A philosopher argues that state-sponsored cyberattacks against central military or civilian targets are always acts of war. What is this philosopher doing? According to conceptual analysts, the philosopher is making a claim about our concept of war. According to philosophical realists, the philosopher is making a claim about war per se. In a quickly developing literature, a third option is being explored: the philosopher is engineering the concept of war. On this view, the philosopher is making a proposal about which (...) concept we should have – even if it deviates from the extant concept, and even if it does not capture ‘what war really is’. The activity or method of proposing such revisionary definitions, as well as the metaphilosophical reflection on it, has become known as conceptual engineering. (shrink)

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 (...) in conceptual engineering (without naming it as such). We subsequently reflect on the case studies to find out how these illustrate conceptual engineering as an appropriate method to deal with pressing concerns in the philosophy of technology. We have two main goals. We first want to contribute to the literature on conceptual engineering by presenting concrete examples of conceptual engineering in the philosophy of technology. This is especially relevant, because the technologies that are designed based on the conceptual work done by philosophers of technology potentially have crucial moral and social implications. Secondly, we want to make explicit what choices are made when doing this conceptual work. Making explicit that some of the implicit assumptions are, in fact, debated in the literature allows for reflection on these questions. Ultimately, our hope is that conscious reflection leads to an improvement of the conceptual work done. (shrink)

Politicians and engineers are increasingly realizing that values are important in the development of technological artefacts. What is often overlooked is that different conceptualizations of these abstract values lead to different design-requirements. For example, designing social media platforms for deliberative democracy sets us up for technical work on completely different types of architectures and mechanisms than designing for so-called liquid or direct forms of democracy. Thinking about Democracy is not enough, we need to design for the proper conceptualization of these (...) values. As we see it, we cannot responsibly engineer and innovate and shape technology in accordance with our moral values without engaging in systematic and continuous conceptual engineering: This is not only an academic, or theoretical issue, it is also not simply an issue for public policy or politics, or regulators, it has become a central problem for engineering and the world of technology. In this paper, we present a framework for doing the necessary conceptual work in the context of requirement engineering. We draw on the literature on conceptual engineering to lay out a methodology to (1) assess different conceptions and (2) to develop new conceptions. Moreover, we integrate this methodology with extant approaches in the philosophy of technology which aim at designing technological artefacts ethically. In the final section we apply this integrated framework to freedom in the context of social media networks. (shrink)

This paper explores the question: What would conceptual engineering have to be in order to promote social justice? Specifically, it argues that to promote social justice, conceptual engineering must deliver the following: it needs to be possible to deliberately implement a conceptual engineering proposal in large communities; it needs to be possible for a conceptual engineering proposal to bring about change to extant social categories; it needs to be possible to bring a population to adopt a conceptual engineering proposal for (...) the right reasons; and it needs to be possible to do – without producing harmful consequences. I show that, of the three dominant approaches to conceptual engineering in the literature, only one of them seems amenable to the idea that it is possible and legitimate to promote social justice in accordance with –. (shrink)

On a representationalist view, conceptual engineering is the practice of changing the extensions and intensions of the devices we use to speak and think. But if this view holds true, conceptual engineering has a bad rationale. Extensions and intensions are not the sorts of things that are better or worse as such. A representationalist account of conceptual engineering thus falls prey to the objection that the practice has a bad rationale. To account for the assumption that conceptual engineering is worthwhile, (...) we propose to view what is being engineered as inferential devices, as opposed to representational devices. The objective is not to establish that being or having an inferential role is all there is to meaning or conceptual content. Rather, our agenda is to recommend a shift of focus from the representational features of content to the inferential features of content for the purposes of doing and thinking about conceptual engineering. Inferentialism about conceptual engineering makes better sense of the practice than a representationalist approach: In addition to accounting for the rationality of engaging in conceptual engineering, inferentialism provides a sound interpretation of what is at stake in concrete examples of conceptual engineering. (shrink)

Conceptual Engineering (CE) is thought to be generally aimed at ameliorating deficient concepts. In this paper, we challenge this assumption: we argue that CE is frequently undertaken with the orthogonal aim of _conceptual adaptation_. We develop this thesis with reference to the interplay between technology and concepts. Emerging technologies can exert significant pressure on conceptual systems and spark ‘conceptual disruption’. For example, advances in Artificial Intelligence raise the question of whether AIs are agents or mere objects, which can be construed (...) as a CE question regarding the concepts AGENT and OBJECT. We distinguish between three types of conceptual disruption (conceptual gaps, conceptual overlaps, and conceptual misalignments) and argue that when CE occurs to address these disruptions, its primary aim is not to improve concepts, but to retain their functional quality, or to prevent them from degrading. This is the characteristic aim of CE when undertaken in philosophy of technology: to _preserve_ the functional role of a concept or conceptual scheme, rather than _improving_ how a concept fulfills its respective function. (shrink)

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.

Begriffe sind die Bausteine unserer Gedanken. Wir nutzen sie, um Ordnung in die Vielzahl der uns umgebenden Einzeldinge zu bringen, um Schlussfolgerungen zu ziehen, um Überzeugungen, Hoffnungen oder Wünsche zu formen, um uns miteinander zu verständigen. Viele unserer begrifflichen Gebilde unterliegen Korrektheitsbedingungen. Überzeugungen können falsch sein, Theorien ebenso. Doch wie sieht es mit unseren Begriffen selbst aus? Können auch diese in einem bestimmten Sinne falsch oder ungeeignet sein? Sollten wir gar versuchen, unser begriffliches Repertoire aktiv umzugestalten, indem wir z. B. (...) manche von ihnen verbessern oder austauschen, neue hinzufügen oder andere entfernen? Diese und weitere Fragen werden in der aktuellen analytischen Philosophie unter den Stichworten ‚Conceptual Ethics‘ bzw. ‚Conceptual Engineering‘ diskutiert. Der vorliegende Artikel erläutert die grundsätzliche Motivation des Conceptual Engineering und diskutiert außerdem einige der wichtigsten Probleme und Perspektiven dieses noch äußerst jungen und aufregenden Forschungsfeldes. (shrink)