas Marvan (eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science and Technology. London: College Publications.
  15. Inferentialist Conceptual Engineering.Sigurd Jorem & Guido Löhr - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    On a representationalist view, conceptual engineering is the practice of changing the extensions and intensions of the devices we use to speak and think. But if this view holds true, conceptual engineering has a bad rationale. Extensions and intensions are not the sorts of things that are better or worse as such. A representationalist account of conceptual engineering thus falls prey to the objection that the practice has a bad rationale. To account for the assumption that conceptual engineering is worthwhile, (...)
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  16. Epistemic paternalism via conceptual engineering.Eve Kitsik - forthcoming - Journal of the American Philosophical Association.
    The paper targets conceptual engineers who aim to improve other people’s patterns of inference and attention by shaping their concepts. Such conceptual engineers sometimes engage in a form of epistemic paternalism that I call “paternalistic cognitive engineering”: instead of explicitly persuading, informing and educating others, the engineers non-consultatively rely on assumptions about the target agents’ cognitive systems to improve their belief-forming. The target agents could reasonably regard such benevolent exercises of control as violating their sovereignty over their own belief-formation. This (...)
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  17. Topics, Disputes and 'Going Meta'.Viktoria Knoll - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    On a naive view of conceptual engineering, conceptual engineers simply aim at engineering concepts. This picture has recently come under attack. Sarah Sawyer (2018, 2020) and Derek Ball (2020) present two rather different, yet equally unorthodox, accounts of conceptual engineering, which they take to be superior to the naive picture. This paper casts doubts on the superiority of their respective accounts. By elaborating on the explanatory potential of “going meta”, the paper defends the naive view against Sawyer’s and Ball’s rival (...)
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  18. Verbal disputes and topic continuity.Viktoria Knoll - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Changing concepts comes with a risk of creating merely verbal disputes. Accounts of topic continuity (such as Herman Cappelen’s) are supposed to solve this problem. As this paper shows, however, no existing solution avoids the danger of mere verbalness. On the contrary, accounts of topic continuity in fact increase the danger of overlooking merely verbal disputes between pre- and post-ameliorators. Ultimately, this paper suggests accepting the danger of mere verbalness resulting from a change in topic as a downside of conceptual (...)
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  19. What Topic Continuity Problem?Alexander W. Kocurek - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    A common objection to the very idea of conceptual engineering is the topic continuity problem: whenever one tries to “reengineer” a concept, one only shifts attention away from one concept to another. Put differently, there is no such thing as conceptual revision: there’s only conceptual replacement. Here, I show that topic continuity is compatible with conceptual replacement. Whether the topic is preserved in an act of conceptual replacement simply depends on what is being replaced (a conceptual tool or a conceptual (...)
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  20. How Language Teaches and Misleads: "Coronavirus" and "Social Distancing" as Case Studies.Ethan Landes - forthcoming - In Manuel Gustavo Isaac, Kevin Scharp & Steffen Koch (eds.), New Perspectives on Conceptual Engineering.
    The beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic offers a unique case study for understanding conceptual and linguistic propagation. In early 2020, scientists, politicians, journalists, and other public figures had to, with great urgency, propagate several public health-related concepts and terms to every person they could. This paper examines the propagation of coronavirus and social distancing and develops a framework for understanding how the language used to express a notion can help or hinder propagation. I argue that anyone designing a representational device (...)
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  21. Critical Review of Fixing Language: An Essay on Conceptual Engineering, by Herman Cappelen [in Portuguese]. [REVIEW]Samuel Maia - forthcoming - Principia: An International Journal of Epistemology.
    This is a critical review of Herman Cappelen’s Fixing Language (2018), an excellent and thought-provoking introduction to a hot topic in metaphilosophy: conceptual engineering, which defines the process of evaluating and improving/revising our representational devices (popular known as concepts). Here, I first present an overview of the book, summarizing his General Theory of conceptual engineering. Second, I point out some limits of the General Theory, in particular the putative consequence of his semantic externalism, the Lack of Control thesis. According to (...)
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  22. Topic Continuity in Conceptual Engineering and Beyond.Tristram McPherson & David Plunkett - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy:1-27.
    One important activity in conceptual ethics and conceptual engineering involves proposing to associate a new semantics with an existing word. Many philosophers think that one important way to evaluate such a proposal concerns whether it preserves the “topic” picked out by the existing word, and several have offered competing proposals concerning what is required to preserve topic. Our paper is focused on the conceptual ethics question of how conceptual engineers should use the term ‘topic continuity’. We provide and defend a (...)
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  23. Conceptual engineering via experimental philosophy.Jennifer Nado - forthcoming - Tandf: Inquiry:1-21.
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  24. Don't Count Truth Out Just Yet: A Response to Isaac.Paul-Mikhail Catapang Podosky - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    This paper continues a debate on the normative limits of conceptual engineering. In particular, it responds to Manuel Gustavo Isaac’s (2021) claim, in response to Simion (2018a) and Podosky (2018), but in particular Podosky, that cognitive efficacy, rather than truth and knowledge, should be the normative standard by which we assess the legitimacy of a conceptual engineering project – at least for ideological concepts. I argue Isaac has not done enough to show us that truth and knowledge are insignificant for (...)
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  25. Ideology and normativity: constraints on conceptual engineering.Paul-Mikhail Catapang Podosky - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy:1-15.
    ABSTRACTWhere do the boundaries of the ‘should’ in conceptual engineering lie? Mona Simion suggests that the right kind of reason for a...
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  26. Reasons of Love and Conceptual Good-for-Nothings.Matthieu Queloz - forthcoming - In Michael Frauchiger & Markus Stepanians (eds.), Themes from Susan Wolf. Berlin: De Gruyter.
    What reasons do we have to use certain concepts and conceptions rather than others? Approaching that question in a methodologically humanistic rather than Platonic spirit, one might seek “reasons for concept use” in how well concepts serve the contingent human concerns of those who live by them. But appealing to the instrumentality of concepts in meeting our concerns invites the worry that this yields the wrong kind of reasons, especially if the relevant concerns are nonmoral ones. Drawing on Susan Wolf’s (...)
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  27. Defending Genealogy as Conceptual Reverse-Engineering.Matthieu Queloz - forthcoming - Analysis.
    In this paper, I respond to three critical notices of The Practical Origins of Ideas: Genealogy as Conceptual Reverse-Engineering, written by Cheryl Misak, Alexander Prescott-Couch, and Paul Roth, respectively. After contrasting genealogical conceptual reverse-engineering with conceptual reverse-engineering, I discuss pragmatic genealogy’s relation to history. I argue that it would be a mistake to understand pragmatic genealogy as a fiction (or a model, or an idealization) as opposed to a form of historical explanation. That would be to rely on precisely the (...)
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  28. Law as a Test of Conceptual Strength.Matthieu Queloz - forthcoming - In Veronica Rodriguez-Blanco, Daniel Peixoto Murata & Julieta Rabanos (eds.), Bernard Williams: From Responsibility to Law and Jurisprudence.
    In ‘What Has Philosophy to Learn from Tort Law?’, Bernard Williams reaffirms J. L. Austin’s suggestion that philosophy might learn from tort law ‘the difference between practical reality and philosophical frivolity’. Yet while Austin regarded tort law as just another repository of time-tested concepts, on a par with common sense as represented by a dictionary, Williams argues that ‘the use of certain ideas in the law does more to show that those ideas have strength than is done by the mere (...)
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  29. Meaning Change.Indrek Reiland - forthcoming - Analytic Philosophy.
    The linguistic meaning of a word in a language is what fully competent speakers of the language have a grasp of merely in virtue of their semantic competence. The meanings of words sometimes change over time. 'Meat' used to mean 'solid food', but now means 'animal flesh eaten as food'. This type of meaning change comes with change of topic, what we’re talking about. Many people interested in conceptual engineering have claimed that there is also meaning change where topic is (...)
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  30. Concept Pluralism in Conceptual Engineering.Sarah Sawyer - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 1.
    In this paper, I argue that an adequate meta-semantic framework capable of accommodating the range of projects currently identified as projects in conceptual engineering must be sensitive to the fact that concepts (and hence projects relating to them) fall into distinct kinds. Concepts can vary, I will argue, with respect to their direction of determination, their modal range, and their temporal range. Acknowledging such variations yields a preliminary taxonomy of concepts and generates a meta-semantic framework that allows us both to (...)
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  31. Kinds of Kinds: Normativity, Scope and Implementation in Conceptual Engineering.Sarah Sawyer - forthcoming - In Manuel Gustavo Isaac, Steffen Koch & Kevin Scharp (eds.), New Perspectives on Conceptual Engineering. Synthese Library.
    In this paper I distinguish three kinds of kinds: traditional philosophical kinds such as truth, knowledge, and causation; natural science kinds such as spin, charge and mass; and social kinds such as class, poverty, and marriage. The three-fold taxonomy I work with represents an idealised abstraction from the wide variety of kinds that there are and the messy phenomena that underlie them. However, the kinds I identify are discrete, and the three-fold taxonomy is useful when it comes to understanding claims (...)
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  32. Concept Revision, Concept Application and the Role of Intuitions in Gettier Cases.Krzysztof Sękowski - forthcoming - Episteme:1-19.
    The aim of the paper is to determine the role of intuitions in Gettier cases. Critics of the Method of Cases argue that arguments developed within this method contains a premise that is justified by its intuitiveness; they also argue that intuitions are unreliable source of evidence. By contrast, Max Deutsch argues that this critique is unsound since intuitions do not serve as evidence for premises. In Gettier cases, an intuitive premise is justified by other arguments called G-Grounds. I propose (...)
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  33. Engineering Existence?Lukas Skiba - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    This paper investigates the connection between two recent trends in philosophy: higher-orderism and conceptual engineering. Higher-orderists use higher-order quantifiers (in particular quantifiers binding variables that occupy the syntactic positions of predicates) to express certain key metaphysical doctrines, such as the claim that there are properties. I argue that, on a natural construal, the higher-orderist approach involves an engineering project concerning, among others, the concept of existence. I distinguish between a modest construal of this project, on which it aims at engineering (...)
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  34. Ameliorating educational concepts and the value of analytic philosophy of education.Jane Gatley - 2023 - Educational Philosophy and Theory 55 (4):508-518.
    R. S. Peters and a small group of contemporaries set the foundations for analytic philosophy of education in the 1960s, a field which continues to this day. This article asks about the value of analytic philosophy of education today, and proposes alterations to its initial aims and methods to make its value clearer. I outline some critiques of analytic philosophy of education, and respond by clarifying its aims. The key insight is that if analytic philosophy of education is explicitly aligned (...)
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  35. Aspiration and Self-Realization: The Ameliorative Projects of Steve Biko.David Miguel Gray - 2023 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences (2):142-162.
    Work on the conceptual amelioration of race concepts is usually negative or critical: it uncovers social features that contribute to racial hierarchies. Much less focus has been placed on how ameliorative accounts contribute to positive change. Using an account of race developed by Steve Biko during South African apartheid, I will argue that we can extract a novel account of positive amelioration in which racial categories can have normative or aspirational force, contributing to positive change.
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  36. The Impossibility of Hypocritical Advice.Casey Hall - 2023 - Southwest Philosophy Review 39 (1):193-200.
    Charging others with hypocrisy often acts as a way of rejecting the practical reasons they attempt to give (Herstein, 2017). There are some merits to a practice of rejecting reasons. To accept others’ provided reasons as valid is to affirm their authority in the relevant normative domain (Isserow and Klein, 2017). Conversely, to reject these reasons as invalid is to undermine the reason-givers’ authority in the domain. However, this practice can be rife with abuse—if we allow charges of ‘Hypocrite!’ to (...)
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  37. A Socratic Essentialist Defense of Non-Verbal Definitional Disputes.Kathrin Koslicki & Olivier Massin - 2023 - Ratio:1-15.
    In this paper, we argue that, in order to account for the apparently substantive nature of definitional disputes, a commitment to what we call ‘Socratic essentialism’ is needed. We defend Socratic essentialism against a prominent neo-Carnapian challenge according to which apparently substantive definitional disputes always in some way trace back to disagreements over how expressions belonging to a particular language or concepts belonging to a certain conceptual scheme are properly used. Socratic essentialism, we argue, is not threatened by the possibility (...)
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  38. Classification procedures as the targets of conceptual engineering.Jennifer Nado - 2023 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 106 (1):136-156.
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.
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  39. Classification procedures as the targets of conceptual engineering.Jennifer Nado - 2023 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 106 (1):136-156.
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.
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  40. Scharp on inconsistent concepts and their engineered replacements, or: can we mend these broken things?Mark Pinder - 2023 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 66 (5):863-884.
    Kevin Scharp’s influential work on the alethic paradoxes combines an extensively developed inconsistency theory with a substantial conceptual engineering project. I argue that Scharp’s inconsistency theory is in tension with his conceptual engineering project: the inconsistency theory includes an account of concepts that implies that the conceptual engineering project will fail. I recommend that Scharp revises his account of concepts, and show how doing so allows him to resolve the tension. The discussion is important for ongoing work on conceptual engineering. (...)
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  41. Nietzsche’s Conceptual Ethics.Matthieu Queloz - 2023 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy:1–31.
    If ethical reflection on which concepts to use has an avatar, it must be Nietzsche, who took more seriously than most the question of what concepts one should live by, and regarded many of our inherited concepts as deeply problematic. Moreover, his eschewal of traditional attempts to derive the one right set of concepts from timeless rational foundations renders his conceptual ethics strikingly modern, raising the prospect of a Nietzschean alternative to Wittgensteinian non-foundationalism. Yet Nietzsche appears to engage in two (...)
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  42. Introduction to the topical Collection: Concept formation in the natural and social sciences: empirical and normative aspects.Kevin Reuter, Catherine Herfeld & Georg Brun - 2023 - Synthese 201 (3):1-10.
    Concept formation has recently become a widely discussed topic in philosophy under the headings of “conceptual engineering”, “conceptual ethics”, and “ameliorative analysis”. Much of this work has been inspired either by the method of explication or by ameliorative projects. In the former case, concept formation is usually seen as a tool of the sciences, of formal disciplines, and of philosophy. In the latter case, concept formation is seen as a tool in the service of social progress. While recent philosophical discussions (...)
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  43. De conceitos a perguntas, de perguntas a conceitos. [REVIEW]César Schirmer dos Santos - 2023 - Trans/Form/Ação 46:141–146.
    Comentário a “Para Velhas Perguntas, Novas e Melhores Respostas: Da Engenharia Conceitual ao Aprimoramento Erotético”, de André J. Abath.
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  44. Same-tracking real kinds in the social sciences.Theodore Bach - 2022 - Synthese 200 (2):1-26.
    The kinds of real or natural kinds that support explanation and prediction in the social sciences are difficult to identify and track because they change through time, intersect with one another, and they do not always exhibit their properties when one encounters them. As a result, conceptual practices directed at these kinds will often refer in ways that are partial, equivocal, or redundant. To improve this epistemic situation, it is important to employ open-ended classificatory concepts, to understand when different research (...)
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  45. Re-engineering contested concepts. A reflective-equilibrium approach.Georg Brun - 2022 - Synthese 200 (2):1-29.
    Social scientists, political scientists and philosophers debate key concepts such as democracy, power and autonomy. Contested concepts like these pose questions: Are terms such as “democracy” hopelessly ambiguous? How can two theorists defend alternative accounts of democracy without talking past each other? How can we understand debates in which theorists disagree about what democracy is? This paper first discusses the popular strategy to answer these questions by appealing to Rawls’s distinction between concepts and conceptions. According to this approach, defenders of (...)
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  46. A New Ameliorative Approach to Moral Responsibility.Mich Ciurria - 2022 - Verifiche: Rivista Trimestrale di Scienze Umane 1 (2):159-183.
    Sally Haslanger identifies three standard philosophical approaches – conceptual, descriptive, and ameliorative – and defends an ameliorative analysis of race and gender as the most effective at addressing social injustice. In this paper, I assign three influential theories of moral responsibility to these categories, and I defend the ameliorative approach as the most justice-conducive. But I argue that existing ameliorative accounts of responsibility are not ameliorative enough – they do not adequately address social injustice. I propose a new ameliorative model (...)
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  47. Explicating ‘Explication’ via Conceptual Spaces.Matteo De Benedetto - 2022 - Erkenntnis 87 (2):853-889.
    Recent years have witnessed a revival of interest in the method of explication as a procedure for conceptual engineering in philosophy and in science. In the philosophical literature, there has been a lively debate about the different desiderata that a good explicatum has to satisfy. In comparison, the goal of explicating the concept of explication itself has not been central to the philosophical debate. The main aim of this work is to suggest a way of filling this gap by explicating (...)
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  48. Bad Concepts, Bilateral Contents.Michael Deigan - 2022 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 8:595-614.
    I argue that one need not be an inferentialist in order to model inconsistent concepts, contrary to what some have thought. Representationalists can do so by adopting a form of bilateralism about contents. It remains unclear, however, why conceptual inconsistency would constitute a defect to be eliminated, rather than a vindication of dialetheism to be embraced. I suggest some answers to explore that involve accepting a descriptive form of dialetheism but denying its normative forms.
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  49. Fake news, conceptual engineering, and linguistic resistance: reply to Pepp, Michaelson and Sterken, and Brown.Joshua Habgood-Coote - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 65 (4):488-516.
    ABSTRACT In Habgood-Coote : 1033–1065) I argued that we should abandon ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’, on the grounds that these terms do not have stable public meanings, are unnecessary, and function as vehicles for propaganda. Jessica Pepp, Eliot Michaelson, and Rachel Sterken and Étienne Brown : 144–154) have raised worries about my case for abandonment, recommending that we continue using ‘fake news’. In this paper, I respond to these worries. I distinguish more clearly between theoretical and political reasons for abandoning (...)
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  50. The humanities as conceptual practices: The formation and development of high‐impact concepts in philosophy and beyond.Philipp Haueis & Jan Slaby - 2022 - Metaphilosophy 53 (4):385-403.
    This paper proposes an analysis of the discursive dynamics of high-impact concepts in the humanities. These are concepts whose formation and development have a lasting and wide-ranging effect on research and our understanding of discursive reality in general. The notion of a conceptual practice, based on a normative conception of practice, is introduced, and practices are identified, on this perspective, according to the way their respective performances are held mutually accountable. This normative conception of practices is then combined with recent (...)
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