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How to engineer a concept

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Abstract

One dimension of cognitive success concerns getting it right: having many true beliefs and no false ones. Another dimension of cognitive success concerns using the right concepts. For example, using a concept of a person that systematically excludes people of certain demographics from its extension is a sort of cognitive deficiency. This view, if correct, tasks inquirers with critically examining the concepts they are using and perhaps replacing those concepts with new and better ones. This task is often referred to as “conceptual engineering”. However, so far it is unclear what exactly happens in cases of conceptual engineering. How does language change when we engineer a concept? This article offers an answer. I propose a view on which, when speakers assess the truth of propositions, they often rely on assumptions with regard to what is required for their truth. For example, when speakers assess whether unborn fetuses are people, they rely on assumptions with regard to what is required to be a person. Based on this idea, I develop a model of conceptual engineering according to which speakers “engineer concepts” when they change how they assess the truth of propositions. For example, speakers engineer the concept of a person when they change how they assess the truth of the proposition that unborn fetuses are people.

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Notes

  1. 1See Burgess and Plunkett (2013a, b) and Burgess et al. (2019) for an overview and discussion.

  2. See United Nations, General Assembly (1984).

  3. See U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Assistant Attorney General (2002).

  4. For discussions of this case, see Chalmers (2011), Sundell (2011) and Plunkett and Sundell (2013, p. 19).

  5. The New York Times’ Editorial Board (Dec. 28, 2018) has provided a opinion piece that critically discusses some of the recent legal and social developments concerning fetal personhood. See Thomasson (2017) for a philosophical discussion of fetal personhood.

  6. See Fausto-Sterling (2018) for a popular summary of Faust-Sterling’s position.

  7. To explain the less obvious of these notions, ‘gonadal sex’ refers to the sort of gametes that one produces (egg or sperm cells). ‘Brain sex’ refers to the way in which brain cells stimulate the levels and patterns of sex hormones.

  8. More precisely, Byrne concludes that “The existence of some unclear cases shows that it would be incautious to announce that sex (in humans) is binary. By the same token, it is equally incautious to announce that it isn’t—let alone that this is an established biological fact”.

  9. Clarke (2018) provides a response to Byrne, to which Byrne (2018b) supplies a brief rejoinder.

  10. The converse obviously does not hold either. Not every disagreement that is of political or legal relevance is a case in which speakers attempt to engineer a concept.

  11. This view is inspired by my interpretation of Carnap. In Flocke (2020), I argue that Carnap thought that speakers assess each other’s utterances guides by rules that include syntactic rules, semantic rules and rules for the evaluation of empirical evidence.

  12. 12Coppock (2018) offers an alternative “outlook-based” semantics. She distinguishes between worlds and outlooks, where an outlook is a refined of a world and settles certain things that aren’t settled by a world. She uses this framework to give a semantics for subjective taste predicates. The main reason why I prefer a possibility semantics, as presented here, has to do with the metaphysics oof worlds. I think that worlds are complete and cannot have refinements as Coppock’s (2018) outlook-based semantics requires.

  13. For general introductions to social cognition research, see Fiske and Taylor (1984), Bless et al. (2004) and Kruglanski (1989).

  14. See, for instance, Haslanger (2000). See Cappelen (2018, Ch. 16) for a critical discussion.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank an anonymous referee for helpful comments and my audience at the 2019 Chapel Hill Normativity Workshop for helpful discussions. Work on this article has profited from several visiting fellowships at the research project ConceptLab at the University of Oslo. Many thanks to the directors for inviting me.

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    Vera Flocke

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Flocke, V. How to engineer a concept. Philos Stud 178, 3069–3083 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-01570-4

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