https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6168-6080
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ABSTRACT
On a representationalist view, conceptual engineering is the practice of changing the extensions and intensions of the devices we use to speak and think. But if this view holds true, conceptual engineering has a bad rationale. Extensions and intensions are not the sorts of things that are better or worse as such. A representationalist account of conceptual engineering thus falls prey to the objection that the practice has a bad rationale. To account for the assumption that conceptual engineering is worthwhile, we propose to view what is being engineered as inferential devices, as opposed to representational devices. The objective is not to establish that being or having an inferential role is all there is to meaning or conceptual content. Rather, our agenda is to recommend a shift of focus from the representational features of content to the inferential features of content for the purposes of doing and thinking about conceptual engineering. Inferentialism about conceptual engineering makes better sense of the practice than a representationalist approach: In addition to accounting for the rationality of engaging in conceptual engineering, inferentialism provides a sound interpretation of what is at stake in concrete examples of conceptual engineering.
Acknowledgments
We thank Steffen Koch, Christopher Masterman, and the participants to the online workshop ‘Conceptual Engineering and Pragmatism’, organized by Yvonne Hütter-Almerigi and Céline Henne in July ‘21, for fruitful questions, comments and objections.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 It is not crucial that the circumstance of evaluation is a possible world. With uncontroversial adjustments, the argument applies to alternative conceptions of a circumstance of evaluation.
2 Note that extensions may also be indeterminate as such. The ensuing discussion also applies to purely extensional indeterminacy.
3 https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/30/world/europe/norway-killer-of-77-was-insane-during-rampage-prosecution-says.html (accessed July 18, 2021). The court ordered, and eventually sided with, a second psychiatric evaluation according to which the subject was sane at the time of committing the acts and hence liable to punishment (TOSLO-2011-188627-24, 47-71, accessed July 18, 2021 at https://lovdata.no/static/file/1282/toslo-2011-188627-24-eng.pdf).
4 Thomasson (Citation2021) also proposes that we understand what is being engineered in inferentialist (and ‘artifactualist’) terms, because it makes better sense of various features of conceptual engineering, including that what is being engineered (or targeted for revision) is a functional artifact with norms of use, and because it promises to rationalize projects in conceptual engineering. In essence, what we do in the present paper is develop the latter reason for being inferentialist about conceptual engineering at length.
5 There are at least two ways of understanding the target inferential relations. First, one may be concerned with the inferences we are disposed to make. This has us treat concepts as subject to empirical, psychological inquiry, e.g. as described by Machery (Citation2009, Citation2017). Second, following Sellars and Brandom, one may be concerned with the inferences we are committed or entitled to make. Our inferentialism about conceptual engineering remains neutral between the former, dispositional construal and the latter, normative construal (however, see Löhr Citation2021). Attempts to change our conceptual norms and dispositions are closely tied together: A change of norms may engender a change of dispositions and vice-versa. We believe that conceptual engineers in the first instance care (and should care) about the normative relations (c.f. Thomasson Citation2021), and we think it is fair to assume that dispositional changes follow suit to normative changes, but our argument does not hinge on these assumptions.
6 This is also why we follow Brandom in using the phrase ‘goodness of inference’ and not ‘validity of inference’. If there are proprieties of inference without (or prior to the introduction of) logical vocabulary, we need to distinguish good and bad inferences without assimilating the former to formally valid inferences, and the latter to non-valid inferences.
7 This is not to say that it captures everything that follows from someone’s knowing something, or everything from which you may infer that someone knows something. For example, it may follow that we ought to trust what A says about a matter M, if we have found that A knows that p, where p is some proposition that pertains to M. Generally, concepts have consequences of application that exceed what we may capture by the conditions that are necessary for its application. There may be consequences that hold, for example, as a matter of what has been described as typicality effects by prototype theorists, or what follows only in virtue of auxiliary hypotheses/beliefs.
8 Accounting for conceptual engineering is arguably a point in favor of a theory of meaning, but we do not intend to defend semantic inferentialism on this basis in the present paper.
9 Riggs (Citation2019) and Thomasson (Citation2021) support this approach. Riggs argues that it is our job to engineer a sense for ‘meaning’ that captures what conceptual engineers are trying to revise and construct. Thomasson observes that how we need to conceive of concepts to better understand exercises in conceptual engineering need not be identical to how we need to conceive of concepts for other purposes.
10 This echoes Haslanger: ‘instead we begin by considering more fully the pragmatics of our talk employing the terms in question. What is the point of having these concepts?’ (Haslanger Citation2000, 33)