Conceptual Engineering
Edited by Steffen Koch (Bielefeld University)
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 2013, Burgess & Plunkett 2013 approach more broadly what they call 'conceptual ethics'. The first monograph on conceptual engineering is Cappelen 2018. |
Introductions | A good introductory text to conceptual engineering is Plunkett & Cappelen 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. Here is a link to a number of videos of talks about conceptual engineering that were given at a conference about the foundations of conceptual engineering at NYU in September of 2018: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAqk-MiHmiHeN3-dDMLn4KAz9tCwb8Zhf |
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Related categories
Siblings:
- Argument (709)
- Conceptual Analysis (433)
- Computational Philosophy (107)
- Experimental Philosophy (2,807 | 2)
- Formal Philosophy (43)
- Genealogical Method (183 | 54)
- Intuition (672 | 126)
- Methodology in Metaphysics (479)
- Linguistic Analysis in Philosophy (113)
- Philosophical Methods, Misc (369)
- Rhetoric (69)
- Thought Experiments (548)
- Transcendental Arguments (130)
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David Bourget (Western Ontario) David Chalmers (ANU, NYU) Area Editors: David Bourget Gwen Bradford Berit Brogaard Margaret Cameron David Chalmers James Chase Rafael De Clercq Ezio Di Nucci Barry Hallen Hans Halvorson Jonathan Ichikawa Michelle Kosch Øystein Linnebo JeeLoo Liu Paul Livingston Brandon Look Manolo Martínez Matthew McGrath Michiru Nagatsu Susana Nuccetelli Giuseppe Primiero Jack Alan Reynolds Darrell P. Rowbottom Aleksandra Samonek Constantine Sandis Howard Sankey Jonathan Schaffer Thomas Senor Robin Smith Daniel Star Jussi Suikkanen Lynne Tirrell Aness Kim Webster Other editors Contact us Learn more about PhilPapers |