Abstract
I will argue that those thinking about conceptual engineering should think more about ways of believing. When we talk about what someone “believes”, we could be talking about how they are inclined to act, or what they have put forth as their position on a matter, or what gives rise to a feeling of endorsement when they reflect on the matter. If we further recognize (1) that the contents of our beliefs are at least sometimes framed in certain concepts and (2) that projects of conceptual engineering at least sometimes aim to change our beliefs by changing the concepts they are framed in, the question arises: which beliefs does conceptual engineering target? Is it always “belief” in the same sense? I will argue that it is not, using examples from feminist and mainstream metaphysics. Suppose that revisionary ontologists (such as Trenton Merricks and Peter van Inwagen, interpreted in a Siderian manner) call on us to eliminate the non-joint-carving concept TABLE from our beliefs about the world. They then plausibly have in mind only “belief” in the sense of practically detached reflective assent: they want the concept eliminated from the content of such assent. On the other hand, when feminist metaphysicians of gender (such as Sally Haslanger) call on us to ameliorate the ethically problematic concept WOMAN, they target our “beliefs” in a sense that encompasses both the content of our everyday observations and experiences and what might be called practically engaged reflective assent; but they do not target the practically detached assent.
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Notes
In this regard, I will mainly draw on Schwitzgebel (2010). I think much of this work can itself be understood as work in conceptual engineering (of the concept of belief and related terms/concepts), but I do not insist on this here. However, I do insist on my own discussion of “belief” being understood like this: I am not claiming to uncover real kinds of belief, but rather making useful distinctions and finding good ways to talk about those distinctions.
My focus on these projects is consistent with that of the recent discussion about the nature of and relationship between feminist and mainstream metaphysics (Barnes 2014; Mikkola 2017; Sider 2017; Schaffer 2017). For example, Barnes writes: “Metaphysics has spent a lot of time asking whether there are tables, rather less time asking whether there are genders” (Barnes 2014, 335). Further, I believe that focusing on these particular projects allows drawing a certain interesting contrast. I do not aim to draw any broad generalizations about feminist and mainstream metaphysics as such.
In fact, even those who insist on describing the feminist debates in question as “feminist metaphysics” and thus about reality rather than words, or about properties rather than predicates, often admit that the project still centrally involves criticizing and improving concepts. For example, Mikkola writes: “Much of this [feminist metaphysics] involves (re-)classifying entities so that our classificatory schemes better facilitate social justice” (Mikkola 2017, 2441).
Burgess and Plunkett, for example, understand Sider as engaged in conceptual ethics: “The basic facts about the world that ground or give rise to the rest of its features have some determinate structure, so the language we use to catalog these facts—as Ted Sider puts it, ‘to write the book of the world’—should have expressions for all and only the components of that structure“ (Burgess and Plunkett 2013: 1093). I do not quite agree with the suggestion that according to Sider, we should only get to speak about the basic facts in the “book of the world“, but the important gist is that for Sider, metaphysics is about finding the best language for describing the world, including the best concepts, and that such a best language should involve joint-carving concepts, i.e. concepts that reflect the objective structure of the world.
As Unger also notes, the expression “in a way which is most innocuous and favourable” is not entirely self-explanatory. What is most innocuous and favourable depends on the kind of entity in question; but in the case of stones—and we can presumably extend this to many other kinds of things—a relevant principle is that “no atom is to be removed forcefully from a central position, but one may be taken gently from a peripheral location” (Unger 1979a, 124). I will not devote further space to fleshing out and defending such arguments here, but instead refer the reader to the above mentioned proponents of these arguments. I hope that it is sufficiently clear, nevertheless, how these arguments may be taken to show that the relevant concepts (e.g. the concept of table or stone or even person) compel us to make inconsistent judgments; and that this in turn shows an inconsistency in our commonsense theory of the world that involves these concepts.
A note on terms and concepts. I take a concept X to be some representation of x that allows the person that has the concept to make judgments about xs. It is not important what form this representation it takes, but it may involve, for example, an image of a typical x and/or a list of features associated with xs. The concept X, on my way of speaking, is paired with, or associated with, the term/expression “x”; and it is also natural to speak of the concept as the “meaning” (or “sense”, as opposed to referential/denotational meaning) of that term/expression. Some philosophers, e.g. Cappelen (2018), think that when we flesh out what conceptual engineering is, we can dispense with the notion of concepts altogether and rather talk about the intensions and extensions of terms. I do not have strong views on this matter, but I will stick with the familiar concept-talk here.
Unger argues as follows: the expression ‘person’ is logically inconsistent; if the expression ‘person’ is logically inconsistent, then there are no people; so there are no people (Unger 1979b, 179–180). An inconsistent expression, for Unger, is an “expression for which the supposition that it does apply leads to contradiction” (Unger 1979b, 180), and therefore one that does not apply. “Like perfectly square triangles, people are logically impossible entities” (Unger 1979b, 202).
One reason to adopt this linguistic understanding of the origin of the puzzles is that this best explains why we are so confident of the collectively inconsistent or unsystematic judgments, when considered individually, and why we are so helpless to answer the hard questions in certain other cases (such as the ship of Theseus). An alternative explanation is that we simply do not know the fact about which of the ships is the ship of Theseus, for example, and ought to think harder about it—but this does not explain the feeling that there is no answer to be discovered here. The explanation referring to incomplete concepts explains this well.
Although I have not come across studies confirming that this is the folk view, my own observations confirm that it is; and the commonness of this view is often mentioned by feminist philosophers, e.g. Saul (2012, 196): “According to most ordinary speakers and dictionaries, “woman” is a sex term—a term that picks out those who have certain biological traits”.
For example, Ásta writes that she is “giving a metaphysics of social categories—a theory of the nature of social categories” (Ásta 2018, 1). Mikkola interprets the following (rephrased) claim of Haslanger’s (2000) as a factual claim, or more precisely, a grounding claim about the relationship between layers of reality: “S is a woman in virtue of being systematically socially subordinated, where observed or imagined evidence of a female’s biological role in reproduction ‘marks’ one as a target for this kind of treatment” (Mikkola 2015, 787). Mikkola claims that “rewriting Haslanger’s definition in grounding terms … is faithful to the original” (ibid., fn 30).
Likewise, Haslanger and Ásta (2018) write: “The aim of feminism is, in the most general terms, to end the oppression of women. The goal of feminist theory is, therefore, to theorize how women are oppressed and how we can work towards ending it. But what is this group women? Whose oppression is the movement aiming to end? For articulating the various ways in which women are oppressed, there is a need for a working definition of what it is to be a woman”.
Jenkins’s—or Jenkins*’s—objection generalizes to other constructivist accounts, like Ásta’s (2018), where the gender is somehow decided by others or one’s circumstances, but not by one’s psychological orientation. On Ásta’s account, trans women may resist their assigned gender, but their resistance is not guaranteed to succeed: “What if they don’t want to be of the gender they are assigned? There are several things that may happen in a particular context: persons can resist the conferral of the property (the gender assignment), but it will vary how successful such resistance can be” (Ásta 2018, 76). So on her account as well, mere self-identification at least does not guarantee being the corresponding gender (the resistance to the assigned gender may fail); and to that extent, one might charge her as well with not giving a certain kind of unconditional, unqualified respect to trans people’s self-identifications. It is another matter whether it is indeed imperative for theories of gender to give that kind of unconditional, unqualified respect to self-identification.
This is of course not to say that there is no factual, descriptive, or truth-evaluable component at all to the feminist metaphysicians’ claims about gender. The point is rather that fit with reality is not as central in this project.
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Acknowledgements
I have presented previous versions of this paper at the University of Gothenburg (4th meeting of the Nordic Network in Metaphysics) and University of Tartu (analytic philosophy summer camp and the Estonian Annual Philosophy Conference). I thank those audiences for their helpful comments. I also thank Daniel Cohnitz, Matti Eklund, Jonathan Shaheen, Tuomas Tahko, and two anonymous referees for their comments and discussion on this paper, its previous versions and/or related work. This research has been supported by the University of Tartu ASTRA Project PER ASPERA and the Centre of Excellence in Estonian Studies (European Union, European Regional Development Fund), and is related to research project IUT20-5 (Estonian Ministry of Education and Research).
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Kitsik, E. Conceptual Engineering and Ways of Believing. Erkenn 87, 347–368 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-019-00197-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-019-00197-0