How feasible are conceptual engineering projects of social concepts that aim for the engineered concept to be deployed in people's ordinary conceptual practices? 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. 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. (shrink)

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 (...) conceptual understanding at two different points in time without their knowledge of being tested, allowing us to measure conceptual revision in action. Using a masked time-lagged design on a content internalist framework, we attempted to revise PLANET and DINOSAUR in online participants to match experts' concepts. We successfully revised PLANET but not DINOSAUR, demonstrating some of the difficulties conceptual engineers face. Nonetheless, this paper provides conceptual engineers, regardless of framework, with the tools to tackle questions related to implementation empirically and head-on. (shrink)

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 (...) shared epistemic environment through rational deliberation and thereby govern their own beliefs that are shaped by that environment. (shrink)

Virtue theories can plausibly be argued to have important advantages over normative ethical theories which prescribe a strict impartialism in moral judgment, or which neglect people’s special roles and relationships. However, there are clear examples of both virtuous and vicious partiality in people’s moral judgments, and virtue theorists may struggle to adequately distinguish them, much as proponents of other normative ethical theories do. This paper first adapts the “expanding moral circle” concept and some literary examples to illustrate the difficulty of (...) adequately distinguishing virtuous from vicious partiality. Later sections aim to show how an adequate philosophical ethics will be able to both a) attribute virtue (and hence praiseworthiness) to agents whose actions may directly serve only their special interests, roles, or special relationships; and b) attribute vice (and hence censure) where an agent’s attitudes and/or actions mirror known personal biases (for instance, an egoistic attitude) or social biases (for instance, and ethnocentric attitude). This dual ability leaves space for much virtuous partiality, while also reflecting a “risk-aware” approach, recognizing the deleterious consequences of our human penchant for constructing and imbuing moral significance to oftentimes factitious us/them dichotomies. (shrink)

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)

Conceptual engineering is the design, evaluation and implementation of concepts. Despite its popularity, some have argued that the methodology is not worthwhile, because the implementation of new concepts is both inscrutable and beyond our control. In the recent literature we see different responses to this worry. Some have argued that it is for political reasons just as well that implementation is such a difficult task, while others have challenged the metasemantic and social assumptions that underlie this skepticism about implementation. In (...) this paper, I argue that even if implementation is as difficult as critics maintain, there is at least one context in which conceptual engineering is extremely impactful and demonstrably so: the design of new technology. Different conceptions of control, freedom, trust, etc. lead to different designs and implementations of systems that are built to embed those concepts. This means that if we want to design for control, freedom, trust, etc., we have to decide which conception we ought to use. When we determine what the appropriate conception of a concept is in a technological context and use this conception to operationalize a norm or value, we generate requirements which have real-world effects. This not only shows that conceptual engineering can be extremely impactful, the fact that it leads to different design requirements means that we have a way to evaluate our conceptual choices and that we can use this feedback loop to improve upon our conceptual work By illustrating the direct impacts of different conceptions on technology design, this paper underscores the practical applicability and value of conceptual engineering, demonstrating how it serves as a crucial bridge between abstract philosophical analysis and concrete technological innovation. (shrink)

There is a widespread phenomenon that we call linguistic imposters. Linguistic imposters are systematic misuses of expressions that misusers mistake with their conventional usages because of misunderstanding their meaning. Our paper aims to provide an initial framework for theorizing about linguistic imposters that will lay the foundation for future philosophical research about them. We focus on the misuses of the expressions 'grooming' and 'critical race theory' as our central examples of linguistic imposters. We show that linguistic imposters present a distinctive (...) phenomenon by comparing them to some adjacent phenomena, namely conceptual engineering, linguistic hijacking, and dogwhistles. We also address four objections about the extensional adequacy of our definition of linguistic imposters. Finally, we argue that, as linguistic imposters spread, they make some inferences featuring misused expressions more cognitively accessible and seemingly socially licensed to misusers and discuss four types of harms that linguistic imposters are conducive to through these effects. (shrink)

Herman Cappelen’s book The Concept of Democracy makes a case for ‘abolitionism’, that is, abandonment of the word ‘democracy’ and related terminology (‘D-words’). Cappelen’s strategy includes a direct argument for abandonment, aiming to show that D-words are meaningless; and an indirect argument, based on a comparison of abandonment with other options (for instance, replacement or amelioration). In this critical notice, I focus on his comparative case, arguing that the competing options and their respective challenges are not so well demarcated—where this (...) negatively affects the abandonment proposal. Furthermore, I present and defend a yet unexplored alternative: awareness. Awareness is a worthy candidate for its little costs and significant benefits in comparison to abandonment, thus deserving consideration alongside the options assessed by Cappelen. (shrink)

It has been argued that our concepts can be disrupted or challenged by technology or normative concerns, which raises the question of whether we can create, design, engineer, or define more robust concepts that avoid counterexamples and conceptual challenges that can lead to conceptual disruption. In this paper, it is argued that we can. This argument is presented through a case study of a definition in the technological domain.

The spread of misinformation and fake news raises important problems for our society and for our democracy. From the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol to vaccine hesitancy, from suppressing voter turnout to peddling conspiracy theories, we know that these problems are real and need to be taken seriously. While misinformation is not a new problem for democracy, it can spread more quickly and easily because of new media’s design and popularity. Given these problems, it is encouraging that some (...) technology companies are taking steps to reduce the spread of misinformation and fake news on the platforms they manage. Despite this seemingly positive development, some scholars have criticized some interventions designed to combat the spread of misinformation and fake news as paternalistic. For example, a 2019 Facebook intervention called Click-Gap aimed to reduce the amount of low-quality content (including fake news and misinformation) that users see on their NewsFeed. Click-Gap has been criticized as an instance of epistemic paternalism because it was adopted (1) with the goal of improving the epistemic status of its users and (2) irrespective of what the company believed the wishes of its users to be. If interventions like Click-Gap are problematic because paternalistic, those of us interested in the ethics of technology would face a dilemma—either endorse technology companies treating their users paternalistically or endorse their failing to act to combat the spread of misinformation and fake news on their platforms. Both options seem to me to be problematic. While paternalism may sometimes be permissible, I think we should be very hesitant to endorse a paternalistic relationship between technology companies and their users. The relationship does not seem to bear the right sort of structure to one in which paternalism might be appropriate, if it ever is. The second option seems, if anything worse: surely technology companies should not stand by and change nothing about their platforms despite the spread of misinformation and fake news in those spaces. In this paper, I argue that Click-Gap and interventions like it are not paternalistic, contrary to the conclusion of other scholars. Further, I will argue that the focus on paternalism itself is actually a red herring here. While not just any intervention or strategy that purports to reduce fake news and misinformation is permissible, we should want technology companies to take user well-being seriously and be able to take that well-being as a direct reason for action. Their doing so is not paternalistic nor even morally problematic, and it should not be criticized as such. (shrink)

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 (...) shared epistemic environment through rational deliberation and thereby govern their own beliefs that are shaped by that environment. (shrink)

In this project, I raised three methodological issues regarding contemporary studies of moral change and moral progress. The first concerns how philosophers typically think about moral history. The second focuses on the explanatory model of the shift of morality, and the last deals with the prescriptions for moral intervention. Based on the three criticisms, I propose the “person-centric” model as the new paradigm for studying the historical shift of morality. Different from current accounts that follow a knowledge-centric model, the person-centric (...) model requires that we identify the moral values, struggles, and dilemmas crucial to people’s moral life, and develop new perspectives from them to further the study of moral change. (shrink)