Two Kinds of Conceptual Engineering

Conceptual engineering provides a prima facie attractive alternative to traditional, conceptual analysis based approaches to philosophical method – particularly for those with doubts about the epistemic merits of intuition. As such, it seems to be a natural fit for those persuaded by the critiques of intuition offered by experimental philosophy. Recently, a number of authors [Schupbach, J. 2015. “Experimental Explication.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 94 (3): 672–710; Shepherd, J., and J. Justus. 2015. “X-Phi and Carnapian Explication.” Erkenntnis 80 (2): 381–402; Fisher, J. 2015. “Pragmatic Experimental Philosophy.” Philosophical Psychology 28: 412–433; Machery, E. 2017. Philosophy Within its Proper Bounds. Oxford University Press] have suggested that experimental philosophy might be employed in service of conceptual engineering. In this paper, I provide a novel argument for x-phi’s relevance to conceptual engineering, based on a ‘functionalist’ approach to conceptual engineering. In short, I argue that experimental philosophy is distinctively well-suited to investigation of the purposes or functions which our concepts serve, and the means by which they fulfil (or fail to fulfil) those functions. Experimental philosophy thereby uncovers potential engineering solutions that may serve as models for the conceptual engineer.

When fans of conceptual engineering discuss examples of their craft, they frequently focus on cases of ‘one-to-one’ conceptual engineering. That is to say, they focus on cases where a target pre-engineering concept is revised into, or replaced by, a single successor. The possibility that we might instead replace a suboptimal concept with multiple successors is, by contrast, comparatively underexplored. The goal of this paper is to defend this type of pluralist conceptual engineering as legitimate, and as a promising approach to unravelling certain traditional philosophical puzzles. I’ll do so largely by way of example, by exploring a preliminary application of the pluralist approach to one of the most notoriously recalcitrant targets of conceptual analysis: knowledge.

34th AIAA/ASME/SAE/ASEE Joint Propulsion Conference and Exhibit Cleveland, OH, July 12 - 15, 1998.

Chapter 7 proposes a new, naturalistic characterization of conceptual analysis, defends its philosophical significance, and shows that usual concerns with conceptual analysis do not apply to this revamped version. So understood, conceptual analysis encompasses both a descriptive project and a normative project, similar to explication or to conceptual engineering. Chapter 7 also defends the philosophical significance of this novel form of conceptual analysis and its continuity with the role of conceptual analysis in the philosophical tradition. Furthermore, naturalized conceptual analysis often requires empirical tools to be pursued successfully, and an experimental method of cases 2.0 should often replace the traditional use of cases in philosophy.

A striking feature of the contemporary philosophical scene is the flourishing of a number of research programs aimed in one way or another at (as Dretske puts it) making intentional soup out of nonintentional bones-more carefully, specifying in a resolutely nonintentional, nonsemantic vocabulary, sufficient conditions for states of an organism or other system to qualify as contentful representations. This is a movement with a number of players, but for my purposes here, the work of Dretske, Fodor, and Millikan can serve as paradigms. The enterprise in which they are jointly engaged is not so much one of conceptual analysis as it has been traditionally understood as one of conceptual engineering. That is, instead of thinking about what ordinary people or even sophisticated philosophers already mean by terms such as 'representation', they appeal to the tools of the special sciences (for instance, information theory and evolutionary biology) to describe abstractly, but in criticizable detail, how one might craft a situation in which some state arguably deserves to be characterized as 'representationally contentful' in various important senses. Insofar as the theories are good ones, they may shed light on how human knowers actually work. But their immediate aim is a broader one: to say what would count as doing the trick, rather than how we manage to do it. It is not hard to get into a position from which intentionality1 can seem philosophically puzzling. One need not, for instance, be an atoms-in-the-void physicalist in order to want to understand better the nature of the transition from a world devoid of semantic properties to one in which they are at least locally rife. One way of dispelling the sense of mystery that threatens to surround such a transition (indeed, where such a story is possible, the very