Engineering Social Concepts: Feasibility and Causal Models

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (forthcoming)
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Abstract

How feasible are conceptual engineering projects of social concepts that aim for the engineered concept to be widely adopted in ordinary everyday life? Predominant frameworks on the psychology of concepts that shape work on stereotyping, bias, and machine learning have grim implications for the prospects of conceptual engineers: conceptual engineering efforts are ineffective in promoting certain social-conceptual changes. Specifically, since conceptual components that give rise to problematic social stereotypes are sensitive to statistical structures of the environment, purely conceptual change won’t be possible without corresponding world change. This tradition, however, tends to ignore that concepts don’t only encode statistical, but also causal information. Paying attention to this feature of concepts, I argue, shows that conceptual engineering is not only possible. There is an imperative to conceptually-engineer.

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Eleonore Neufeld
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Citations of this work

Engineering Social Concepts: Labels and the Science of Categorization.Eleonore Neufeld - forthcoming - In Sally Haslanger, Karen Jones, Greg Restall, Francois Schroeter & Laura Schroeter (eds.), Mind, Language, and Social Hierarchy: Constructing a Shared Social World. Oxford University Press.

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References found in this work

Philosophy Within its Proper Bounds.Edouard Machery - 2017 - Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
The origin of concepts.Susan Carey - 2009 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Rules and representations.Noam Chomsky (ed.) - 1980 - New York: Columbia University Press.
Doing without concepts.Edouard Machery - 2009 - New York: Oxford University Press.

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