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Deflating the functional turn in conceptual engineering

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Abstract

Conceptual engineers have recently turned to the notion of conceptual functions to do a variety of explanatory work. Functions are supposed to explain what speakers are debating about in metalinguistic negotiations, to capture when two concepts are about the same thing, and to help guide our normative inquiries into which concepts we should use. In this paper, I argue that this recent “functional turn” should be deflated. Contra most interpreters, we should not try to use a substantive notion of conceptual functions to handle various problems for conceptual engineering. The primary accounts of function appealed to by conceptual engineers, namely etiological and system functions, are not suited to handle many of the problems functions are supposed to handle, and it’s dubious whether any other account of function would do better. Instead of trying to use substantive functions to solve theoretical problems, we should deflate those problems themselves by focusing only on what matters to us, as speakers or theorists, in a given inquiry.

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Notes

  1. Cappelen (2018) is the go-to introduction to conceptual engineering. See also Burgess & Plunkett (2013a, 2013b) and the essays in Burgess et al. (2020). There is some dispute in the literature over what exactly conceptual engineering amounts to, and whether it’s distinct from “conceptual ethics” (Burgess & Plunkett, forthcoming). Since the terminological details aren’t at issue in this paper, I’ll elide them and refer to everything in the vicinity as conceptual engineering.

  2. Many conceptual engineers frame their projects in terms of repairing “defective” or “flawed” concepts, e.g. Scharp (2020). Simion & Kelp (2019) point out, no doubt correctly, that we can improve our concepts even if they aren’t defective, exactly.

  3. For answers to this question, see Haslanger (2020), Machery (2017), Koch (forthcoming a) or Isaac (forthcoming).

  4. See Prinzing (2018) or Ball (2020) for discussion of these questions.

  5. Cappelen (2018) is notoriously skeptical of our ability to implement conceptual change. See Riggs (2019), Koch (forthcoming b), Simion and Kelp (2019), and Chalmers (forthcoming) for some replies to Cappelen’s argument.

  6. Thomasson (2020) gives a pragmatist answer to this question, in terms of how well concepts do their jobs; Sider ( 2011) represents a more “metaphysical” approach, thinking that some concepts are intrinsically better.

  7. On some construals, conceptual engineering is mainly done by philosophers. On others, conceptual engineering is closely related to things ordinary speakers do all the time. Some perspectives of the latter sort include Plunkett & Sundell (2013), Ludlow (2014), and Brandom (1994, 2019).

  8. As this list suggests, individual conceptual engineers disagree about just how many of these different tasks functions are good for. While Simion & Kelp (2019) use functions to explain when conceptual engineering has been successful, they explicitly disavow that successful conceptual engineering in their sense must make the world a better place overall–i.e. their notion of success is not normative–and they respond to Strawson’s worry (more on which below) without drawing on functions. By contrast, Thomasson (2020) and Sundell (2020) seem to think that functions are both explanatorily and normatively interesting.

  9. As I’ll argue in Sect. 4, this gives us reason to doubt that functions can explain everything they’re supposed to–the explanatory requirements in each domain pull apart from one another. I think this has largely gone unnoticed in the literature, with the exception of Nado (forthcoming).

  10. Queloz (ms.) offers a third account of functions, “c-function,” which has to do with how concepts satisfy our concerns. I think this account captures something we might care about, but not everything of normative significance. See the discussion of other notions of function in Sect. 4.

  11. Some kinds of work one might deploy conceptual functions for could evade this taxonomy. For instance, Simion & Kelp (2019) use them to define one way of understanding what it takes for a conceptual engineering project to be successful. So I won’t argue that conceptual functions can’t explain anything at all. My argument is just that they can’t explain many of things they have been deployed for.

  12. Cappelen (2018) discusses this sort of samesaying phenomenon, although of course he doesn’t endorse a functional explanation of it. See also Cappelen (2020) and the papers it’s responding to, especially Sundell (2020).

  13. Some other examples of terms that have changed their intension but seem to still be about the same thing include “fish,” “marriage,” and “salad.”

  14. Carnap (1945) includes some relatively early discussion of his notion of explication; Carnap (1963) discusses Strawson’s objections. See also Cappelen (2018) for a contemporary reply to Strawson’s worry.

  15. My discussion here draws significantly on Sundell (2020).

  16. Haslanger (2012) discusses worries of this sort, as does Cappelen (2018) in his discussion of “Exploiters,” who change meanings without concern for any potential impact on our ability to communicate with one another.

  17. Although note that Sundell (2020), fn. 13 seems to defer to Thomasson (2020)’s description of etiological/system functions as the account he would want to endorse.

  18. See also Garson (2019) for a helpful introduction to and defense of this notion of function.

  19. Norenzayan et al. (2016) make the case for this cultural-evolutionary story about belief in moralizing gods, although they don’t themselves make the further functional claim. Henrich (2020) offers a similar story.

  20. The sense of “normative” at issue here is distinct from one at play in the functions literature itself, which is related to making sense of “dysfunction” or of what a mechanism is “supposed” to do.

  21. Cummins (1975) is perhaps the most prominent defender of this interpretation of functions.

  22. There are some hard questions about how robustly we should understand systems. Is anything at all that somehow contributes to its own existence a system? Or does a system need something else, like complexity, or particular constituent parts, or some such? Mossio et al. (2009) offer one account of what else is needed for the presence of functions. As usual, I’ll pass over the details here.

  23. One could interpret Manne’s (2017) account of sexism in this way.

  24. Note that neutrality could mean either having no view at all about what notion of conceptual function is correct, or neutrality between etiological and system function as being correct, but excluding all other candidates. The argument that follows would show that neutrality of the second sort, paired with the idea that conceptual functions do the relevant explanatory work, is also incorrect. It’s not entirely clear which kind of neutrality should be attributed to Thomasson (2020).

  25. Heath (2008) makes similar points about the relative unpredictability of the fitness of cultural variants, including words. See in particular pp. 259–264.

  26. The shift from concepts to terms here is intentional–presumably most transfer of concepts proceeds via terms, since people wouldn’t typically pick up on others’ concepts until those concepts are expressed linguistically.

  27. Haslanger (2012)’s work on the construction of social categories is pertinent here, although it would be outside the scope of this paper to properly engage with it.

  28. What if we say that speakers express views about conceptual functions de re, but not de dicto? That is, they are expressing views about something that turns out to be the function of the relevant concept, although they don’t conceive of it as such? Such a reply would remove the explanatory value of the appeal to function, since we would now lack an account of how speakers conceive of their utterances, and that latter account is presumably the one that would actually explain speech behavior, rather than just categorize it. Moreover, it’s unclear how likely it would be that speakers would conceive of themselves as expressing views about something that, unbeknownst to them, happened to line up with conceptual functions in every case. If conceptual functions don’t play the explanatory role, they probably don’t just happen to line up with speech behavior in the right way.

  29. One might try to say that functions supply the truth-conditions of these utterances, even if ordinary speakers don’t actually know it. But it’s hard to see what would motivate such an account, and in any case there would still be some explanatory work left over that functions aren’t performing, namely what belief states on the part of speakers are associated with these utterances. What state of mind is someone in when they attribute sameness or difference of meaning? Assigning truth-conditions that speakers don’t themselves grasp leaves this question unanswered.

  30. Some content externalists might be happy to say that psychologically identical concepts can nonetheless be distinct. Putnam’s (1975) original Twin Earth example, where a psychologically identical concept to our water refers to something else, could fit the bill here. There are two differences between this sort of case and the one at hand, though. First: content externalists need not say that the concept itself is different–all content externalism requires is that the content of the concept is different. Sameness of content clearly does not entail sameness of concept, since two concepts can have the same content but nonetheless be distinct, e.g. the concept water and the concept H2O. So things might come apart in the other direction as well: difference of content might not entail difference of concept, e.g. our term “water” and Twin Earthers’ term “water” might both express the same concept even though they refer to different things. It might be that the best account of concepts construes them internalistically as states “in the head,” say because they are grounded entirely in dispositions or abilities to discriminate objects, even though what concepts refer to is determined by facts external to the head. Of course, externalists need not think this; the point is just that externalism on its own does not rule out understanding concept identity itself as an internalistic matter, since externalism is a view about the content of concepts, not necessarily the metaphysics of concepts themselves. Second: the relevant external factors here (the etiology of a concept or how it works in a self-perpetuating system) are not the ones externalists usually countenance. In particular, these external factors could vary even if the relation between individual concept users and the referent of the concept stayed exactly the same. That is: a community of people using a concept like our water, in causal contact with the same watery stuff we are, could nonetheless count as using a different concept, if the etiology of their concept was different. But this seems like a case where internalists and externalists alike should want to say both communities have the same concept. After all, its psychological profile and referent are the same in both scenarios.

  31. The essays in Glasgow et al. (2019) would be informative here, although it’s outside the scope of this paper to sufficiently engage with them. And see Boyd and Richerson (1987) for a related cultural-evolutionary story of the emergence and significance of ethnic markers. For work on how race still functions oppressively, see Appiah (1996) and Mills (1998). Thanks to a referee for this journal for pressing me on this latter point and directing my attention to this work.

  32. Queloz (ms.) gives somewhat similar arguments against the normative relevance of etiological and system functions.

  33. Obviously some historical facts are normatively relevant. For instance, whether I said the words “I’ll meet you at noon tomorrow” yesterday is relevant to whether or not I should meet you at noon today, and the fact that my parents spent a lot of time and effort raising me bears on the responsibilities I have toward them now and in the future. But these kinds of cases aren’t really at play here.

  34. Although recall that Queloz (ms.) has an account of “c-function” that seems to be at least more normatively interesting than etiological and system function. But this notion leaves undone much of the explanatory work conceptual engineers were trying to use functions for.

  35. Chomsky (2000) makes this point forcefully. See also Yalcin (2014).

  36. Nado (forthcoming) also argues that we should not expect these two things to line up, although she doesn’t talk about them in the same vocabulary I do. Her argument is that conceptual revisions that change meaning or topic can nonetheless be legitimate.

  37. Pluralism about function has a number of defenders in the philosophy of science literature itself (Garson, 2018; Mahner & Bunge, 2001; Preston, 1998), although the view at play there isn’t exactly the one I’m after. One kind of pluralism is that there are multiple workable substantive notions of function. Another kind of pluralism, the sort I have in mind, is that functions are often attributed in a way that’s sensitive to the context or our interests, without any deep theoretical notion behind them. So it’s not just that sometimes speakers deploy etiological functions, and other times they deploy system functions, but rather they also sometimes attribute functions in a much looser way.

  38. E.g. Thomasson (2020, p. 448) talks about “the point of moral discourse” and “the role of the truth predicate.”

  39. This interpretation is related to the view defended in MacFarlane (2016).

  40. Nado (forthcoming) makes a related point.

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    Jared Riggs

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Riggs, J. Deflating the functional turn in conceptual engineering. Synthese 199, 11555–11586 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03302-5

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