Conceptual engineering has strong political roots. But if conceptual engineering is to be a useful tool for promoting social justice, there must be a means by which the concepts we design can take root and propagate in dominant contexts. This is known as the implementation challenge. In this paper, I caution against movements toward a particular methodological perspective on the challenge called dialogical individualism. This perspective centres the role of speakers in speech-situations to persuade hearers to change their minds about (...) currently held concepts. This individualism has a distorting effect: it warps our perception of the size of the challenge. In particular, dialogical individualism ignores the social environmental factors that make conversation an unfriendly site for conceptual change. Moreover, it is not sufficiently attentive to the history of conceptual change in communities of practice. In the end, I argue for a methodological perspective shift: discursive strategies, such as speaker persuasion, should be decentralized in our overall thinking about the best solutions to the implementation challenge. Our attention is better focused on tailoring strategies to deal with the social environment in which concept-users are embedded. (shrink)

Despite well-founded critiques on the concept of nature and even claims that the concept is decidedly obsolete, evidence would suggest that nature continues to play a pivotal role in orienting people towards environmental practices and advocacy. Given nature’s unyielding relevance, this paper takes inspiration from Sally Haslanger’s project of conceptual amelioration to examine how meanings ascribed to nature can lead to the actualization of desired sociomaterial realities. By building on posthumanist political ecology and Michel Callon’s notion of performation, I illustrate (...) a dynamic in which meanings of nature emerge through the engagement in practices with the environment which are, more often than not, mediated by different technologies. After exploring this proposal through the lens of different environmentalisms, I argue that technologies can play a significant role in mediating conceptualizations of nature. To support this argument, I introduce a few elements of mediation theory and examine the meaning of nature that may emerge when social media users interact with online content of climate and ecological collapse. Overall, this approach advances a postphenomenological contribution to the scholarly trend of examining how technologies may disrupt fundamental concepts with which we respond to ethical issues. This approach underscores the role of technologically mediated practices in processes of conceptualization, as well as the significant political dimension of conceptual engineering projects. (shrink)