Conceptual control: on the feasibility of conceptual engineering

Abstract

This paper empirically raises and examines the question of 'conceptual control': To what extent are competent thinkers able to reason properly with new senses of words? This question is crucial for conceptual engineering. This prominently discussed philosophical project seeks to improve our representational devices to help us reason better. It frequently involves giving new senses to familiar words, through normative explanations. Such efforts enhance, rather than reduce, our ability to reason properly, only if competent language users are able to abide by the relevant explanations, in language comprehension and verbal reasoning. This paper examines to what extent we have such 'conceptual control' in reasoning with new senses. The paper draws on psycholinguistic findings about polysemy processing to render this question empirically tractable and builds on recent findings from experimental philosophy to address it. The paper identifies a philosophically important gap in thinkers' control over the key process of stereotypical enrichment and discusses how conceptual engineers can use empirical methods to work around this gap in conceptual control. The paper thus empirically demonstrates the urgency of the question of conceptual control and explains how experimental philosophy can empirically address the question, to render conceptual engineering feasible as an ameliorative enterprise.Conceptual engineering, experimental philosophy, polysemy, stereotypes, philosophical methods.

Which Concept of Concept for Conceptual Engineering?

“…Note that the importance of preliminary descriptive work is often overlooked in the literature that deals with conceptual engineering qua philosophical method. In addition to Machery (2017), other exceptions include Burgess andPlunkett (2013b), Dutilh Novaes (2016), Eklund (2021), Nado (2021), Plunkett (2016), Thomasson (2020), as well as some whose work reframes Carnapian explication as a precursory form of conceptual engineering (e.g., Brun 2016;Dutilh Novaes 2020a;Koch 2019;Schupbach 2017;Shepherd and Justus 2015).…”

“…Together, these two dimensions of the first step of our rebooted Carnapian explication correspond to the descriptive aspect of conceptual engineering as a method (Sect. 2), for they roughly consist of mapping "what possible and actual concepts there are" (Eklund 2021).…”

“…This step corresponds to the second of the three steps of the rebooted Carnapian explication (Sect. 3) and can be referred to, again in accordance with Eklund (2021), as 'the evaluative-prescriptive project.' Below, it will be carried out in three rounds, following our three recast Carnapian parameters of fruitfulness, exactness, and simplicity.…”

“…28 For example, achieving gender balance in the professional world could lead to modifying the content and structure of people's profession concepts and thereby contribute to mitigating the stereotypical gendered biases in their categorization process and general behaviors about these categories of profession. 29 For example, psycholinguistic studies have shown that the automatic deployment of gender-related stereotypical inferences may be mitigated by the explicit marking of deviation from stereotypes ('male secretary') or salient uses via, e.g., contextual cues ('scratches his beard') (Fischer 2020;Fischer and Engelhardt 2017).…”

Broad‐spectrum conceptual engineering

“…The re‐delineation of our conceptual contents would consist either in removing some of their composing elements or in including new elements in them, for instance, those which previously belonged to the background information—both of which, in turn, can be achieved by modifying the relevant parameters in the agent's environment with which their default retrieval co‐occurs. On the other hand, the mitigation of the inferential pattern of our conceptual contents would consist in blocking the automatic deployment of the stereotypical inferences they underwrite and replacing these by non‐stereotypical ones—which, in turn, can be achieved by linguistic means, via the explicit marking of the deviation from stereotypes or from salient uses with contextual cues (Fischer, 2020). In short, on the psychological approach, conceptual engineering would thus amount to a mind‐refurbishing process that aims to ameliorate the efficacy of concepts as cognitive devices and thereby essentially change the way in which people think about things so that it is better suited to executing the cognitive task it underpins.…”