Recent work in the theory of conceptual engineering

Abstract

A philosopher argues that state-sponsored cyberattacks against central military or civilian targets are always acts of war. What is this philosopher doing? According to conceptual analysts, the philosopher is making a claim about our concept of war. According to philosophical realists, the philosopher is making a claim about war per se. In a quickly developing literature, a third option is being explored: the philosopher is engineering the concept of war. On this view, the philosopher is making a proposal about which concept we should have – even if it deviates from the extant concept, and even if it does not capture ‘what war really is’. The activity or method of proposing such revisionary definitions, as well as the metaphilosophical reflection on it, has become known as conceptual engineering.1 Herman Cappelen’s book Fixing Language (2018) played a central role in setting the terms of current debates, bringing fundamental questions to the fore and developing strategies for tackling them. The theory of conceptual engineering he develops in that book, which he calls the Austerity Framework, has proven to be highly controversial – and, as a locus of debate, very influential. Indeed, the Austerity Framework, along with Cappelen’s discussion more generally, is the starting point for much subsequent work in the field. Cappelen’s work is the foil against which new theories have been developed and defended. Cappelen sets the scene by pointing to a range of projects, inside and outside of philosophy, that he thinks of as conceptual engineering projects. These include projects such as Haslangerian ameliorative projects (Haslanger 2012), Carnapian explication (Carnap 1950) , revisionary views about moral language (Railton 1989), inconsistency theories of truth (Scharp 2013), the astronomical redefinition of ‘planet’ (International Astronomical Union 2006), public controversies over, for example, the meaning of ‘marriage’ (Ludlow 2014) and so on. According to Cappelen, a theory of conceptual engineering aims (in part) to draw out what is common to such examples: what the ‘conceptual engineers’ are doing and why and how they are doing it. But a theory of conceptual engineering may also go beyond concrete examples, laying out the prospects for using conceptual engineering to solve philosophical problems or to enhance social justice, laying out its implications for the nature of thought and language, developing an account of whether and how conceptual engineering should proceed, and so on. Plausibly, then, a theory of conceptual engineering should seek to balance a variety of normative and descriptive considerations. In our terminology, it should provide a rationalizing description of conceptual engineering practice. It should give a plausible description of what conceptual engineers are doing, where that description makes rational sense of conceptual engineering practice and serves as a blueprint for how future conceptual engineering projects should be undertaken. In this review, we aim to structure and systematize the rapidly growing literature on theories of conceptual engineering. We map out some of the emerging trends with respect to two core components of any such theory.2 The first component is a theory of targets, that is, of what conceptual engineers are (or should be) trying to engineer. The second component is a theory of engineering, that is, of how those targets are (or should be) engineered, of which mechanisms and processes are (or should be) used to carry out conceptual engineering. We begin by introducing the core components of the Austerity Framework, before distinguishing two kinds of objections and sketching a variety of theories that have been subsequently developed. We close with some thoughts about future research. At face value, you might expect a theory of conceptual engineering to begin with a seeming truism: conceptual engineering is the engineering of concepts. According to Cappelen’s Austerity Framework, however, conceptual engineering ‘isn’t about concepts, and there isn’t really any engineering’ (Cappelen 2018: 4). According to Cappelen, conceptual engineering doesn’t target concepts. Rather, in the first instance, conceptual engineers are trying to change the intensions of expressions, understood as functions from possible worlds to extensions (61). Cappelen’s principal motivation for this view is that, in contrast to individual theories of concepts, intensions and extensions are theoretically austere: I appeal to non-controversial ingredients that you already have at your disposal, I leave out all the controversial machinery, and I can explain the same phenomena. (142) There is also, according to Cappelen, a more substantive target for conceptual engineering: the world. Cappelen develops this view via the introduction of topics: We can talk about the same topic, e.g., knowledge, belief, freedom, or marriage, even though the extension and intension of ‘knowledge’, ‘belief’, ‘freedom’, and ‘marriage’ change. (103) Cappelen doesn’t have an account of topics, but a core idea is that they are more coarse-grained than intensions. Thus, according to the Austerity Framework, it is possible to change the intension of a word without changing the topic. Suppose, for instance, that a philosopher successfully changes the intension of ‘war’ at time t, so that ‘cyberattacks count as acts of war’ was false before t but true after t. According to Cappelen, so long as the change is within the ‘limits of revision’, the philosopher has not thereby changed the topic: she is talking about the same thing when using ‘war’ as others speaking before t. This allows her to truthfully say things like: ‘What a war is has changed.’ ‘War changed at t’ In this sense, Cappelen claims that conceptual engineering is worldly. While it targets intensions in the first instance, conceptual engineering is ultimately about changing the world. How can the intensions of expressions be changed? Cappelen tells us that this is a matter for metasemantics, the study of the facts in virtue of which words and concepts have the meanings or contents they do. Cappelen endorses a mixture of externalist metasemantic assumptions that he derives from Putnam (1975), Kripke (1980), Burge (1979) and Williamson (2007). In Cappelen’s words: The external environment that speakers are in partly determines extensions and intensions. The relevant elements of the external environment include experts in the community, the history of use going back to the introduction of a term, complex patterns of use over time, and what the world happens to be like (independently of what the speakers believe the world is like). (Cappelen 2018: 63) According to Cappelen, one must act upon these kinds of factors to engineer intensions (and thus the world). However, Cappelen is not optimistic about the engineer’s prospects. Firstly, the factors relevant to determining meaning are ‘too complex, messy, nonsystematic, amorphous, and unstable for us to fully grasp or understand’ (72). Secondly, the factors ‘are not within our control’ (72). In other words, according to the Austerity Framework, our control over the intensions of words is limited, and consequently our conceptual engineering ambitions are as well. It is in this sense that, on the Austerity Framework, there ‘isn’t really any engineering’. Suppose, then, that you are a conceptual engineer, trying to revise the concept of war. According to the Austerity Framework: you are best interpreted as trying to change the intension of ‘war’; you are very unlikely to succeed; but, were you to succeed, your efforts would change the nature of war itself. We have distinguished two core components of any theory of conceptual engineering: a theory of targets, and a theory of engineering. Accordingly, we will distinguish between two core groups of objections to the Austerity Framework: objections to Cappelen’s theory of targets; and objections to Cappelen’s theory of engineering. We take them in reverse order. According to Cappelen, we (philosophers) have almost no control over the meanings of our words. But many supporters of conceptual engineering think that their proposals are implementable. This is a pernicious instance of the so-called implementation problem, the objection that conceptual engineers cannot implement their proposals (Deutsch 2020a).3 Driven by this and other concerns, a host of objections have been raised to Cappelen’s theory of engineering. Two principal strategies have been taken: argue that Cappelen is endorsing the wrong metasemantic theory; or argue that metasemantics is irrelevant, and so Cappelen shouldn’t be appealing to a metasemantic theory at all. Koch (2021a, 2021b) develops one instance of the ‘wrong metasemantic theory’ strategy. He points to variants of semantic externalism, such as those of Evans (1973) and Devitt (1981), that are explicitly designed to explain reference change. Koch argues that such variants give groups of people ‘collective long-range control’ over the meanings of words. In effect, to change the meaning of a word from m1 to m2, speakers must collectively (mis)use that word as if it means m2 until, after some time, the meaning shifts. According to Koch, any plausible metasemantic theory should allow for collective long-range control, and so a theory of conceptual engineering should be built around such a metasemantic theory. More generally, Riggs objects to Cappelen’s emphasis on semantic externalism. According to Riggs, ‘if semantic externalism of the sort under consideration is true, then conceptual engineers don’t want to change meanings after all’ (Riggs 2019: 4). Riggs imagines a fictionalized Richard Rorty who ‘wants “justified” to stop meaning something like “properly mirroring the world” and to start meaning something like “defensible to one’s peers”’, because ‘this way will lead to more fruitful theorizing’ (2). Riggs then imagines that everybody adopts Rorty’s proposal, using ‘justified’ in the proposed way, leading to the envisaged more-fruitful theorizing. Riggs argues that, even if semantic externalism were true and – because of, for example, the structure of reality or the opinions of experts – the meaning of ‘justified’ hadn’t changed, Rorty would rightly be satisfied. Meaning-as-envisaged-by-the-semantic-externalist simply isn’t what conceptual engineers (should) care about. If this is right, then an adequate theory of engineering will not be built around an externalist metasemantic theory. Versions of the ‘metasemantics is irrelevant’ strategy are developed by Pinder (2021) and Nado (2021). Pinder considers cases of local conceptual engineering, in which one designs and articulates a technical definition for local use. For example, imagine a soccer pundit making this argument: There’s a certain type of person who loves soccer in a nerdy way. She never plays, but she watches all the matches, knows all the stats, and understands the minutiae of the rules. I call her a statistician. My theory is that most soccer referees are statisticians, but that ex-players make better referees than statisticians. According to Pinder, this local revision of ‘statistician’ counts as an instance of conceptual engineering. And, if the expected audience understands how the term is being used, it is a successful instance of conceptual engineering. But this judgement of success is prior to our metasemantic theorizing. That is, we do not need to engage in metasemantic theorizing at all to see that the soccer pundit has successfully undertaken local conceptual engineering. According to Pinder, this shows that, at least in local cases, metasemantic theorizing is irrelevant to conceptual engineering. Nado focuses on a very different of – one social that the of were to from on and to us that the metasemantic theory is such that meaning is by factors at the time of a such that no of change will to meaning change. that the of us that, to the facts of its ‘marriage’ to between a and a that it really – we conceptual engineers would to to others to with The point is not to be to the of to the of the of The thought is that, in the of projects conceptual engineers have in simply are not to the metasemantic If Pinder and Nado are right, then Cappelen’s theory of engineering doesn’t make rational sense of what conceptual engineers are should not appeal to a metasemantic theory in a theory of engineering. The Austerity intensions as the principal targets of conceptual engineering. objections have been raised against this The objections have to the idea that it is a to leave concepts out of the – the consideration is that there is some of in a that doesn’t concepts ‘conceptual engineering’. According to If conceptual engineering is not be) about concepts, then the very of conceptual engineering would of the very core of conceptual that better to better and It would then conceptual engineers with a have been raised about the of Cappelen’s theory of targets to do the argues that what conceptual engineers really care about is our in for example, by and by making more However, there are about how the intensions of expressions are to these phenomena. 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