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  1. (1 other version)Conceptual Engineering: A Road Map to Practice.Manuel Gustavo Isaac, Steffen Koch & Ryan Nefdt - 2022 - Philosophy Compass 17 (10):1-15.
    This paper discusses the logical space of alternative conceptual engineering projects, with a specific focus on (1) the processes, (2) the targets and goals, and (3) the methods of such projects. We present an overview of how these three aspects interact in the contemporary literature and discuss those alternative projects that have yet to be explored based on our suggested typology. We show how choices about each element in a conceptual engineering project constrain the possibilities for the others, thereby giving (...)
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  • What is Conceptual Engineering and What Should it Be?David Chalmers - 2020 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 63.
    Conceptual engineering is the design, implementation, and evaluation of concepts. Conceptual engineering includes or should include de novo conceptual engineering (designing a new concept) as well as conceptual re-engineering (fixing an old concept). It should also include heteronymous (different-word) as well as homonymous (same-word) conceptual engineering. I discuss the importance and the difficulty of these sorts of conceptual engineering in philosophy and elsewhere.
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  • Conceptual Engineering and the Politics of Implementation.Matthieu Queloz & Friedemann Bieber - 2022 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 103 (3):670-691.
    Conceptual engineering is thought to face an ‘implementation challenge’: the challenge of securing uptake of engineered concepts. But is the fact that implementation is challenging really a defect to be overcome? What kind of picture of political life would be implied by making engineering easy to implement? We contend that the ambition to obviate the implementation challenge goes against the very idea of liberal democratic politics. On the picture we draw, the implementation challenge can be overcome by institutionalizing control over (...)
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  • Recent work in the theory of conceptual engineering.Steffen Koch, Guido Löhr & Mark Pinder - 2023 - Analysis 83 (3):589-603.
    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 (...)
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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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  • 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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  • Concepts in Conceptual Engineering.Sarah Sawyer - forthcoming - In Stephan Schmid & Hamid Taieb, A Philosophical History of the Concept. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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  • There is no dilemma for conceptual engineering. Reply to Max Deutsch.Steffen Koch - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 178 (7):2279-2291.
    Max Deutsch has recently argued that conceptual engineering is stuck in a dilemma. If it is construed as the activity of revising the semantic meanings of existing terms, then it faces an unsurmountable implementation problem. If, on the other hand, it is construed as the activity of introducing new technical terms, then it becomes trivial. According to Deutsch, this conclusion need not worry us, however, for conceptual engineering is ill-motivated to begin with. This paper responds to Deutsch by arguing, first, (...)
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  • Merely verbal agreement, speaker-meaning, and defective context.Steffen Koch - 2025 - Synthese 205 (1):1-20.
    In a merely verbal agreement, a misunderstanding between two parties creates the false impression of agreement: one or both parties think they agree on something, when in fact they do not. There is reason to believe that merely verbal agreements are as common as merely verbal disagreements and disputes. Unlike the latter, however, merely verbal agreements have so far been ignored by philosophers. The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to clarify what merely verbal agreement is by considering various (...)
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  • The Anti-Conceptual Engineering Argument and the Problem of Implementation.Steffen Koch - 2024 - American Philosophical Quarterly 61 (1):73-85.
    Conceptual engineering concerns the assessment and improvement of our concepts. But how can proposals to engineer concepts be implemented in the real world? This is known as the implementation challenge to conceptual engineering. In this paper, I am concerned with the meta-philosophical implications of the implementation challenge. Specifically, must we overcome the implementation challenge prior to undertaking conceptual engineering? Some critics have recently answered this question affirmatively. I intend to show that they are mistaken. I argue as follows. First, successful (...)
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  • Conceptual Engineering and Philosophy of Technology: Amelioration or Adaptation?Jeroen Hopster & Guido Löhr - 2023 - Philosophy and Technology 36 (4):1-17.
    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 (...)
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  • Local Conceptual Engineering in a Linguistic Subgroup and the Implementation Problem.Takaaki Matsui - 2024 - In Piotr Stalmaszczyk, Conceptual Engineering: Methodological and Metaphilosophical Issues. Brill. pp. 117–133.
    In this chapter, I examine Max Deutsch’s dilemma for the implementation of newly engineered concepts. In the debate over this dilemma, the goal of conceptual engineering tends to be set either too high or too low. As a result, implementation tends to be seen as either very unlikely to succeed or too easily achievable. This chaper aims to offer a way out of this dilemma. I argue that the success conditions for implementation can be better understood if we distinguish between (...)
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  • Conceptual exploration.Rachel Etta Rudolph - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 67 (9):2930-2955.
    Conceptual engineering involves revising our concepts. It can be pursued as a specific philosophical methodology, but is also common in ordinary, non-philosophical, contexts. How does our capacity for conceptual engineering fit into human cognitive life more broadly? I hold that conceptual engineering is best understood alongside practices of conceptual exploration, examples of which include conceptual supposition (i.e. suppositional reasoning about alternative concepts), and conceptual comparison (i.e. comparisons between possible concept choices). Whereas in conceptual engineering we aim to change the concepts (...)
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  • 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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  • Meaning change and changing meaning.Allison Koslow - 2022 - Synthese 200 (2):1-26.
    Is volitional conceptual change feasible? Answering that question requires a theory of semantic change, which is sometimes thought elusive. Fortunately, much is known about semantic change as it occurs in the wild. While usage is chaotic and complex, changes in a word’s use can produce changes in its meaning. There are several under-appreciated empirical constraints on how meanings change that stem from the following observation: word use finely reflects equilibrium between various communicative pressures. Much of the relevant work in linguistics (...)
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  • (1 other version)Why Conceptual Engineers Should Not Worry About Topics.Steffen Koch - 2023 - Erkenntnis 88 (5):2123-2143.
    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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  • (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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  • What Should Conceptual Engineering Be All About?Isaac Manuel Gustavo - 2021 - Philosophia: A Global Journal of Philosophy 49 (5):2041-2051.
    Conceptual engineering is commonly characterized as the method for assessing and improving our representational devices. Little has been said, however, on how best to construe these representational devices—in other words, on what conceptual engineering should be all about. This paper tackles this problem with a basic strategy: First, by presenting a taxonomy of the different possible subject matters for conceptual engineering; then, by comparatively assessing them and selecting the most conducive one with a view to making conceptual engineering an actionable (...)
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  • What Ought a Fruitful Explicatum to be?Mark Pinder - 2022 - Erkenntnis 87 (2):913-932.
    Many concepts are inadequate for serious inquiry, so theorists often seek to engineer new concepts. The method of explication, which involves replacing concepts with more fruitful alternatives, is a model of this process. In this paper, I develop an account of fruitfulness, the Relevant-Goals Account of Fruitfulness. The account is in the spirit of extant proposals, but develops and extends them in important ways. In particular, while it applies to explications in general, the account allows us to derive substantive details (...)
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  • Classification procedures as the targets of conceptual engineering.Jennifer Nado - 2021 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 106 (1):136-156.
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.
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  • Still the same dilemma for conceptual engineers: reply to Koch.Max Deutsch - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 178 (11):3659-3670.
    Steffen Koch raises several objections to my critique of conceptual engineering. Here, I reply to these objections, arguing that Koch fails to adequately defend the “standard rationale” for conceptual engineering, and that the dilemma I have posed for “conceptual re-engineering”, a dilemma that presents this practice as either infeasible or else trivial, survives Koch’s objections unscathed. I conclude that conceptual engineering, both in terms of its conception and rationale, remains problematic.
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  • (1 other version)Engineering concepts by engineering social norms: solving the implementation challenge.Christian Nimtz - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 67 (6):1716-1743.
    The classic programme of conceptual engineering (Cappelen, Herman. 2018. Fixing Language: An Essay on Conceptual Engineering. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Eklund, Matti. 2021. “Conceptual Engineering.” In The Routledge Handbook of Social and Political Philosophy of Language, edited by Justin Khoo, and Rachel Sterken, 15–30. London: Routledge) envisages a two-stage ameliorating process. First, we assess ‘F’ and determine what the term should express. Second, we bring it about that ‘F’ expresses what it should express. The second stage gives rise to a (...)
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  • 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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  • Verbal Disagreement and Semantic Plans.Alexander W. Kocurek - 2023 - Erkenntnis.
    I develop an expressivist account of verbal disagreements as practical disagreements over how to use words rather than factual disagreements over what words actually mean. This account enjoys several advantages over others in the literature: it can be implemented in a neo-Stalnakerian possible worlds framework; it accounts for cases where speakers are undecided on how exactly to interpret an expression; it avoids appeals to fraught notions like subject matter, charitable interpretation, and joint-carving; and it naturally extends to an analysis of (...)
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  • 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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  • Commitment engineering: conceptual engineering without representations.Guido Löhr - 2021 - Synthese 199 (5-6):13035-13052.
    It is largely assumed that conceptual engineering is essentially about revising, introducing, or eliminating representational devices, in particular the intension and extension of words and concepts. However, tying conceptual engineering too closely to representations is risky. Not everyone endorses the notion of representation as theoretically helpful or even real. Not everyone thinks that concepts or meanings should be understood in terms of the notion of representation. Does this mean that conceptual engineering is not interesting or relevant for these skeptics? In (...)
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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 Topic Continuity Problem?Alexander W. Kocurek - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    A common objection to the very idea of conceptual engineering is the topic continuity problem: whenever one tries to “reengineer” a concept, one only shifts attention away from one concept to another. Put differently, there is no such thing as conceptual revision: there’s only conceptual replacement. Here, I show that topic continuity is compatible with conceptual replacement. Whether the topic is preserved in an act of conceptual replacement simply depends on what is being replaced (a conceptual tool or a conceptual (...)
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  • Varieties of Metalinguistic Negotiation.David Plunkett & Timothy Sundell - 2023 - Topoi 42 (4):983-999.
    In both co-authored and solo-authored work over the past decade, we have developed the idea of “metalinguistic negotiation”. On our view, metalinguistic negotiation is a type of dispute in which speakers appear to use (rather than explicitly mention) a term in conflicting ways to put forward views about how that very term should be used. In this paper, we explore four possible dimensions of variation among metalinguistic negotiations, and the interactions among those dimensions. These types of variation matter for understanding (...)
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  • 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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  • Is Haslanger’s ameliorative project a successful conceptual engineering project?Mark Pinder - 2022 - Synthese 200 (4):1-22.
    Supporters of conceptual engineering often use Haslanger’s ameliorative project as a key example of their methodology. However, at face value, Haslanger’s project is no cause for optimism about conceptual engineering. If we interpret Haslanger as seeking to revise how people in general use and understand words such as ‘woman’, ‘man’, etc., then her project has been unsuccessful. And if we interpret her as seeking to reveal the meaning of those words, then her project does not involve conceptual engineering. I develop (...)
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  • Truth in philosophy: a conceptual engineering approach.Jennifer Nado - 2024 - Asian Journal of Philosophy 3 (1):1-22.
    The focus of this paper will be to examine the implications that a “practical” approach to conceptual engineering might have for the “traditional” conception of philosophy as uncovering truths about phenomena of philosophical interest. In doing so, I will be building on the ideas of a figure that many take to be the first major philosopher to write on conceptual engineering: Rudolf Carnap. Though the current wave of interest in conceptual engineering goes back less than a decade, many conceptual engineers (...)
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  • Pluralist conceptual engineering.Tamara Dobler - 2025 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 68 (2):224-250.
    Building on Wittgenstein’s ideas, I defend a brand of pluralism that associates words with conceptual families and appeals to this notion in the course of philosophical problem solving. I argue that certain problems that the received view of conceptual engineering (‘improvement by replacement’) faces can be more easily overcome if we adopt a pluralist perspective. I show that the proposed approach can circumvent the problem of topic discontinuity, whilst also avoiding the threat of trivialisation, since it can easily accommodate both (...)
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  • Contested metalinguistic negotiation.Rachel Etta Rudolph - 2023 - Synthese 202 (3):1-23.
    In ordinary conversation, speakers disagree not only about worldly facts, but also about how to use language to describe the world. For example, disagreement about whether Buffalo is in the American Midwest, whether Pluto is a planet, or whether someone has been canceled, can persist even with agreement about all the relevant facts. The speakers may still engage in “metalinguistic negotiation”—disputing what to mean by “Midwest”, “planet”, or “cancel”. I first motivate an approach to metalinguistic negotiation that generalizes a Stalnakerian (...)
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  • Content internalism and conceptual engineering.Joey Pollock - 2020 - Synthese 198 (12):11587-11605.
    Cappelen proposes a radically externalist framework for conceptual engineering. This approach embraces the following two theses. Firstly, the mechanisms that underlie conceptual engineering are inscrutable: they are too complex, unstable and non-systematic for us to grasp. Secondly, the process of conceptual engineering is largely beyond our control. One might think that these two theses are peculiar to the Austerity Framework, or to metasemantic externalism more generally. However, Cappelen argues that there is no reason to think that internalism avoids either commitment. (...)
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  • Conceptual engineering for analytic theology.Patrick Greenough, Jean Gové & Ian Church - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy:1-34.
    Conceptual engineering is the method (or methods) via which we can assess and improve our concepts. Can conceptual engineering be usefully employed within analytic theology? Given that analytic theology and analytic philosophy effectively share the same philosophical toolkit then if conceptual engineering works well in philosophy then it ought to work well in analytic theology too. This will be our working hypothesis. To make good on this hypothesis, we first address two challenges. The first challenge makes conceptual engineering look to (...)
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  • Conceptual infrastructure and conceptual engineering.Steffen Koch & Jochen Briesen - 2023 - In Aaron Pinnix, Axel Volmar, Fernando Esposito & Nora Binder, Rethinking Infrastructure Across the Humanities. Transcript. pp. 75-86.
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  • What Conceptual Engineering Can Learn from the History of Philosophy of Science: Healthy Externalism and Metasemantic Plasticity.Matteo De Benedetto - 2024 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 14 (1):1-24.
    Conceptual engineering wants analytic philosophy to be centered around the assessment and improvement of philosophical concepts. But contemporary debates about conceptual engineering do not engage much with the vast literature on conceptual change that exists in philosophy of science. In this article, I argue that an adequate appreciation of the history of philosophy of science can contribute to discussions about conceptual engineering. Specifically, I show that the evolution of debates over scientific conceptual change arguably demonstrates that, contrary to what is (...)
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  • Scharp on inconsistent concepts and their engineered replacements, or: can we mend these broken things?Mark Pinder - 2023 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 66 (5):863-884.
    Kevin Scharp’s influential work on the alethic paradoxes combines an extensively developed inconsistency theory with a substantial conceptual engineering project. I argue that Scharp’s inconsistency theory is in tension with his conceptual engineering project: the inconsistency theory includes an account of concepts that implies that the conceptual engineering project will fail. I recommend that Scharp revises his account of concepts, and show how doing so allows him to resolve the tension. The discussion is important for ongoing work on conceptual engineering. (...)
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  • Why Conceptual Engineers Should Resist Dialogical Individualism.Paul-Mikhail Catapang Podosky - 2024 - Topoi 43 (5):1671-1684.
    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 (...)
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  • Impactful Conceptual Engineering: Designing Technological Artefacts Ethically.Herman Veluwenkamp - forthcoming - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice:1-16.
    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 (...)
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  • (1 other version)Linguistic Imposters.Denis Kazankov & Edison Yi - 2024 - The Philosophical Quarterly 74 (4):1182–1206.
    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 (...)
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  • Conceptual engineering and conceptual innovation.Matti Eklund - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Conceptual engineering, motivated one natural way, involves the search for new concepts. But to what extent does conceptual engineering as practiced involve such conceptual innovation, and to what extent can it do so? In this paper, I first argue that conceptual engineering as practiced surprisingly does not appear to involve conceptual innovation, and then I discuss problems regarding the extent to which it can involve conceptual innovation.
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  • Keep using “democracy” in political theory.Mark Pinder - 2025 - Asian Journal of Philosophy 4 (1):1-17.
    This paper is a contribution to a symposium on Herman Cappelen’s 2023 book The Concept of Democracy: An Essay on Conceptual Amelioration and Abandonment. In that book, Cappelen develops a theory of abandonment—a theory of why and how to completely stop using particular linguistic expressions—and then uses that theory to argue for the general abandonment of the words “democracy” and “democratic”. In this paper, I critically discuss Cappelen’s arguments for the abandonment of “democracy” and “democratic” in political theory specifically.
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  • 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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  • Bias, machine learning, and conceptual engineering.Rachel Etta Rudolph, Elay Shech & Michael Tamir - forthcoming - Philosophical Studies:1-29.
    Large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT reflect, and can potentially perpetuate, social biases in language use. Conceptual engineering aims to revise our concepts to eliminate such bias. We show how machine learning and conceptual engineering can be fruitfully brought together to offer new insights to both conceptual engineers and LLM designers. Specifically, we suggest that LLMs can be used to detect and expose bias in the prototypes associated with concepts, and that LLM de-biasing can serve conceptual engineering projects (...)
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  • Conceptual Engineering for Externalists.Jussi Haukioja - 2023 - In Panu Raatikainen, _Essays in the Philosophy of Language._ Acta Philosophica Fennica Vol. 100. Helsinki: Societas Philosophica Fennica. pp. 211-224.
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  • Conceptual engineering in the Lvov-Warsaw School.Krzysztof Sękowski - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 68.
    The paper explores the relationship between conceptual engineering and the methodology of the Lvov-Warsaw School. While conceptual engineering is commonly seen as rooted in Rudolf Carnap's works and his method of explication, this paper argues that LWS predates and informs contemporary understanding of this methodology. The paper establishes that LWS not only engaged in but also systematically developed a method of conceptual revision aimed at enhancing clarity, precision, and coherence with specific theoretical frameworks. The analysis shows that LWS's approach to (...)
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  • Deciding What We Mean.Andrew Peet - 2023 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Stipulation gives us a degree of control over meaning. By stipulating how I will use a term I am able to determine the meaning it will receive on future occasions of use. My stipulation will affect the truth conditional content of my future utterances. But the mechanisms of stipulation are mysterious. As Cappelen (2018) argues, meaning is typically determined in an inscrutable way by a myriad of external factors beyond our control. How does stipulation override these factors? And the powers (...)
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  • Conceptual Ethics and The Categories of “Ideal Theory” and “Non-Ideal Theory” in Political Philosophy: A Proposal for Abandonment.Tristram McPherson & David Plunkett - forthcoming - New Perspectives on Conceptual Engineering.
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