Engineering what? On concepts in conceptual engineering
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Engineering what? On concepts in conceptual engineering Steffen Koch1 Received: 25 July 2020 / Accepted: 9 September 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract 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. Instead, I propose and defend the Dual Content View of Conceptual Engineering. On this view, conceptual engineering targets concepts, where concepts are understood as having two (interrelated) kinds of contents: referential content and cognitive content. I show that this view is independently plausible and that it gives us a comprehensive account of conceptual engineering that helps to make progress on some of the most difficult problems surrounding conceptual engineering. Keywords Conceptual engineering · Semantic externalism · Concepts · Dual content · Reference · Philosophical and psychological theories of concepts
1 Introduction Conceptual engineers think that philosophy should involve the critique and improvement of the concepts we use—both within and outside of philosophy. The potential impacts of this approach are interesting and far-reaching. Few things in the world are more important to human cognition and interaction than our concepts. They shape how we think about the world, how we communicate with each other, how we pursue our personal lives, and how we organize our society. Philosophy understood as conceptual engineering clearly has a lot of potential.
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Steffen Koch [email protected] Institut für Philosophie II, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Universitätsstraße 150, 44801 Bochum, Germany
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But what is the relevant notion of concepts? And what could it possibly mean to engineer them? These questions are of central importance to both the theory and the practice of conceptual engineering; but, as I’ll argue in this paper, they haven’t been answered satisfactorily.1 There are currently two main approaches to these questions in the literature. According to what I’ll call semanticism, conceptual engineering is concerned with word meanings. On this view, to do conceptual engineering is to advocate and implement changes in what our words mean (Cappelen 2018; Thomasson 2020). By contrast, according to what I’ll call psychologism, conceptual engineering is concerned with the psychological structures that explain our mental and linguistic behavior. On this view, to do conceptual engineering is to advocate and implement changes in how people classify things, what inference patterns they are drawn to, and under what circumstances they use particular linguistic expressions (Machery 2017; Isaac 202
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