Foundational issues in conceptual engineering: Introduction and overview

Abstract

We, the editors, provide a brief introduction to the main topics of the issue and then summarize its contributions.KEYWORDS Metaphilosophy; philosophical methods; conceptual engineering; topic discontinuity challenge; conceptual genealogy; experimental philosophy Recent case studies have shown how widely applicable and powerful the method of conceptual engineering is in philosophy. For instance, Sally Haslanger has shown how conceptual engineering can improve normative theorizing by enabling us to develop categories of race and gender

From naturalness to materiality: reimagining philosophy of scientific classification

“…Still, one may wonder whether it is actually feasible to instigate conceptual change from "naturalness" to "materiality". This worry can be further articulated through recent debates about an "implementation challenge" (Queloz and Bieber, 2022;Jorem, 2021;Isaac & Koch, 2022) of conceptual engineering-philosophers have neither the authority nor power to become the language police of scientific or public discourse. From a naturalist perspective that treats philosophy and science as continuous, however, the implementation challenge rests on a misleading distinction: Conceptual change is ubiquitous in scientific practice and if philosophers of science are part of these practices (rather than policing them from the outside), there is nothing suspicious about proposing and testing new conceptual tools.…”

Conceptual engineering: A road map to practice

“…There are two main aspects to current research in conceptual engineering. First, the theory of conceptual engineering reflects on conceptual engineering qua method and addresses its foundational issues (e.g., Burgess et al., 2020; Cappelen, 2018; Isaac & Koch, 2022). For instance, theorists interested in these issues ask questions such as: should conceptual engineering operate on concepts, words, or some other representational device?…”