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ABSTRACT
The later Carnap is usually cited as the first conceptual engineer – someone who argues that we can and should revise our concepts in order to make them fit for their purpose. This paper shows that there is an earlier, pragmatist, account of conceptual engineering and that today’s conceptual engineers would do well to turn to it, rather than to Carnap.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 See, for instance, Cappelen (Citation2018), Leitgeb and Carus (Citation2021), Brun (Citation2016). The pragmatist position I articulate here as the proper underpinning of conceptual engineering will be closer to that of the later Wittgenstein and indeed, I argue elsewhere that he got it from the pragmatists (Misak Citation2016).
2 Brun (Citation2016) and Chalmers (Citation2020) use the term ‘re-engineering’.
3 See Peirce (CP 7.623) and Misak (Citation2012) for an extended discussion.
4 Lewis’s student Quine snapped up his teacher’s account of knowledge and the a priori, changing the metaphor from a pyramid of belief to a web of belief, without attribution. Quine’s account is not as good as Lewis’s in many ways, for instance, in his dismissal of ethics. But the web metaphor is better than the pyramid one, as it is not so suggestive of a hierarchy, so I will employ it.
5 See Misak (Citation2000) for the full argument.
6 A referee pointed out to me that a Carnapian could re-engineer the concept of language or theory to allow for the same language or theory to persist across certain kinds of change, rather than saying that involves choice of a new language. Indeed, one who followed Carnap could do that. But then they would be a Ramseyan pragmatist.
7 (Pap Citation1943, 451, 454, 457; Pap Citation1946, vii). Pap also credits Dewey as an influence. Dewey put forward a functionalism, on which the core meaning of a concept is found in the function it plays in the theory. Ernst Cassirer, guest professor at Yale and director of Pap’s MA thesis, also provided stimulus for his idea of the functional a priori. See (Stump Citation2011) for an excellent discussion. But it is Lewis who most clearly shines through in Pap’s work.
8 See Hahn, Carnap, and Neurath (Citation1929, 318).
9 There must be limits to how much theory change can be had while preserving sameness of meaning and those limits will be hard to identify. Perhaps something like Kuhn’s normal and revolutionary science is the distinction we need. But clearly, there is more work to be done here.