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  1. Gender Is a Natural Kind with a Historical Essence.Theodore Bach - 2012 - Ethics 122 (2):231-272.
    Traditional debate on the metaphysics of gender has been a contrast of essentialist and social-constructionist positions. The standard reaction to this opposition is that neither position alone has the theoretical resources required to satisfy an equitable politics. This has caused a number of theorists to suggest ways in which gender is unified on the basis of social rather than biological characteristics but is “real” or “objective” nonetheless – a position I term social objectivism. This essay begins by making explicit the (...)
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  • Metaphilosophy.Yuri Cath - 2011 - Oxford Bibliographies in Philosophy.
    Often philosophers have reason to ask fundamental questions about the aims, methods, nature, or value of their own discipline. When philosophers systematically examine such questions, the resulting work is sometimes referred to as “metaphilosophy.” Metaphilosophy, it should be said, is not a well-established, or clearly demarcated, field of philosophical inquiry like epistemology or the philosophy of art. However, in the late 20th and early 21st centuries there has been a great deal of metaphilosophical work on issues concerning the methodology of (...)
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  • History and the critique of social concepts.Brian Epstein - 2010 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 40 (1):3-29.
    Many theorists, including Nietzsche, Adorno, and Foucault, have regarded genealogy as an important technique for social criticism. But it has been unclear how genealogy can go beyond the accomplishments of other, more mundane, critical methods. I propose a new approach to understanding the critical potential of history. I argue that theorists have been misled by the assumption that if a claim is deserving of criticism, it is because the claim is false. Turning to the criticism of concepts rather than criticism (...)
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  • Gender concepts and intuitions.Mari Mikkola - 2009 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 39 (4):pp. 559-583.
    The gender concept woman is central to feminism but has proven to be notoriously difficult to define. Some feminist philosophers, most notably Sally Haslanger, have recently argued for revisionary analyses of the concept where it is defined pragmatically for feminist political purposes. I argue against such analyses: pragmatically revising woman may not best serve feminist goals and doing so is unnecessary. Instead, focusing on certain intuitive uses of the term ‘woman’ enables feminist philosophers to make sense of it.
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  • Feminist philosophy of language.Jennifer Saul - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Much of feminist philosophy of language so far can be described as critical—critical either of language itself or of philosophy of language, and calling for change on the basis of these criticisms. Those making these criticisms suggest that the changes are needed for the sake of feminist goals — either to better allow for feminist work to be done or, more frequently, to bring an end to certain key ways that women are disadvantaged. In this entry, I examine these criticisms. (...)
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  • Feminist perspectives on sex and gender.Mari Mikkola - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Feminism is the movement to end women’s oppression. One possible way to understand ‘woman’ in this claim is to take it as a sex term: ‘woman’ picks out human females and being a human female depends on various anatomical features (like genitalia). Historically many feminists have understood ‘woman’ differently: not as a sex term, but as a gender term that depends on social and cultural factors (like social position). In so doing, they distinguished sex (being female or male) from gender (...)
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  • Resenha crítica de CAPPELEN, Herman. Fixing Language: An Essay on Conceptual Engineering. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. [REVIEW]Samuel Maia - 2021 - Principia: An International Journal of Epistemology 25 (3):565-575.
    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 (popularly 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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  • 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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  • (What) Is Feminist Logic? (What) Do We Want It to Be?Catharine Saint-Croix & Roy T. Cook - 2024 - History and Philosophy of Logic 45 (1):20-45.
    ‘Feminist logic’ may sound like an impossible, incoherent, or irrelevant project, but it is none of these. We begin by delineating three categories into which projects in feminist logic might fall: philosophical logic, philosophy of logic, and pedagogy. We then defuse two distinct objections to the very idea of feminist logic: the irrelevance argument and the independence argument. Having done so, we turn to a particular kind of project in feminist philosophy of logic: Valerie Plumwood's feminist argument for a relevance (...)
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  • A Plea for Descriptive Social Ontology.Kathrin Koslicki & Olivier Massin - 2023 - Synthese 202 (Special Issue: The Metametaphysi):1-35.
    Social phenomena—quite like mental states in the philosophy of mind—are often regarded as potential troublemakers from the start, particularly if they are approached with certain explanatory commitments, such as naturalism or social individualism, already in place. In this paper, we argue that such explanatory constraints should be at least initially bracketed if we are to arrive at an adequate non-biased description of social phenomena. Legitimate explanatory projects, or so we maintain, such as those of making the social world fit within (...)
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  • Expressive Responding, Experimental Philosophy, and Philosophical Expertise.Shane Nicholas Glackin - 2024 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 15 (3):909-931.
    The Experimental Philosophy (“X-Phi”) movement applies the methodology of empirical sciences – most commonly empirical psychology – to traditional philosophical questions. In its radical, “negative” form, X-Phi uses the resulting empirical data to cast doubt on the reliability of common philosophical methods, arguing for radical reform of philosophical methodology.In this paper I develop two connected methodological worries about this second enterprise. The first concerns the data elicited by questionnaires and other empirical survey methods; recent work in political science suggests that (...)
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  • Deweyan conceptual engineering: reconstruction, concepts, and philosophical inquiry.Oscar Westerblad - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Reconstruction is a central notion in Dewey’s account of inquiry and in his metaphilosophical commitments. In his work, Dewey made a call for reconstruction of philosophy, in the reconstruction of central notions of the discipline, like knowledge, logic, truth, the good, reason, and experience. Inquiry itself is reconstructive, according to Dewey, involving the transformation of an indeterminate situation into one which is determinate and understood. Dewey’s philosophical views should therefore be of interest to those taking part in the recent turn (...)
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  • Conceptual engineering and pragmatism: historical and theoretical perspectives.Céline Henne & Yvonne Huetter-Almerigi - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Conceptual engineering takes a distinctively normative and reconstructive approach to our conceptual repertoire. This approach is congenial to the ideas defended by philosophers belonging to the multifaceted tradition of American and Cambridge Pragmatism. This special issue is devoted to the investigation and development of these connections. Our introduction maps some of the historical and theoretical entanglements between the two fields and gives a short overview of the contributions to the special issue.
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  • Bending as Counterspeech.Laura Caponetto & Bianca Cepollaro - 2023 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 26 (4):577-593.
    In this paper, we identify and examine an overlooked strategy to counter bigoted speech on the spot. Such a strategy we call ‘bending’. To ‘bend’, in our sense, is to deliberately give a distorted response to a speaker’s harmful move – precisely, an ameliorative response, which may turn that move into a different, less harmful, contribution. To substantiate our proposal, we distinguish two ideas of uptake – interpretation and response – and argue for the general claim that a distorted response (...)
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  • The medical model, with a human face.Justis Koon - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (12):3747-3770.
    In this paper, I defend a version of the medical model of disability, which defines disability as an enduring biological dysfunction that causes its bearer a significant degree of impairment. We should accept the medical model, I argue, because it succeeds in capturing our judgments about what conditions do and do not qualify as disabilities, because it offers a compelling explanation for what makes a condition count as a disability, and because it justifies why the federal government should spend hundreds (...)
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  • Technology as Driver for Morally Motivated Conceptual Engineering.Herman Veluwenkamp, Marianna Capasso, Jonne Maas & Lavinia Marin - 2022 - Philosophy and Technology 35 (3):1-25.
    New technologies are the source of uncertainties about the applicability of moral and morally connotated concepts. These uncertainties sometimes call for conceptual engineering, but it is not often recognized when this is the case. We take this to be a missed opportunity, as a recognition that different researchers are working on the same kind of project can help solve methodological questions that one is likely to encounter. In this paper, we present three case studies where philosophers of technology implicitly engage (...)
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  • Rethinking Low, Middle, and High Art.Ting Cho Lau - 2022 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (4):1-12.
    What distinguishes low, middle, and high art? In this article, I give an ameliorative analysis of these concepts. On what I call the Capacity View, the distinction between low, middle, and high art depends on the relation between an artwork’s perceiver (specifically her aesthetic responsive capacities) and the perceived artwork. Though the Capacity View may not align perfectly with folk usage, the view is worth our attention due to three attractive upshots. First, it explains how an artwork’s status level can (...)
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  • Negotiating “women”: metalinguistic negotiations across languages.Knoll Viktoria - 2022 - Synthese 200 (4):1-20.
    The metalinguistic approach to conceptual engineering construes disputes between linguistic reformers and linguistic conservatives as metalinguistic disagreements on how best to use particular expressions. As the present paper argues, this approach has various merits. However, it was recently criticised in Cappelen’s seminal Fixing Language. Cappelen raises an important objection against the metalinguistic picture. According to this objection – the Babel objection, as I shall call it – the metalinguistic account cannot accommodate the intuition of disagreement between linguistic conservatives and reformers (...)
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  • The phenomenon objection to conceptual engineering.Mark Pinder - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (11):3281-3305.
    Conceptual engineering is sometimes presented as an alternative to conceptual analysis. But one important objection to conceptual analysis threatens to carry across: that philosophy investigates phenomena—knowledge, truth, freedom, etc.—rather than concepts of those phenomena. This poses a prima facie problem insofar as conceptual engineering targets concepts or terms rather than phenomena. Call it the ‘phenomenon objection’. I begin by examining recent discussions of the phenomenon objection by Cappelen and Scharp, rejecting their responses. I then clarify and strengthen the objection, discussing (...)
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  • Epistemic Paternalism via Conceptual Engineering.Eve Kitsik - 2023 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 9 (4):616-635.
    This essay focuses on 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 (...)
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  • Responsibility for implicitly biased behavior: A habit‐based approach.Josefa Toribio - 2021 - Journal of Social Philosophy 53 (2):239-254.
    This paper has a two-fold goal. First, I defend the view that the prejudicial behaviour that results from implicit biases is best understood as a type of habitual action—as a harmful, yet deeply entrenched, passively acquired, socially relevant type of habit. Second, I explore how characterizing such implicitly biased behaviour as a habit aids our understanding of the responsibility we bear for it. As habits are ultimately susceptible of being controlled, agents ought to be held responsible for their implicit biased (...)
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  • Why Ideal Epistemology?Jennifer Rose Carr - 2021 - Mind 131 (524):1131-1162.
    Ideal epistemologists investigate the nature of pure epistemic rationality, abstracting away from human cognitive limitations. Non-ideal epistemologists investigate epistemic norms that are satisfiable by most humans, most of the time. Ideal epistemology faces a number of challenges, aimed at both its substantive commitments and its philosophical worth. This paper explains the relation between ideal and non-ideal epistemology, with the aim of justifying ideal epistemology. Its approach is meta-epistemological, focusing on the meaning and purpose of epistemic evaluations. I provide an account (...)
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  • (1 other version)Why Conceptual Engineers Should Not Worry About Topics.Steffen Koch - 2021 - Erkenntnis 88 (5):1-21.
    This paper argues for explanatory eliminativism about topics (and cognates, such as subject matters) relative to the domain of conceptual engineering. It has become usual to think that topics serve an important explanatory role in theories of conceptual engineering, namely, to determine the limits of revision. I argue, first, that such limits can be understood either as thenormative limitspertaining to the justification of conceptual engineering, as themetaphysical limitspertaining to the identity of the concepts in question, or as theterminological limitspertaining to (...)
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  • Conceptual Engineering in Philosophy.Matti Eklund - 2021 - In Rebecca Mason (ed.), Hermeneutical Injustice. Routledge.
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  • The Communicative Significance of Beliefs and Desires.Uku Tooming - 2014 - Dissertation, Universitatis Tartunesis
    When we think about what others believe and want, we are usually affected by what we know about their attitudes. If I’m aware that another person believes something, I have an opportunity to agree or disagree with it. If I think that another person wants something, I can endorse or disapprove of her desire. The importance of such reactions to attributed beliefs and desires has thus far been overlooked in philosophy of mind where the focus has been on explanatory and (...)
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  • Is There a “Qua Problem” for a Purely Causal Account of Reference Grounding?Max Deutsch - 2023 - Erkenntnis 88 (5):1807-1824.
    This article argues that the “_qua_ problem” for purely causal theories of reference grounding is an illusion. Reference _can_ be grounded via description and fit, but purely causal reference grounding is possible too. In fact, “arguments from ignorance and error” suggest that many of our terms have had their reference grounded purely causally. If the _qua_ problem is illusory, then there is no need to adopt a “hybrid” theory of reference grounding of the kind recently recommended by Amie Thomasson (Ontology (...)
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  • Ingeniería conceptual e innovación teórica: esbozo de un modelo.Carlos Muñoz-Suárez - 2021 - Escritos 29 (62):144-171.
    Every area of knowledge is based on a variety of products of conceptual engineering. This article is programmatic in essence: it aims at introducing a model of how conceptual engineering works and, particularly, how conceptual innovation is achieved in the context of theoretical inquiry. First, it describes the context in which the explicit study of the relevance, scope, mechanisms, and aims of conceptual engineering was born. Secondly, it introduces a distinction between evaluative and instrumental conceptual engineering based on the difference (...)
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  • Ingegneria Concettuale.Davide Andrea Zappulli - 2021 - Aphex 23.
    L'ingegneria concettuale è una branca della filosofia caratterizzata da un approccio normativo nei confronti della rappresentazione. Assunzione fondamentale è che i nostri dispositivi rappresentazionali possano essere difettosi. Si configura dunque come l'attività che consiste nell'identificare i difetti in tali dispositivi e mettere in atto strategie di miglioramento. Verranno illustrate le questioni fondamentali a cui una teoria di ingegneria concettuale deve rispondere: in cosa consiste esattamente questa attività? Come possiamo attuarla? Quali meccanismi regolano la formazione dei dispositivi rappresentazionali? Possiamo influire su (...)
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  • Is Conceptual Relativism a Prerequisite for Philosophy as Conceptual Engineering?Pavol Labuda - 2021 - Filozofia 76 (1):3-17.
    The aim of the paper is to examine whether conceptual relativism is a prerequi-site for conceptual engineering (and if so, then to what extent). In the first part of the paper, I explore and classify varieties of relativism to prepare a distinctive definition of conceptual relativism. In the second part I analyse conceptual relativism and I consequently propose two different readings of conceptual scheme: (i) conceptual scheme as a monolithic, timeless, and determinate systems of meanings, and (ii) conceptual scheme as (...)
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  • Essentializing Language and the Prospects for Ameliorative Projects.Katherine Ritchie - 2021 - Ethics 131 (3):460-488.
    Some language encourages essentialist thinking. While philosophers have largely focused on generics and essentialism, I argue that nouns as a category are poised to refer to kinds and to promote representational essentializing. Our psychological propensity to essentialize when nouns are used reveals a limitation for anti-essentialist ameliorative projects. Even ameliorated nouns can continue to underpin essentialist thinking. I conclude by arguing that representational essentialism does not doom anti-essentialist ameliorative projects. Rather it reveals that would-be ameliorators ought to attend to the (...)
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  • Invariantist, Contextualist, and Relativist Accounts of Gender Terms.Dan Zeman - 2020 - EurAmerica 4 (50):739-781.
    In this paper, I explore a range of existent and possible ameliorative semantic theories of gender terms: invariantism, according to which gender terms are not context-sensitive, contextualism, according to which the meaning of gender terms is established in the context of use, and relativism, according to which the meaning of gender terms is established in the context of assessment. I show that none of these views is adequate with respect to the plight of trans people to use their term of (...)
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  • A Little Puzzle about a Piece and a Puddle.Mahrad Almotahari - 2020 - In Karen Bennett & Dean W. Zimmerman (eds.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics Volume 12. Oxford University Press. pp. 231-261.
    A new puzzle about material constitution is presented and its implications are discussed. The moral of the story is that familiar intuitions supporting a neo-Aristotelian view of the material world are contradictory. To accommodate these intuitions is to embrace inconsistency. Therefore, neo-Aristotelianism is worse off for its intuitive appeal. Furthermore, the puzzle is used to argue for an account of ordinary modal thought and language that’s reconstructive, or ameliorative.
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  • Experimental philosophy and the method of cases.Joachim Horvath & Steffen Koch - 2020 - Philosophy Compass 16 (1):e12716.
    In this paper, we first briefly survey the main responses to the challenge that experimental philosophy poses to the method of cases, given the common assumption that the latter is crucially based on intuitive judgments about cases. Second, we discuss two of the most popular responses in more detail: the expertise defense and the mischaracterization objection. Our take on the expertise defense is that the available empirical data do not support the claim that professional philosophers enjoy relevant expertise in their (...)
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  • What are the debates on same-sex marriage and on the recognition of transwomen as women about? On anti-descriptivism and revisionary analysis.Brice Bantegnie - 2020 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 63 (9-10):974-1000.
    ABSTRACT In recent years, debates on same-sex marriage and the recognition of transwomen as women have been raging. These debates often seem to revolve around the meaning of, respectively, the word ‘marriage’ and ‘woman’. That such debates should take place might be puzzling. It seems that if debates on gay and transgender rights revolve around the meaning of these words, then those in favor of same-sex marriage and of the recognition of transwomen as women have no room left to maneuver. (...)
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  • Objectivity and orgasm: the perils of imprecise definitions.Samantha Wakil - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):2315-2333.
    Lloyd analyzes every proposed evolutionary explanation of female orgasm and argues that all but one suffers from serious evidential errors. Lloyd attributes these errors to two main biases: androcentrism and adaptationism. This paper begins by arguing that the explanation Lloyd favors—the by-product account—is guilty of the androcentrism which supposedly implicates the other explanations of female orgasm with numerous evidential discrepancies. This suggests that there is another error afflicting orgasm research in addition to the biases Lloyd identities. I attempt to diagnose (...)
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  • Engineering what? On concepts in conceptual engineering.Steffen Koch - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):1955-1975.
    Conceptual engineers aim to revise rather than describe our concepts. But what are concepts? And how does one engineer them? Answering these questions is of central importance for implementing and theorizing about conceptual engineering. This paper discusses and criticizes two influential views of this issue: semanticism, according to which conceptual engineers aim to change linguistic meanings, and psychologism, according to which conceptual engineers aim to change psychological structures. I argue that neither of these accounts can give us the full story. (...)
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  • Conceptual analysis without concepts.Max Deutsch - 2020 - Synthese 198 (11):11125-11157.
    “Conceptual analysis” is a misnomer—it refers, but it does not refer to a method or practice that involves the analysis of concepts. Once this is recognized, many of the main arguments for skepticism about conceptual analysis can be answered, since many of these arguments falsely assume that conceptual analyses target concepts. The present paper defends conceptual analysis from skepticism about its viability and, positively, presents an argument for viewing conceptual analyses as targeting philosophical phenomena, not our concepts of these phenomena.
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  • How to Philosophically Tackle Kinds without Talking About ‘Natural Kinds’.Ingo Brigandt - 2020 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 52 (3):356-379.
    Recent rival attempts in the philosophy of science to put forward a general theory of the properties that all (and only) natural kinds across the sciences possess may have proven to be futile. Instead, I develop a general methodological framework for how to philosophically study kinds. Any kind has to be investigated and articulated together with the human aims that motivate referring to this kind, where different kinds in the same scientific domain can answer to different concrete aims. My core (...)
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  • Cappelen, H. 2018. Fixing Language. An Essay in Conceptual Engineering. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 224 pp. ISBN: 978-0-198-81471-9. [REVIEW]Steffen Koch - 2019 - History of Philosophy & Logical Analysis 22 (1):248-256.
    This is a review article of Herman Cappelen's monograph 'Fixing Language. An Essay on Conceptual Engineering' (OUP 2018). It summarizes the key elements of the book and objects to various of Cappelen's claims.
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  • 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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  • On how to achieve reference to covert social constructions.Esa Diaz-Leon - 2019 - Studia Philosophica Estonica 12:34-43.
    What does it mean to say that some features, such as gender, race and sexual orientation, are socially constructed? Many scholars claim that social constructionism about a kind is a version of realism about that kind, according to which the corresponding kind is a social construction, that it, it is constituted by social factors and practices. Social constructionism, then, is a version of realism about a kind that asserts that the kind is real, and puts forward a particular view about (...)
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  • Speaker’s reference, stipulation, and a dilemma for conceptual engineers.Max Deutsch - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (12):3935-3957.
    Advocates of conceptual engineering as a method of philosophy face a dilemma: either they are ignorant of how conceptual engineering can be implemented, or else it is trivial to implement but of very little value, representing no new or especially fruitful method of philosophizing. Two key distinctions frame this dilemma and explain its two horns. First, the distinction between speaker’s meaning and reference and semantic meaning and reference reveals a severe implementation problem for one construal of conceptual engineering. Second, the (...)
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  • Review of: Hilary Putnam on Logic and Mathematics, by Geoffrey Hellman and Roy T. Cook (eds.). [REVIEW]Tim Button - 2019 - Mind 129 (516):1327-1337.
    Putnam’s most famous contribution to mathematical logic was his role in investigating Hilbert’s Tenth Problem; Putnam is the ‘P’ in the MRDP Theorem. This volume, though, focusses mostly on Putnam’s work on the philosophy of logic and mathematics. It is a somewhat bumpy ride. Of the twelve papers, two scarcely mention Putnam. Three others focus primarily on Putnam’s ‘Mathematics without foundations’ (1967), but with no interplay between them. The remaining seven papers apparently tackle unrelated themes. Some of this disjointedness would (...)
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  • On Haslanger’s Meta-Metaphysics: Social Structures and Metaphysical Deflationism.E. Díaz-León - 2018 - Disputatio 10 (50):201-216.
    The metaphysics of gender and race is a growing area of concern in contemporary analytic metaphysics, with many different views about the nature of gender and race being submitted and discussed. But what are these debates about? What questions are these accounts trying to answer? And is there real disagreement between advocates of differ- ent views about race or gender? If so, what are they really disagreeing about? In this paper I want to develop a view about what the debates (...)
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  • Social Explanation: Structures, Stories, and Ontology. A Reply to Díaz León, Saul, and Sterken.Sally Haslanger - 2018 - Disputatio 10 (50):245-273.
    In response to commentaries by Esa Díaz León, Jennifer Saul, and Ra- chel Sterken, I develop more fully my views on the role of structure in social and metaphysical explanation. Although I believe that social agency, quite generally, occurs within practices and structures, the relevance of structure depends on the sort of questions we are asking and what interventions we are considering. The emphasis on questions is also relevant in considering metaphysical and meta-metaphysical is- sues about realism with respect to (...)
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  • Amelioration vs. Perversion.Teresa Marques - 2020 - In Teresa Marques & Åsa Wikforss (eds.), Shifting Concepts: The Philosophy and Psychology of Conceptual Variability. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Words change meaning, usually in unpredictable ways. But some words’ meanings are revised intentionally. Revisionary projects are normally put forward in the service of some purpose – some serve specific goals of inquiry, and others serve ethical, political or social aims. Revisionist projects can ameliorate meanings, but they can also pervert. In this paper, I want to draw attention to the dangers of meaning perversions, and argue that the self-declared goodness of a revisionist project doesn’t suffice to avoid meaning perversions. (...)
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  • Conceptual Marxism and Truth: Inquiry Symposium on Kevin Scharp’s Replacing Truth.Patrick Greenough - 2019 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 62 (4):403-421.
    In Replacing Truth, Scharp takes the concept of truth to be fundamentally incoherent. As such, Scharp reckons it to be unsuited for systematic philosophical theorising and in need of replacement – at least for regions of thought and talk which permit liar sentences and their ilk to be formulated. This replacement methodology is radical because it not only recommends that the concept of truth be replaced, but that the word ‘true’ be replaced too. Only Tarski has attempted anything like it (...)
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  • Fixing Language: An Essay on Conceptual Engineering, by Herman Cappelen. [REVIEW]Derek Ball - 2020 - Mind 129 (513):245-256.
    Fixing Language: An Essay on Conceptual Engineering, by CappelenHerman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. x + 212.
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  • The Revisionist’s Rubric: Conceptual Engineering and the Discontinuity Objection.Michael Prinzing - 2018 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 61 (8):854-880.
    This paper is about conceptual engineering. Specifically, it discusses a common objection to CE, which I call the Discontinuity Objection. According to the Discontinuity Objection, CE leads to problematic discontinuities in subject and/or inquiry – making it philosophically uninteresting or irrelevant. I argue that a conceptual engineer can dismiss the Discontinuity Objection by showing that the pre-engineering concept persists through the proposed changes. In other words, the Discontinuity Objection does not apply if the proposal involves identity-preserving changes. Two existing views (...)
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  • Conceptual engineering for mathematical concepts.Fenner Stanley Tanswell - 2018 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 61 (8):881-913.
    ABSTRACTIn this paper I investigate how conceptual engineering applies to mathematical concepts in particular. I begin with a discussion of Waismann’s notion of open texture, and compare it to Shapiro’s modern usage of the term. Next I set out the position taken by Lakatos which sees mathematical concepts as dynamic and open to improvement and development, arguing that Waismann’s open texture applies to mathematical concepts too. With the perspective of mathematics as open-textured, I make the case that this allows us (...)
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