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  1. 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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  2. Framed and framing inquiry: a pragmatist proposal.Céline Henne - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-25.
    In this article, I draw an important distinction between two kinds of inquiry. “Framed inquiries” take for granted and use a conceptual framework in order to ask and answer questions, while “framing inquiries” require the creation, revision, or expansion of the conceptual framework itself in order to address the problem at hand. This distinction has been largely ignored in epistemology, and collapsed by two radically opposed philosophical camps: representationalism and antirepresentationalism. While the former takes all inquiries to be in the (...)
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  3. The Practical Implementation Challenge: A Pragmatist Response to Deutsch’s Dilemma for Conceptual Engineers.Celine Henne - 2024 - In Piotr Stalmaszczyk (ed.), Conceptual Engineering: Methodological and Metaphilosophical Issues. Brill. pp. 69–92.
    According to Max Deutsch, conceptual engineers face a dilemma: either they target semantic meanings, in which case they are engaged in an infeasible activity (the “implementation challenge”), or they target speaker meanings, in which case they are engaged in a trivial enterprise (the “trivialization challenge”). Focusing on the first horn of the dilemma, I argue that the “transubstantiation version” of the implementation challenge only holds for representationalist approaches to conceptual engineering, according to which concepts are individuated by their representational relation (...)
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  4. Physicists’ views on scientific realism.Céline Henne, Hannah Tomczyk & Christoph Sperber - 2024 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 14 (1):1-27.
    Do physicists believe that general relativity is true, and that electrons and phonons exist, and if so, in what sense? To what extent does the spectrum of positions among physicists correspond to philosophical positions like scientific realism, instrumentalism, or perspectivism? Does agreement with these positions correlate with demographic factors, and are realist physicists more likely to support research projects purely aimed at increasing knowledge? We conducted a questionnaire study to scrutinize the philosophical stances of physicists. We received responses from 384 (...)
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  5. John Dewey: Was the Inventor of Instrumentalism Himself an Instrumentalist?Céline Henne - 2023 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 13 (1):120-150.
    In discussing instrumentalism in philosophy of science, John Dewey is rarely studied, but rather mentioned in passing to credit him for coining the label. His instrumentalism is often interpreted as the view that science is an instrument designed to control the environment and satisfy our practical ends, or likened to the Duhemian view that scientific objects are useful fictions for organizing observable phenomena. Dewey was careful to qualify the first view and denied holding the second. Furthermore, the observable/unobservable distinction does (...)
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