Contents
180 found
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  1. Defectiveness of formal concepts.Carolin Antos - manuscript
    It is often assumed that concepts from the formal sciences, such as mathematics and logic, have to be treated differently from concepts from non-formal sciences. This is especially relevant in cases of concept defectiveness, as in the empirical sciences defectiveness is an essential component of lager disruptive or transformative processes such as concept change or concept fragmentation. However, it is still unclear what role defectiveness plays for concepts in the formal sciences. On the one hand, a common view sees formal (...)
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  2. (1 other version)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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  3. Conceptual Revision in Action.Ethan Landes & Kevin Reuter - manuscript
    Conceptual engineering is the practice of revising concepts to improve how people talk and think. Its ability to improve talk and thought ultimately hinges on the successful dissemination of desired conceptual changes. Unfortunately, the field has been slow to develop methods to directly test what barriers stand in the way of propagation and what methods will most effectively propagate desired conceptual change. In order to test such questions, this paper introduces the masked time-lagged method. The masked time-lagged method tests people's (...)
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  4. Bessere Begriffe? Zur Möglichkeit des Fortschritts durch Begriffsgestaltung.Cyrill Mamin - manuscript
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  5. 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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  6. 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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  7. Conceptual Engineering Using Large Language Models.Bradley Allen - forthcoming - In Vincent C. Müller, Aliya R. Dewey, Leonard Dung & Guido Löhr (eds.), Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence: The State of the Art. Berlin: SpringerNature.
    We describe a method, based on Jennifer Nado’s proposal for classification procedures as targets of conceptual engineering, that implements such procedures by prompting a large language model. We apply this method, using data from the Wikidata knowledge graph, to evaluate stipulative definitions related to two paradigmatic conceptual engineering projects: the International Astronomical Union’s redefinition of PLANET and Haslanger’s ameliorative analysis of WOMAN. Our results show that classification procedures built using our approach can exhibit good classification performance and, through the generation (...)
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  8. 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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  9. 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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  10. 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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  11. 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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  12. 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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  13. Concepts and their engineering.Heimir Geirsson - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    This paper argues that conceptual engineering comes in many guises, often depending on what type of concept is being engineered. Engineering a classical concept, one that stems from Plato and Frege, is very different from engineering, e.g., a prototype concept or an exemplar concept. The former are abstract and have necessary and sufficient satisfaction conditions. The latter, on the other hand, can and do differ from one person to the next and thus have the earmarks of conceptions. While it is (...)
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  14. Conceptual Engineering and the Dynamics of Linguistic Intervention.Adam F. Gibbons - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    The Implementation Problem for conceptual engineering is, roughly, the problem conceptual engineers face when attempting to bring about the conceptual change they support. An important aspect of this problem concerns the extent to which attempting to implement concepts can lead to unintended negative consequences. Not only can conceptual engineers fail to implement their proposals, but their interventions can produce outcomes directly counter to their goals. It is therefore important to think carefully about the prospect of attempted implementation leading to unintended (...)
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  15. Implementing conceptual engineering: lessons from social movements.Carme Isern-Mas - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Communication strategies to shape public opinion can be applied to the philosophical program of conceptual engineering. I propose to look for answers to the implementation challenge for conceptual engineering on similar challenges that arise in other contexts, such as that of social movements. I claim that conceptual engineering is successfully practiced in other areas with direct consequences on the political landscape, and that we can apply to philosophy what we might learn from those successful practices. With that end in mind, (...)
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  16. Epistemic Environmentalism and Autonomy: The Case of Conceptual Engineering.Eve Kitsik - forthcoming - Canadian Journal of Philosophy:1-15.
    I will clarify when and how a tension arises between epistemic environmentalism (a new focus on assessing and improving the epistemic environment) and respect for epistemic autonomy (allowing, empowering, and requiring people to each govern their own beliefs). Using the example of participatory conceptual engineering (improving the linguistic environment through rational discussion with broad participation), I will also identify an option for avoiding the tension—namely, participatory environmentalism. This means a new focus on how people can each contribute to improving the (...)
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  17. Ameliorative projects, psychological essentialism, and the power of nouns.Steffen Koch - forthcoming - Mind and Language.
    Ameliorative projects design and propagate new linguistic content for some expressions we use for political or social justice purposes. These projects are often driven by an anti-essentialist agenda: they aim to debunk the idea that social categories such as “woman,” “man,” or “race” are constituted by natural essences. But critics argue that nouns tend to trigger essentialist thinking. And because ameliorative projects typically retain nouns, it is argued that these projects cannot achieve their anti-essentialist goals. In response, I argue that (...)
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  18. What is conceptual engineering good for? The argument from nameability.Steffen Koch & Gary Lupyan - forthcoming - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
    It is often assumed that how we talk about the world matters a great deal. This is one reason why conceptual engineers seek to improve our linguistic practices by advocating novel uses of our words, or by inventing new ones altogether. A core idea shared by conceptual engineers is that by changing our language in this way, we can reap all sorts of cognitive and practical benefits, such as improving our theorizing, combating hermeneutical injustice, or promoting social emancipation. But how (...)
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  19. Heavy-duty conceptual engineering.Steffen Koch & Jakob Ohlhorst - forthcoming - Noûs.
    Conceptual engineering is the process of assessing and improving our conceptual repertoire. Some authors have claimed that introducing or revising concepts through conceptual engineering can go as far as expanding the realm of thinkable thoughts and thus enable us to form beliefs, hypotheses, wishes, or desires that we are currently unable to form. If true, this would allow conceptual engineers to contribute to solving stubborn problems – problems that cannot be solved with our current ways of thinking. We call this (...)
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  20. Conceptual Engineering of Medical Concepts.Elisabetta Lalumera - forthcoming - In Manuel Gustavo Isaac, Kevin Scharp & Steffen Koch (eds.), New Perspectives on Conceptual Engineering. Synthese Library.
    There is a lot of conceptual engineering going on in medical research. I substantiate this claim with two examples, the medical debate about cancer classification and about obesity as a disease I also argue that the proper target of conceptual engineering in medical research are experts’ conceptions. These are explicitly written down in documents and guidelines, and they bear on research and policies. In the second part of the chapter, I propose an externalist framework in which conceptions have both the (...)
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  21. Conceptual Engineering Should be Empirical.Ethan Landes - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:1-21.
    Conceptual engineering is a philosophical method that aims to design and spread conceptual and linguistic devices to cause meaningful changes in the world. So far, however, conceptual engineers have struggled to successfully spread the conceptual and linguistic entities they have designed to their target communities. This paper argues that conceptual engineering is far more likely to succeed if it incorporates empirical data and empirical methods. Because the causal factors influencing successful propagation of linguistic or conceptual devices are as complicated and (...)
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  22. 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. Synthese Library.
    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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  23. Ordinary Language Philosophy and Ideal Language Philosophy.Sebastian Lutz - forthcoming - In Marcus Rossberg (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Analytic Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    According to ordinary language philosophy (OLP), philosophical problems can be solved by investigating ordinary language, often because the problems stem from its misuse. According to ideal language philosophy (ILP), on the other hand, philosophical problems exist because ordinary language is flawed and has to be improved or replaced by constructed languages that do not exhibit these flaws. OLP and ILP together make up linguistic philosophy, the view that philosophical problems are problems of language. Linguistic philosophy is opposed to what may (...)
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  24. Sameness of Subject Matter in Conceptual Amelioration.Cyrill Mamin - forthcoming - Perspectiva Filosófica.
    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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  25. How Not to Not Change the Subject (And How to Actually Not Change the Subject).John Mancini - forthcoming - Southwest Philosophy Review.
    In 2015, ‘marriage’ was redefined in the United States to include same-sex couples. In conceptual engineering, this is often assumed to be a paradigm case of Sally Haslanger’s (2020a, 2020b) semantic amelioration. Semantic amelioration changes a concept’s content to make it better. In the case of [MARRIAGE], [MARRIAGE]’s content was broadened to include same-sex couples – which, many contend, made it morally better. Semantic amelioration faces the following challenge, however: Doesn’t changing a concept’s content ‘change the subject?’ By broadening [MARRIAGE]’s (...)
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  26. Carnap, Esperanto, and Language Engineering.Takaaki Matsui - forthcoming - Erkenntnis.
    Rudolf Carnap was an Esperantist who also had an active interest in other international auxiliary languages (IALs), and noted a psychological affinity between the construction of IALs and symbolic language systems. This paper provides a detailed reconstruction of Carnap’s engagement with Esperanto and other IALs, drawing on his underdiscussed essay on IALs, “The Problem of a World Language,” and his unpublished material from the Virtual Archive of Logical Empiricism (VALEP). It addresses two questions: the first is about the relationship between (...)
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  27. (1 other version)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.
    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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  28. Engineering virtue: constructionist virtue ethics.Jakob Ohlhorst - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Virtue ethics is traditionally a conservative project. It analyses the virtues that humanity has been relying on since antiquity. This conservatism unduly limits the potential of virtue ethics to contribute to moral progress. Instead, we should pay more attention to constructionist virtue ethics with the help of conceptual engineering. I will argue that revising and ameliorating the virtue concepts which a community uses directly and indirectly leads to a change of the virtues that exist in this community. By revising and (...)
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  29. Law as a Test of Conceptual Strength.Matthieu Queloz - forthcoming - In Veronica Rodriguez-Blanco, Daniel Peixoto Murata & Julieta A. Rabanos (eds.), Bernard Williams on Law and Jurisprudence: From Agency and Responsibility to Methodology. Oxford: Bloomsbury Publisher.
    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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  30. Virtues, Rights, or Consequences? Mapping the Way for Conceptual Ethics.Matthieu Queloz - forthcoming - Studia Philosophica.
    Are there virtues that constitutively involve using certain concepts? Does it make sense to speak of rights or duties to use certain concepts? And do consequentialist approaches to concepts necessarily have to reproduce the difficulties that plague utilitarianism? These are fundamental orientating questions for the emerging field of conceptual ethics, which invites us to reflect critically about which concepts to use. In this article, I map out and explore the ways in which conceptual ethics might take its cue from virtue-ethical, (...)
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  31. 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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  32. Williams’s Debt to Wittgenstein.Matthieu Queloz & Nikhil Krishnan - forthcoming - In Marcel van Ackeren & Matthieu Queloz (eds.), Bernard Williams on Philosophy and History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    This chapter argues that several aspects of Bernard Williams’s style, methodology, and metaphilosophy can be read as evolving dialectically out of Wittgenstein’s own. After considering Wittgenstein as a stylistic influence on Williams, especially as regards ideals of clarity, precision, and depth, Williams’s methodological debt to Wittgenstein is examined, in particular his anthropological interest in thick concepts and their point. The chapter then turns to Williams’s explicit association, in the 1990s, with a certain form of Wittgensteinianism, which he called ‘Left Wittgensteinianism’. (...)
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  33. Conspiracy theories are not theories: Time to rename conspiracy theories.Kevin Reuter & Lucien Baumgartner - forthcoming - In Manuel Gustavo Isaac, Kevin Scharp & Steffen Koch (eds.), New Perspectives on Conceptual Engineering. Synthese Library.
    This paper presents the results of two corpus studies investigating the discourse surrounding conspiracy theories and genuine theories. The results of these studies show that conspiracy theories lack the epistemic and scientific standing characteristic of theories more generally. Instead, our findings indicate that conspiracy theories are spread in a manner that resembles the dissemination of rumors and falsehoods. Based on these empirical results, we argue that it is time for both re-engineering conspiracy theory and for relabeling "conspiracy theory". We propose (...)
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  34. 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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  35. Kinds of Kinds: Normativity, Scope and Implementation in Conceptual Engineering.Sarah Sawyer - forthcoming - In Manuel Gustavo Isaac, Kevin Scharp & Steffen Koch (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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  36. Concepts in Conceptual Engineering.Sarah Sawyer - forthcoming - In Stephan Schmid & Hamid Taieb (eds.), A Philosophical History of the Concept. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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  37. Conceptual Engineering is Old News.Krzysztof Sękowski & Ethan Landes - forthcoming - Philosophical Quarterly.
    According to a prevailing view, conceptual engineering introduces a revolutionary philosophical methodology, challenging traditional conceptual analysis. However, in our paper, we argue that closer scrutiny reveals not only the falsity but also the inherent ambiguity of this narrative. We explore four interpretations of the "Anti-Novelty Claim", the claim that conceptual engineering is not a new way of doing philosophy. Discussing the Anti-Novelty Claim from the perspective of a text’s producer, the text’s consumers, and the exegetical potential of the text, we (...)
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  38. 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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  39. (1 other version)Biomimicry and AI-Enabled Automation in Agriculture. Conceptual Engineering for Responsible Innovation.Marco Innocenti - 2025 - Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 38 (2):1-17.
    This paper aims to engineer the concept of biomimetic design for its application in agricultural technology as an innovation strategy to sustain non-human species’ adaptation to today’s rapid environmental changes. By questioning the alleged intrinsic morality of biomimicry, a formulation of it is sought that goes beyond the sharp distinction between nature as inspiration and the human field of application of biomimetic technologies. After reviewing the main literature on Responsible Innovation, we support Vincent Blok’s “eco-centric” perspective on biomimicry, which considers (...)
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  40. Conceptually Engineering the Post-Truth Crisis.Tom Kaspers - 2025 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    This article uses the current post-truth crisis to level a charge against deflationism. It argues that a post-truth society rejects the normativity of truth, thereby deflating truth, by treating disagreements about, say, scientific facts, as mere disagreements of taste. To have substantive disagreements, the notion of truth at stake must be substantive as well. To ward off the perils of post-truth politics, truth must be taken to be more than what deflationists can account for. If we want our disagreements to (...)
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  41. Should we stop talking about “democracy”? Conceptual abandonment and the perils of political discourse.Steffen Koch - 2025 - Asian Journal of Philosophy 4 (28):1-16.
    In his recent book, The Concept of Democracy: An Essay on Conceptual Amelioration and Abandonment (OUP, 2023) Herman Cappelen argues that we should abandon the concept of democracy, and hence stop using the words “democracy” and “democratic.” In the course of developing his arguments for this surprising claim, Cappelen also offers a more general theory of what kind of reasons count in favor of abandoning a concept. In this paper, which is part of a book symposium on Cappelen’s book, I (...)
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  42. Competing Conceptual Inferences and the Limits of Experimental Jurisprudence.Jonathan Lewis - 2025 - In Kevin Tobia (ed.), The Cambridge handbook of experimental jurisprudence. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
    Legal concepts can sometimes be unclear, leading to disagreements concerning their contents and inconsistencies in their application. At other times, the legal application of a concept can be entirely clear, sharp, and free of confusions, yet conflict with the ways in which ordinary people or other relevant stakeholders think about the concept. The aim of this chapter is to investigate the role of experimental jurisprudence in articulating and, ultimately, dealing with competing conceptual inferences either within a specific domain (e.g., legal (...)
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  43. Competing Conceptual Inferences and the Limits of Experimental Jurisprudence.Jonathan Lewis - 2025 - In Kevin Tobia (ed.), The Cambridge handbook of experimental jurisprudence. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
    Legal concepts can sometimes be unclear, leading to disagreements concerning their contents and inconsistencies in their application. At other times, the legal application of a concept can be entirely clear, sharp, and free of confusions, yet conflict with the ways in which ordinary people or other relevant stakeholders think about the concept. The aim of this chapter is to investigate the role of experimental jurisprudence in articulating and, ultimately, dealing with competing conceptual inferences either within a specific domain (e.g., legal (...)
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  44. The Ethics of Conceptualization: Tailoring Thought and Language to Need.Matthieu Queloz - 2025 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Philosophy strives to give us a firmer hold on our concepts. But what about their hold on us? Why place ourselves under the sway of a concept and grant it the authority to shape our thought and conduct? Another conceptualization would carry different implications. What makes one way of thinking better than another? This book develops a framework for concept appraisal. Its guiding idea is that to question the authority of concepts is to ask for reasons of a special kind: (...)
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  45. Irreplaceable truth.Jamin Asay - 2024 - Synthese 203 (3):1-20.
    Conceptual engineers are always on the lookout for concepts that can be improved upon or replaced. Kevin Scharp has argued that the concept truth is inconsistent, and that this inconsistency thwarts its ability to serve in philosophical and scientific explanatory projects, such as developing linguistic theories of meaning. In this paper I present Scharp’s view about what makes a concept inconsistent, and why he believes that truth in particular is inconsistent. Then I examine the concepts that he suggests should replace (...)
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  46. Esbozo para una perspectiva integral sobre la ética en el contexto del determinismo tecnológico.G. A. Flórez Vega - 2024 - Trilogía 16 (33):e3128.
    El texto aborda cómo la interacción entre tecnología y sociedad, sobre todo desde el contexto del determinismo tecnológico, ha configurado el entorno humano desde la prehistoria hasta la contemporaneidad. La tecnología no es solo una herramienta, sino un agente activo que afecta y reconfigura las dinámicas sociales, además de estar influenciada por valores y decisiones humanas. En este sentido, se subraya la necesidad de una ética tecnológica que garantice que los avances sirvan al bienestar humano y promuevan la justicia social. (...)
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  47. Rational conceptual conflict and the implementation problem.Adam F. Gibbons - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 67 (9):3355-3381.
    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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  48. Climate concepts for supporting political goals of mitigation and adaptation: The case for “climate crisis”.Philipp Haueis - 2024 - WIREs Climate Change:1-20.
    Climate concepts are crucial to understand the effects of human activity on the climate system scientifically, and to formulate and pursue policies to mitigate and adapt to these effects. Yet, scientists, policymakers, and activists often use different terms such as “global warming,” “climate change,” “climate crisis,” or “climate emergency.” This advanced review investigates which climate concept is most suitable when we pursue mitigation and adaptation goals in a scientifically informed manner. It first discusses how survey experiments and social science reviews (...)
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  49. The Practical Implementation Challenge: A Pragmatist Response to Deutsch’s Dilemma for Conceptual Engineers.Celine Henne - 2024 - In Piotr Stalmaszczyk (ed.), Conceptual Engineering: Methodological and Metaphilosophical Issues. Brill. pp. 69–92.
    According to Max Deutsch, conceptual engineers face a dilemma: either they target semantic meanings, in which case they are engaged in an infeasible activity (the “implementation challenge”), or they target speaker meanings, in which case they are engaged in a trivial enterprise (the “trivialization challenge”). Focusing on the first horn of the dilemma, I argue that the “transubstantiation version” of the implementation challenge only holds for representationalist approaches to conceptual engineering, according to which concepts are individuated by their representational relation (...)
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  50. Post-Truth Conceptual Engineering.Manuel Gustavo Https://Orcidorg Isaac - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 67 (1):199-214.
    Conceptual engineering is the method for assessing and improving our concepts. Some have recently claimed that the implementation of such method in the form of ameliorative projects is truth-driven and should thus be epistemically constrained, ultimately at least (Simion 2018; cf. Podosky 2018). This paper challenges that claim on the assumption of a social constructionist analysis of ideologies, and provides an alternative, pragmatic and cognitive framework for determining the legitimacy of ameliorative conceptual projects overall. The upshot is that one should (...)
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