Conceptual engineering and pragmatism: historical and theoretical perspectives

ABSTRACT

Conceptual engineering takes a distinctively normative and reconstructive approach to our conceptual repertoire. This approach is congenial to the ideas defended by philosophers belonging to the multifaceted tradition of American and Cambridge Pragmatism. This special issue is devoted to the investigation and development of these connections. Our introduction maps some of the historical and theoretical entanglements between the two fields and gives a short overview of the contributions to the special issue.

KEYWORDS:

• Conceptual engineering
• pragmatism
• metaphilosophy
• representationalism
• action

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For the sake of simplicity, in this introduction, we use ‘conceptual engineering’ to refer to the family of philosophical projects concerned with the amelioration of our conceptual devices: conceptual ethics, ameliorative analysis, revisionary projects, explication, etc. In line with the terminology defended by Burgess and Plunkett (2020) and McPherson and Plunkett in this special issue, we use ‘conceptual engineering’ in the broadest sense, which encompasses conceptual ethics as a subprogramme of conceptual engineering (the part that focuses on evaluative considerations), whereas conceptual engineering at large investigates additional matters (such as revision and implementation).

2 Two further, independent occurrences of the metaphor can be found in Richard Creath (1990) and Luciano Floridi (2011).

3 For work on further traditions and strands of thought see, e.g. Dutilh Novaes (2020) on Carnap and Foucault, Queloz (2021) on the practical origins of concepts in Nietzsche, Edward Craig, Bernard Williams, and Miranda Fricker.

4 For a comprehensive outline of what is at stake in the debate between Quine and Carnap in a pragmatist key, see (Price 2011) and (Thomasson 2015).

5 A main point of divergence among particular conceptual engineers (and also among particular pragmatists) can be traced to their endorsement or not of the analytic-synthetic distinction.

6 On the difference between antirealism and antirepresentationalism see, e.g. (Huetter-Almerigi 2022) and how various forms of antirepresentationalism frame realist intuitions (Huetter-Almerigi 2020).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Cambridge Commonwealth, European and International Trust [Award number 2090146].