De-Novo Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Re-engineering
Concepts mediate our perception of reality – Immanuel Kant
What happens when the words we have been using have their meanings changed? The answer is simple, our perception and reality of the world changes. Changing the meaning of words is the first step towards creating a new world – Antony Kagirison
“We are as sailors who are forced to rebuild their ship on the
open sea, without ever being able to start fresh from the bottom
up. Wherever a beam is taken away, immediately a new one must
take its place, and while this is done, the rest of the ship is used as
support. In this way, the ship may be completely rebuilt like new
with the help of the old beams and driftwood—but only through
gradual rebuilding.” – Otto Neurath (1921, pp. 75-76)
What happens when moral values come apart and scientific desiderata are burst by postmodernism?
Conceptual engineering is a cognitively demanding feat that changes how reality is perceived with the framework of accepted justified beliefs. It is a job done by brilliant and intelligent people for the benefit of the public.
In —, Sally Haslanger wrote Gender and Race: What Are They? What Do We Want Them to Be?. This paper used conceptual engineering to redefine gender as a social construct thus paving way for recognition of non-binary genders as valid gender categories. Her approach to gender and race was not to ask “what is race?” or “what is gender?” but rather to ask “what should race be?” and “what should gender be?”. By exploring new definitions of these concepts, the consensus reality of what race and gender are were interrogated and found to be grounded in culture i.e the prevailing culture determined the traditional definitions of race and gender. In other words, encultured definitions of race and gender established their social,economic, and political reality. Upon this foundation, Haslanger was able to describe the concept of woman in the context of hierarchy of power and concluded that this concept has been given meaning that allows the female to internalize social oppression without her consent and without her realizing it because the culture in which she lives has mainstreamed that oppression.
For this reason, culture needed to be deconstructed in order to bring out new meanings of race and gender that were negated by power hierarchy that established the orthodox culture. This process of cultural criticism was pillared on post-structuralism and Foucaldian power/knowledge framework. To the political right and socially conservatives, this archeology of knowledge and power structures
— described these cultural critics, postmodernists, and cultural technologist as modern-day sorcerers who are excavating the ground of established knowledge to unearth hidden gems that could then be used to destroy orthodox or established power hierarchy and knowledge system through the process of unbuilding (or deconstruction) and then replace it with new knowledge systems.
Deconstruction of concepts lies at the heart of narrative deconstruction, myth debunking, and the unbuilding of Grand Narratives such as Rationalism, Zionism, Neoliberalism, Republicanism, Islam, Judaism, Nazism, Holocaust, Monarchism, and Idealism etc.
Manhole
Access hole
Conceptual Engineering
On September 2018, a workshop whose subject was designated as Foundations of Conceptual Engineering was held at New York University. Among the speakers was David Chalmers, and is talk focused on what conceptual engineering should be. A transcript of this talk was published in 2020 by the journal Inquiry under the title What is Conceptual Engineering and What Should It Be?
The definition of conceptual engineering provided by David Chalmers in this talk was a tiered definition. According to Chalmers, conceptual engineering is the design, implementation, and evaluation of concepts. This is the same definition that appears in Wikipedia under the entry Conceptual Engineering. However, this definition requires one to know two things: what a concept is and what is is engineering? I will start with the second question: what is engineering?
Technology and Engineering of Concepts
David Chalmers provided a concise definition of engineering in his talk at NYU in September 2018. I will modify Chalmers definition so as to provide a better definition of engineering as follows: engineering is the process of using acquired knowledge to design, build, and analyze objects. For the purposes of this post, I use the word objects here as the equivalent of Heideggerian being where being is anything that exists, including physical objects, ideas, human beings, beliefs, and as expected, concepts.
Engineering is the application of acquired knowledge to design, build, and/or analyze objects. How is this different from technology? According to…, technology is application of acquired scientific knowledge to solve a practical problem. So, do concept building serve to solve any practical problem? I will relate this question to a fad of the Russian Cosmists of the nascent Soviet Union – God-building. The Russian Cosmists
Including Niikolai Federov,
Their
Fauerbacher that god is a concept.
The question was not who is God but rather who God should be?
Engineering
Operate, maintain, repair, evaluate, forecast
It can thus be called God Engineering rather than God Building
Concept and Schopenahuer’s Representation
What is the target domain of conceptual engineering? This is the question that Manuel Gustavo Isaac sets to answer in his work titled,What Should Conceptual Engineering Be All About?, which was published in April 27, 2021, in the the journal, Philosophia.
Manuel Gustavo Isaac describes a concept as a representational device.
In Fixing Language: Conceptual Engineering and the Limits of Revision (2018), Cappelen presents the following challenge: What is a concept? How can this concept be engineered?
A branch of analytic philosophy
Conceptual engineering as an outgrowth of conceptual analysis
Conceptual analysis which is a branch of analytic philosophy that focuses on “analytical dissection of a concept” according to Rudolf Carnap (1950).
An ideal concept is disambugated
Prevent fallacy, formulate generalization that has explanatory value, and promotes group or human agency.
Manuel states that conceptual engineering is a method and not a practice. He differentiates method from practice using the idea of foundational theorization.
In a practice, a person can successfully complete a task without knowing the underlying theory of why that task can be completed in a specific way e.g booting up a computer requires one to just press the start button of the computer and wait until the login screen appears and then provide the required credentials to access the desktop screen. One does not need to know how the press of the button causes the computer to perform a power-on self test (POST) after reading data from the basic -input output system (BIOS). In any practice, a person is provided with a method of how to perform the practice.
Another example is learning a foreign language
Linguitics, stylometry, morphology, syntax
This is why one can easily tell an ESL from an ENL from their spoken speech.
A method requires one to know the foundational theory of how to perform a task.
Principles and procedures that must be applied in order to achieve a meta-odos
These principles and procedures are created in a specific field of study and are then applied in that same field of study.
This ensures that the action is efficient and consistent, while the target object become … accuracy and precision
This underlies the concept of professionalism or expertise.
Method requires a fortiori theoretical knowledge of the object to be worked on (also called the target object).
Principles and procedures are applied on a target object
Concept engineers work to develop a concept that optimizes human performance while preventing fallacies,
Principled versus Unprincipled Views
Principled View – conceptual engineering applies only to a specified representational device. This representational device can be a concept, an intension, a conception, a lexical item, a linguistic meaning, or a speaker-meaning.
It is divided into two wings.
The positive wing asserts that the representational device that is acted upon by conceptual engineering is the concept. It also asserts that linguistic meaning is part of a concept, and not a representational device. The positive wing is also called the positive principled view or pro-concept wing.
The negative wing asserts that the representational device that is acted upon by conceptual engineering is not the concept, but rather the linguistic meaning, conception, or speaker-meanings. The negative wing is also called the negative principled view or no-concept wing.
Unprincipled View – conceptual engineering applies to any representational device.
Lacks a delineated target domain
Underspecification/hypospecification or non-specification of the target domain
Efficient and consistent application
A method is created after gaining a theoretical understanding of the target object. This form of understanding is termed foundational theorization.
The actionability principle declares the positive principled view of conceptual engineering as the only viable form of conceptual engineering i.e the only form of conceptual engineering.
According to Manuel Gustavo, the ultimate goal, or final telos, of conceptual engineering is to create better representational devices that “foster better thinking, talking, and reasoning” (page 2058, 2021). If this telos is combined with the actionability principle, then the no-concept wing or negative principled view should be rejected. The reason is simple.
If conceptual engineering is not about concepts, then the term is a misnomer that creates misleading associations in the mind of people, and this creates a cognitive impediment – which is contrary to the ultimate goal of conceptual engineering.
Likewise, the negative principled view transforms the term conceptual engineering into a defective representational device that needs to be fixed using “conceptual engineering” so that it becomes a better representational device. The only way to fix this is by making concept the representational device in conceptual engineering.
The conceptual engineer must critically examine any representational device that (s)he receives. This is called representational skepticism.
In 2013, Burgess and Plunkett introduced a new term – foundational neutralism – in their work titled, Conceptual Ethics I, which was published by the journal, Philosophy Compass.
According to Manuel Gustavo, foundational neutralism allows one to “ deliberately choose to either underspecify or overspecify the subject matter of conceptual engineering” (page 2059, 2021). It can be considered as the third wing of the Principled View of Conceptual Engineering that allows one to choose either the positive wing (which is overspecification in foundational neutralism) or the negative wing (which is underspecification in foundational neutralism). On the downside, foundational neutralism allows one to underspecify the subject matter to the level of the Unprincipled View of Conceptual Engineering. Another demeit is that it allows one to overspecify each representational device and try to include all of them as the subject matter of conceptual engineering, thereby allowing the procedures and principles of these overspecified representational devices to clash with each other. It is these two demerits that compel Gustavo to discard foundational neutralism as a wing of conceptual engineering (page 2060, 2021).
Concept inflation
Concept deflation
Manuael describes this phenomenon as the Pluralization of Engineering Projects.
No-concept wing
Focus on representational device
Linguistic meaning is Semantic engineering
Lexical items is Lexical engineering
Terms is Terminological engineering
Depending on target objects
They fall under Representational devices engineering
Conceptual engineering is a compound hyponym made up of an adjective (i.e- conceptual) and a verb (i.e engineering). Conceptual is a qualification of the noun – conceptualization which simply means an elaborated concept. Concept has been explained. Now, the focus is on engineering. So, what is engineering?
Lexical effect
Connection between signified and the its signifier
Motivated morpheme
Demotivated morpheme
“The upshot is then a Golden Rule for lexical engineering: When the coining of
a new technical term builds on extant linguistic items that are themselves already
meaningful (viz., morphemes or lexemes), the new technical term should obey deci
pherability (or transparency) requirements. In other words, it should enable the
receivers to correctly infer the intended information from the signifier itself”
The Vienna Circle
Eliminate vagueness in concepts. This should also involve eliminating indeterminacy in these concepts.
Scientific concepts
Transformed into folk concept by the Public
In Quantum Mysticism is Stupid (Deepak Chopra, Spirit Science, Actualized.org), Dave Farina blames folk concepts for creating misunderstanding of their synonymous scientific concepts.
As Nersessian noted in 1989 in his paper, Conceptual Change in Science and in Science Education, “there is a surprisingly large discrepancy
in how particular concepts are understood within and outside of science”.
For example, innateness and human nature are understood differently within and outside science. Scientists understand life differently from lay people, with the latest definition of life as a concept being regarded as unpalatable by non-scientific minds.
In Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (2003), Godfrey Smith warned against “the temptation to come up with theories that are too broad and sweeping”.
Conceptual instrumentalism that is clearly borrowed from the field of scientific instrumentalism
“Conceptual Engineering = (i) The assessment of representational devices, (ii) reflections on and proposal for how to improve
representational devices, and (iii) efforts to implement the proposed improvements” – Cappelen and Plunkett
For this reason, concept is defined differently in cognitive science (including psychology and cognitive linguistics), philosophy, and folk discourse.
“Conceptual Engineering = (i) The assessment of concepts,
categories, and classificatory systems, (ii) determination of their
relevant contexts and purposes to which they are and should be
put to use, (iii) reflections on and proposal for how to improve
7them, and (iv) proposals for and active participation in the im
plementation of the suggested improvements.” – Walter Veit and Heather Browning.
Browning and Veit call their description of conceptual engineering as Ameliorative Pluralism or Conceptual Engineering Pluralism.
By extending concepts to cover categories and classificatory systems, Browning and Veit want to set their Ameliorative Pluralism apart from both Carnapian Explication and the Ameliorative Analysis of Haslanger.
In 2005, Sally Haslanger described ameliorative analysis is her paper titled, What Are We Talking About? The Semantics and Politics
of Social Kinds. She described it as follows:
““a project that seeks to identify what legitimate purposes we
might have (if any) […] and to develop concepts that would help us achieve these ends”
As will be explained later, ameliorative analysis is applied in concept re-engineering.
“considering what categories we should employ in the quest for social justice” – Haslanger on race and gender
Purposes of concepts: scientific and moral
Scientific adequate
Optimization for pragmatism and epistemology
Aesthetic values… aesthetic conceptual engineering (ACE)
If the principle of compositionality is applied to the two words – conceptual and engineering, then conceptual engineering is the process of designing and building elaborate concepts, as well as analyzing these concepts or any existing elaborate concept. This is a better definition of conceptual engineering than the definition provided by Chalmers (which was cited earlier in this post). My definition is
Syncs with the
By Walter Veit and Heather Browning that “conceptual engineering allows for evaluation and improvement of concepts according to the purposes to which they will be used” ().
Teleological Types of Conceptual Engineering
There are two teleological types of conceptual engineering: moral and naturalist conceptual engineering
Moral Conceptual Engineering (MCE)
This is conceptual engineering undertaken to achieve a political, social, or moral goal (or goals).
MCE focuses on moral values such as justice, wellbeing, and right
Among the products of MCE are the concepts of political correctness, wokeness, women rights, animal welfare, social justice, non-binary gender, racial equity, systemic racism, and the now popular acronym used in history of philosophy, DWEM (Dead White European Males).
“Moral Conceptual Engineering = (i) The moral, political,
and social assessment of concepts, categories, and classificatory
systems, (ii) determination of their relevant context and purposes
to which they are and should be put to use, (iii) reflections on
and proposal for how to improve them, and (iv) proposals for
and active participation in the implementation of the suggested
Improvements” – Walter Veit and Heather Browning.
Unlike Haslanger’s ameliorative analysis which relies on moral norms when engaging in conceptual engineering, MCE does not rely on moral norms because it aims to interrogate the existing moral norms and, if possible, create new moral norms.
Naturalist Conceptual Engineering
It developed from the concept called explication which was formulated by Rudolf Carnap in 1947. This is how Carnap described explication in his book, Meaning and Necessity: A Study in Semantics and Modal Logic:
“The task of making more exact a vague or not quite exact con
cept used in everyday life or in an earlier stage of scientific or logi
cal development, or rather of replacing it by a newly constructed,
more exact concept, belongs among the most important tasks of
logical analysis and logical construction. We call this the task of
explicating, or of giving an explication for, the earlier concept”
Basically, explication means disambiguating an existing concept. This reveals Carnap’s preference for the enlightenment values of rationalism, emancipation, empiricism, and freedom.
Scientific concept refinement
As a member of the Vienna Circle, Carnap wanted the concept to have utility in the development of a scientific law. Thus, explication was concept refinement through disambiguation so that it is scientifically useful or resourceful.
“Naturalist Conceptual Engineering = (i) The scientific as
sessment of concepts, categories, and classificatory systems, (ii)
determination of their relevant context and purposes to which
they are and should be put to use, (iii) reflections on and pro
posal for how to improve them, and (iv) proposals for and active
participation in the implementation of the suggested improve
Ments.” – Walter Veit and Heather Browning.
A bridging concept is a concept that has been developed using both methods of MCE and NCE e.g animal welfare. Consider the concept of animal welfare. It was described in terms of animal well-being by Peter Singer in his 1975 book, Animal Liberation. Before describing what animal welfare is, there is need to understand that four approaches can be used in concept design.
The first approach can be described as subjective welfare because it is concerned with the mental state of the animal, with animal welfare being the promotion of positive mental state in the animal. The second approach is described as physical welfare which is concerned with the physical functioning of the animal, with animal welfare being the promotion of good physical functioning. The third approach can be described as teleological welfare because it is concerned with the living conditions of the animal, with animal welfare being the promotion of natural living conditions for the animal. The last approach can be described as preference-based welfare because it focuses on meeting the preferences of the animal.
In terms of NCE, the concept of welfare should be measurable and disambiguated, while MCE demands that this concept should have a moral value. Therefore, the appropriate concept should be measurable, disambiguated, and possess moral value.
In Indicators of Poor Welfare by Broom that was published in 1986 in the British Veterinary Journal, animal welfare is described as the promotion of the capacity of the animal to cope with its existing environment. This prioritizes the physical welfare of the animal and not its living conditions, and was regarded as the most scientifically viable conceptualization of animal welfare at that time. The reason for this is simple: this concept was measurable as attributes of physical welfare such as prevalence of injury, growth rate, morbidity rate, mortality rate, and hormonal profiles can be measured with a fair degree of accuracy and precision. However, do these physical attributes lack a moral value?
A probable answer is yes if one considers the subjective welfare of the animals. To put it simply, a morbid animal experiences a negative mental state while an ambulatory healthy animal usually experiences a positive mental state.
In 2019, Browning in The Natural Behavior Debate: Two Conceptions of Animal Welfare argued that the best concept should consider the “ the lifestyle for which it (the animal) has evolved to live; generally focussing on the performance of natural behaviours”. This is the teleological welfare argument, and it performs poorly because it lacks measurable scientific metrics, as well as lacks accompanying intrinsic moral values. Naturalness cannot be measured nor described in inherently moral terms.
“of adopting or modifying scientific concepts is to assist in
educating the general public as to the preferred concept and the reasons underlying its choice”
In 2003, Dawkins described the concept of preference-based welfare in his paper titled Behaviour as a Tool in the Assessment of Animal Welfare which was published by the 106th issue of the journal, Zoology. He surmised this concept as follows “welfare is good when preferences are satisfied, and poor when they are frustrated”. He then described preference-based behavioral tests which automatically makes this concept scientifically measurable as tests do provide measurements. Normally, the animal is presented with two or more mutually exclusive choices, and then the choice it makes is noted as well as how much effort the animal makes to attain its choice. This is the preference of the animal. Here a question can be asked: is this preference valued because it creates a positive mental state? In that case, doesn’t the subjective welfare supervene over the preference-based welfare? In other words, isn’t preference-based welfare a sub-category of subjective welfare, albeit the most scientific rigorous sub-category?
So far, the best definition of animal welfare is provided by Fraser in his 1999 paper titled, Animal Ethics and Animal Welfare Science: Bridging the
Two Cultures, which was published in the journal, Applied Animal Behaviour Science. He defines animal welfare as follows:
““that animals should feel well by being free from prolonged or intense fear, pain and other unpleasant states, and by experiencing normal pleasures; that animals should function well in the sense of satisfactory health, growth and normal behavioral and physiological functioning; and that animals should lead natural lives through the development and use of their natural adaptations”
MCE and NCE are goal-oriented descriptions of conceptual engineering.
Later, the methods of conceptual engineering will be described as concept re-engineering and de-novo conceptual engineering.
In Conceptual Engineering: The Master Argument (2018), Herman Cappelen defines conceptual engineering as the “project of
assessing and improving our representational devices”, and then argues that concepts are the core representational device upon which other representational devices are built upon.
Are Conceptual Engineers to be Classified as Descriptivists or Revisionists?
In the history of philosophy, philosophers and intellectuals can be classified into two main groups – Descriptivists and Revisionists. Peter Strawson developed the terms Descriptivists and Revisionists in 1959 in his book titled Individuals. I derive the meaning of Descriptivism and Revisionism from the terms descriptive metaphysics and revisionary metaphysics which are explained in Individuals.
According to Strawson, descriptive metaphysics “is content to describe the actual structure of our thought about the world” (page 9, Individuals, 1959). Descriptivism can therefore be determined to be focused on explaining the existing concepts. The person engaging in descriptivism is a descriptivist, and this person focus is on describing existing concepts.
According to Strawson, revisionary metaphysics “is concerned to produce a better structure (of our thought about the world)” (page 9, Individuals, 1959). Revisionism can therefore be described as the effort to create better concepts from existing concepts. The person engaging in revisionism is called a revisionist.
Strawson described the history of philosophy as the realm of battle between Descriptivists and Revisionists. To me, this highlights the tension between contemporaneous intellectuals and philosophers. A good example is Moses ben Maimon (who I consider an Intellectual who used Aristotelian philosophy to explain Torah principles and concepts) and Moses de Leon who is considered as the real author of Sefer ha-Zohar (which introduced new concepts into Judaism thus giving birth to Kabbalah).
Strawson also categorized some eminent philosophers with Aristotle and Immanuel Kant falling under his descriptivist category, while Rene Descartes, Berkeley, and Gottfried Leibniz are described as revisionists.
It is for this reason that intellectuals are considered as Descriptivists.
Philosophers are usually regarded as Revisionists.
As Cappelen states, Descriptivists tend to find Revisionists as naive or unintelligible; while Revisionists tend to regard Descriptivists as uninspired, lazy, and complacent.
The philosopher who embodies the ideal Revisionist is Freidrich Nietzsche whose approach to inherited concepts is explained as follows in his book, The Will to Power:
“Philosophers … have trusted in concepts as completely as they have mistrusted the senses: they have not stopped to consider that concepts and words are our inheritance from ages in which thinking was very modest and unclear….What dawns on philosophers last of all: they must no longer accept concepts as a gift, nor merely purify and polish them, but first make and create them, present them and make them convincing. Hitherto one has generally trusted one’s concepts as if they were a wonderful dowry from some sort of wonderland: but they are, after all, the inheritance from our most remote, most foolish as well as most intelligent ancestors…What is needed above all is an absolute skepticism toward all inherited concepts.” (Nietzsche 1901/68, section 409 [emphasis mine]).
As will be explained later, the method of conceptual engineering known as concept re-engineering starts with a descriptivism and then concludes with revisionism. It happens this way, the concept is described and its deficiencies identified, and then revisionism is applied to minimize or eliminate these deficiencies thus ameliorating the identified conceptual defect.
Meaning as intension
Herman Cappelen describes intensions as “functions from points of evaluation to extensions”
An evaluation creates a function (or multiple functions)
Each function provides value, and this value is the extension.
Meaning assignment
Gradual change of meaning
Diachronic linguistics, also called historical linguistics, is a sub-speciality of linguistics that is focused on changes in syntax and semantics of a language over a period of time.
The gradual change of meaning of a word is the basic unit of language evolution.
Alternative meanings can be similar meanings or different meanings.
Similar meanings is an idea that
Anil Gupta describes two forms of concept improvement: absolute improvement and purpose-driven improvement
Explication for a specific purpose in a specific context
Expose hidden meaning
“we supply lacks” quine in word and object
Meaning with gaps
Degree of appropriateness of meaning of a concept
Cluster of meanings
Subscripted concepts
Borrows from Chalmer’s subscript gambit (verbal disputes, 2011)
E.g Freedom1, freedom2, freedom3,
“Which one of freedom1, freedom2,…,freedomn is really freedom?” – Chalmers (2011).
Bad concepts are concepts that harm the audience or target population. In Conceptual Engineering: The Master Argument, Herman Cappelen argues that is not advisable to conceive a bad concept or to assign to an existing concept a bad meaning as an alternative meaning. It is for this reason that religions guard the meanings to their corpus of concepts with all alternative meanings being assigned the status of heresy.
In his essay titled A Plea for Excuses – which was published by the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society in 1956 – John Austin said that “ordinary language . . . embodies . . . the inherited experience and acumen of many generations of men. . . . If a distinction works well for practical purposes in ordinary life (no mean feat, for even ordinary life is full of hard cases), then there is sure to be something in it” (page 11). Austin was making a case for defense of the orthodox meaning assigned to a concept. However, this should not stop the conceptual engineer from engaging in concept re-engineering when necessary. Austin agrees with this stance as he states later in the same essay that “ordinary language is not the last word: in principle it can everywhere be supplemented and improved upon and superseded” (page 11). This acknowledges the need to engage in revisionism when necessary.
Concept changes occur in tandem with changes in technology, politics, and morality.
Consider how Sally Haslanger sought to describe woman as a political concept
The original meaning of a concept can serve as the anchor for generating new meanings, as well as studying the trace of changes of meanings that have occurred across time and culture changes.
“language play an important role in the creation and preservations of social facts” – cappelen “If lexical items play some role in the creation and preservation of social facts, then changing the meaning of a lexical item might contribute to a change in social reality”
Concept Valuation, Activation, and Concept Activism
Because concepts are intangible, Chalmers argued during his talk that the noun building be replaced with the verb implementing. Therefore, the phrase building concepts should be replaced with the phrase – implementing concepts. However, I have a problem with Chalmer’s phrase because it implies that the concept already exist while the phrase building concept reveals that the concept is being created. Nonetheless, in page 2 of his paper, Chalmers equates building to design implementation, though he admits that implementing a concept presupposes that the concept already exists and that implementation allows for instantiation and execution of the concept. This means that concept implementation involves the activation and initial use of the concept. I call this process concept activation, which implies that the concept has become active i.e it has transitioned from its former state as a potential concept into the state of actual concept.
To use the concept in real-life, the concept must be popularized so that people can adopt and use it. Herman Cappelen called this popularization of a concept so that it can be adopted and used as concept activism.
The verb I would prefer instead of implementing is generating so that the phrase becomes generating concepts. However, my phrase encompasses the processes of designing and building concepts. In other words concept generation encapsulates the processes of concept design and concept build.
Chalmers also argued that the verb analyzing be replaced with the verb evaluating so that the phrase analyzing concepts is changed to evaluating concepts. I have a problem with his terminology. The verb evaluating describes the process of estimating the significance and quality of a concept and then forming a critical opinion about its nature and extent of its utility to understanding and dealing with the problem that necessitated the formation of the concept. Chalmers describes concept evaluation as passing a judgement on how good the concept is in itself (I call this intrinsic concept value), and how good is the concept when applied to serve a specific purpose (I call this applied concept value), as well as what roles the concept can play or be applied to (I call this the teleological concept value). The intrinsic concept value as well as the teleological concept value are used to determine the ethical nature of the concept. Chalmers argues that concept evaluation allows for flaws in the concept to be “repaired” or “debugged” if I may borrow the term from software engineering.
For me, analyzing is the best verb because it describes the process of breaking down the concept into its foundational components and then
The branch of analytic philosophy of concept analysis now falls under concept evaluation phase of conceptual engineering
Abstract versus Concreta: Concept as Analogous to Software
Like a concept, a software is an abstract object. Comparing concepts to software addresses a key question that is asked about conceptual engineering: How do you engineer a concept which is an abstract object? The software analogy applies even further to concept engineering because it helps address this question: How does conceptual engineering interact with reality?
If a software is an abstract object, then how does it have physical effects. The answer is simple, when the program is run in a computer, it instructs the computer to perform certain tasks. So how does this apply to a concept? Simple, when people understand a concept and use it to solve their existing problem, then the concept instructs these people how to think and act when solving this problem. It is for this reason that concepts that are grounded in rational logic are easy to understand and apply in real-life situations. This explains why such rational concepts appeal more than irrational concept, and because science is grounded on rational concepts, then it has gained more popularity than religion which is grounded on irrational concepts (with the exception of Postmodern Christianity which is grounded on process philosophy that allows for its concepts to be re-engineered according to existing needs as well as corpus of justified knowledge).
As mentioned, concept activism transforms an abstract concept into a concrete concept. The efficient telos of conceptual engineering is the concrete concept.
Applied Conceptual Engineering
Conceptual engineering is a product of Neitzschean non-foundationlism and Post-Heideggerian postmodern ontology and epistemology, especially Derridan deconstruction and Foucaldian power/knowledge analysis. Postmodernism created the foundation for present-day conceptual engineering as a field of academic study. As such, it is considered a sociopolitical field of enquiry, though I would extend this by stating that conceptual engineering has been applied to life sciences (e.g psychology, psychiatry, biology, internal medicine, and clinical chemistry) and physical sciences (e.g physics, chemistry, material science, and software engineering). An example of conceptual engineering as applied to life sciences is the description of life as a concept that was made by — in — as published in —. In literary criticism, conceptual engineering is central in understanding what Jacques Derrida described as the trace of meaning.
In the realm of public politics, conceptual engineering is considered as a leftist-liberal idea that was born in the halls of academy and lecture halls of the university, unlike conservative ideas such as inerrant power hierarchy and binary oppositions that were created by unenlightened and illiterate stone-age human beings. This explains why conservatives – who are now almost non-existent in university faculties, but dominate the epistemophobic political right – are opposed to such ideas a flattening the hierarchies and universal access to knowledge. As expected, such epistemophobes do not know – as well as do not want to know – about conceptual pluralism which would shatter what they regard as truth or justified knowledge. In fact, it can be argued that conceptual engineering has been responsible for the downfall of what was considered orthodox politics and moral regime of the 20th Century.
Conceptual engineering can be used to create new concepts and this is called de-novo conceptual engineering (and it is discussed later in this post). An example of de-novo conceptual engineering is the designing of the concept of supervenience by George Edward Moore in 1922 – one of the quartet of philosophers who established analytic philosophy.
(The other three philosophers in this quartet are Bertrand Russell who wrote Principia Mathematica, his student and author of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Johann Wittgenstein whose work on philosophy of language created the foundation for deconstruction and later study by Paul-Michel Foucault of how regimes of knowledge create power hierarchies; and Friedrich Gottlob Frege, a German philosopher and mathematician who wrote Begriffsschrift that laid down the foundation for development of modern logic and analytic philosophy).
Concept activation of supervenience was done by Richard Mervyn Hare and Donald Davidson, with the later applying this concept in anomalous monism. Subsequent concept activism was done by David Lewis, Terence Horgan, and Jaegwon Kim.
Conceptual engineering can be used to redesign and endow an existing concept with new meanings and purposes/functions, and this is called concept re-engineering. David Chalmers considers concept re-engineering to be fixing (or repairing or patching) a broken concept.Chalmers calls this mode the revisionary mode of conceptual engineering.
An example of concept re-engineering was the reconceptualization of existence as a metaphysical concept by Amie Lynn Thomasson. Another example is the controversial re-conceptualization of truth in semantics, ethics, and epistemology, especially the work of Kevin Scharp which describe truth an unelaborated concept that has a range of meaning thus necessitating the hierarchization of truth from descending truth to ascending truth. Concept re-engineering was also done by Ned Block in his work on consciousness which concludes that consciousness is an unelaborated concept that can best be redesigned by affixing hyponyms to this concept so that modular concepts such as access consciousness can emerge.
David Chalmers describes two modes of conceptual engineering – mode of creation and mode of fixing. De-novo conceptual engineering is the mode of creation while concept re-engineering is the mode of fixing.
Social philosophy and Linguistic Engineering
As Chalmers accurately points out, de-novo conceptual engineering is common in social philosophy where new concepts are frequently created to describe phenomena. Among these new concepts are epistemic injustice, hermeneutic injustice, and testimonial injustice coined by Miranda Fricker, explication which was developed by — Carnap, and deconstruction which was initially coined by the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger. Similarly, conceptual engineering is a new concept which was developed in 1990 by Richard Creath in his book, Dear Carnap, Dear Van: The Quine-Carnap Correspondence and Related Work.
Concept re-engineering is also used in social philosophy. An example is the concept of ameliorative analysis which was developed by Sally Haslanger to study gender and race.
Concept Re-Engineering and De-Novo Conceptual Engineering
The term that Creath coined for this new concept – i.e conceptual engineering – won over the term coined by Carnap to explain the same concept. Carnap had coined the term linguistic engineering, which reveals the influence of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language in his development and understanding of this concept. A more erroneous term that was invented to describe conceptual engineering is the (discredited) term – conceptual coinage.
In his magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation, the pessimistic German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, explained that there is not direct interaction between reality (or the world) and the human being who perceives the reality. He explained that this interaction of reality is mediated by perception, and that this perception is made up of representations of the world. The Swedish philosopher, Immanuel Kant, had already discovered that concepts allows these representations to form, and thus flawed concepts lead to formation of flawed representations of reality. For this reason, concepts are described as representational devices because they filter and determine how reality is represented to the human being. They are described as abstract devices because they are not built into the human body or mind, but are rather created by human beings using the talents of abstract thinking, speech, art, and writing. The description of concepts as representational devices allows for concretization of concepts.
In Fixing Language, Herman Cappelen defines conceptual engineering as the process of assessing and improving our deficient representational devices. Because we know that representational devices can be substituted with the noun concept, then his definition can be reworded as follows: the process of assessing and improving our deficient concepts. This is an inadequate definition of conceptual engineering as it focuses primarily on fixing defective concepts and does not give any consideration to concept generation. However, Cappelen was a victim of the paradigm that no new concepts can be added to the existing repertoire of concepts. The reason why this paradigm was adopted was simple – most of what were described as new concepts were simply renaming of existing concepts and they never described any new phenomenon. As will be explained later, the substituion of a term of an existing concept with a new term is called heteronymous conceptual engineering. This paradigm considers the term conceptual engineering as a replacement of the old term, explication, with both terms describing the same thing.
Mode of Creation versus Mode of Fixing
Cappelen definition of conceptual engineering necessitated Chalmers to differentiate the two modes of conceptual engineering. As mentioned above, Chalmers described these modes as the mode of creation and the mode of fixing. Chalmers aptly recognizes the term conceptual engineering as a new concept – a product of the mode of creation, not the mode of fixing. Therefore, Chalmers considers explication and conceptual engineering to be two different concepts that describe different phenomenon.
The two modes of conceptual engineering are not given the same weight by Chalmers with the mode of creation being privileged over the other mode as is evident in page 7 of his aforementioned paper: “the normative claim has an underlying nonverbal point: conceptual engineering should cover de novo conceptual engineering”.
At this point, it should be
Discontinuity of meaning which was a concern expressed by Cappelen and Plunkett in 2020 in their work titled, A Guided Tour of Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics.
Lexical Expansion is a term coined by Herman Cappelen and explained in his paper, Conceptual Engineering: The Master Argument (2018). Lexical expansion is the generation of a new word alongside a new meaning for this word. This allows him to differentiate between lexical expansion and lexical improvement. According to Cappelen, lexical improvement is the assignment of a new meaning to an existing concept.
When applied to the two modes described above, it is evident that lexical expansion is used in the mode of creation, while lexical improvement is used in the mode of fixing.
Mode of Fixing Applied Through Heteronymous Conceptual Engineering and Homonymous Conceptual Engineering
A concept must be labeled, and this process involves linguistic engineering. Before a concept is labeled, words are either invented or adopted from the existing vocabulary and then matched with the desired meaning of the concept.
Giving a meaning to a symbol
Symbolism
Langue and parole as Wittgenstein described them
It is why conceptual engineers are described as symbolists. A symbolist – a term derived from the artistic movement of the early 20th Century – is a person who develops a symbol and endows this symbol with a meaning.
How words should be used to label concepts
“Ethics of terminology” by Pierce
The mode of conceptual engineering also determines the type of linguistic engineering that is used in labeling concepts. In the mode of fixing or concept re-engineering, the concept is given a new meaning but it retains its original label. If the concept retains its original label but its meaning has been changed, then this is called homonymous conceptual engineering. It is for this reason that homonymous conceptual engineering is described as same-word linguistic engineering. Ideally, the new label allows the concept to play all its original roles, as well as play additional new roles. If this is achieved, then it is called ideal homonymous conceptual engineering.
An example of homonymous conceptual engineering is the concept of psychiatric disease.
Medicalization allowed homosexuality to be defined as a psychiatric disease
In another form of concept re-engineering, a concept can retain its meaning but acquire a new label, and this is called heteronymous conceptual engineering. As expected, heteronymous conceptual engineering is described as different-word linguistic engineering.
Access consciousness developed by Ned Block in — as a substitute for phenomenal consciousness.
Another example is civil union as a substitute for marriage
This exemplifies how conceptual engineering is applied in the field of social justice.
In religion, Kabbalah can be described the most successful metaphysical project of conceptual engineering.
Concept identity
Subject identity
Changing the subject
Control of meaning
More effort is required in Concept activism for homonymous conceptual engineering because there exists a community of people who already use the concept and match the existing concept identity to the old meaning, and they need to be convinced to match the same concept identity to a new meaning. Moreover, the old meaning has already acquired a certain social prestige in the community and the people may not want to easily let go that prestige. This is because this social prestige is determined by existing power hierarchies (hence its social status) and legal frameworks.
In politics and social justice, homonymous conceptual engineering have allowed for new ideas to gain widespread acceptance as they are associated with the prestige, orthodoxy, and appeal of the concept label. It is how gender was transformed from its former meaning as biological sex into its new meaning as social constructs. Basically, new roles were attached to traditional gender roles which blurred their former delimitation as biologically-determined roles.
Homonymous conceptual engineering is the basis of homographs. Theoretically, homographs can create confusion
Each phenomena to have its own label instead of multiple phenomena sharing the same label.
It why concept activism for homonymous conceptual engineering can succeed only when it is implemented in a small community, or by a wealthy, powerful or prestigious person in a large community.
Prestigious universities spearheaded wokeness
Ire of right-wing politicians and commentators is directed towrads universities and other centers of knowledge production and concept verification
Heteronymous conceptual engineering is the basis of synonyms
Modular Concept Design
I do build personal computers (PC) and this is possible because of modularity. For example, on May 12, 2024, I opened the chassis cover of my desktop console and removed the two aging 4 Gigabytes (GB) sticks of Random Access Memory (RAM) and replaced them with two 8-GB RAM sticks that have heat spreaders on them. When I started the PC, it registered the additional 8 GB of RAM. This is possible because the PC allows one to replace its constituent components, which is why the PC is described as having a modular design.
There are two types of conceptual engineering.
- De-Novo Conceptual Engineering
- Conceptual Re-Engineering
Concept Disambiguation and Concept Potentiation
Some of the key advances in philosophy have happened due to conceptual engineering. Philosophers have engaged in conceptual engineering from start to finish i.e concept generation, concept activism, and concept re-engineering. This has allowed philosophers to put their theoretical efforts into practical use. For example, postmodernism is a product of conceptual engineering done by French and German philosophers, among them being Paul-Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jurgen Habermas, Jean-Frangois Lyotard,
Arnold Toynbee coined the term postmodern in 1934 and developed it into a concept that describes historical chronology in 1939. However, it is the post-Heideggerian neitzchean philosophers in France and Germany who engaged in concept re-engineering who developed the concepts of postmodern and postmodernism, and then engaged in concept activism to get their concepts accepted and used by the public.
Philosophers have engaged in what I call concept potentiation. Concept potentiation is a form of concept re-engineering that makes a concept -usually a disambiguated – more powerful than it originally was.
Concept disambiguation is the process of clarifying the meaning of the concept by eliminating unclear meanings and replacing them with a cohesive clear meaning. Concept disambiguation modifies a concept so that it can play an explanatory role better. It also allows for an immoral or imprecise or inconsistent concept to be rehabilitated and given epistemic value that allows it play an explanatory role.
In Postmodernism – An Introduction, Thomas Docherty describes the impact of postmodernism in the following way:
“There is hardly a single field of intellectual endeavour which has not been touched by the spectre of ‘the postmodern’. It leaves its traces in every cultural discipline from architecture to zoology, taking in on the way biology, forestry, geography, history, law, literature and the arts in general, medicine, politics, philosophy, sexuality…”
Absolute Idealism, also called German Idealism was a product of Kantian philosophy as understood and interpreted by Hegel
Thesis Engineering
Conceptual engineering plays a central role in the invention, development, and analysis of a thesis.
Thesis is privileged over the concept
There is epistemic value in the relationship between concepts in the thesis
When a concept is used to explain a property of a language, then this concept is being applied in thesis engineering.
Carnap talked about the fruitfulness of a concept, I prefer the phrase potency of a concept.
The potency of a concept is its ability to be used in formulating and explaining different theses, as well as evaluating existing theses. The more theses that require this concept, the more potent is the concept.
Concept Pluralism
Can multiple concepts play a single role?
Legacy meaning of woman as a biological female is useful in medical and surgical practice
The legacy meaning of woman is useless in gender theory where woman is described as a social construct
Epistemic injustice
Cappelen called this concept pluralism.
Death of the Author
Cappelen has argued well that an outcome of conceptual engineering in the postmodern age is the inability of the conceptual engineer to control the meaning of the concept. This is due to what the postmodern philosopher, Roland Barthes called the Death of the Author. Cappelen states that this is the product of semantic externalism. It counteracts the efforts of concept design – the stage at which concept meaning is formulated.
Meaning and reference
Use and meaning
Concept marketing though mass media, influencer marketing, and marketing through academia.
A change in the meaning of a concept creates a dispute in the community using that concept. The reason for this can be stated as follows. The people who understand the concept before its change of meaning will be using the concept to describe its pre-change meaning while the people who understand the new meaning will be using the same concept to describe its post-change meaning. Therefore, the same concept is used to describe two different meanings with the person using that concept believing that the concept has only one meaning that is agreed upon. If the meaning changes, then the topic changes, and thus the same concept can said to have two different topics – the pre-change topic and the post-change topic. This change of topic due to change of meaning of a concept is called topic meaning discontinuity.
In Fixing Language, Cappelen argues that the same meaning can be conveyed by two different sentences whose semantic contents are different. Therefore, two different sentences can have the same semantic value. This is the basis of paraphrasing a sentence. Cappelen describes this preservation of semantic values across different semantic contents as preservation of topic. This is the basis of topic continuity across different semantic contents that convey the same meaning (i.e have the same semantic value).
Discourse continuity
Human mind and perception tracks discourse continuity, usually for inter-conversational or inter-contextual continuity that allows a person to indivudate conversation that occurred in the past (or are to occur in the future), or occurred in different places, or lasted for short or long durations, or involved a small or large group of people participating in the conversation
“lexical continuity as markers of topic continuity” – Cappelen (page 21)
In Chapter 11 of Fixing Language, Cappelen coins the term lexical effects to describe the effects that an existing concept label has acquired in the minds of people who know that label.
Usually, lexical effects are subconscious, and are related to associations and references that the word has acquired
Lexical effects give a word value in political, legal, social, and medical contexts
A post published by Live Science argued that political affiliation influences the way a parent names his/her child
E.g liberal parents prefer soft sounds such as liam or m,
While conservative parents prefer hard sounds like Kurt or t
Same applies to religious affiliation where religious parents priviledge theophoric names to secular names
To preserve the lexical effect, concept re-engineering is preferred to de-novo conceptual engineering
Conceptual engineering involves identifying representational defects and ameliorating these defects in the best way possible. This implies that not all the defects will be eliminated permanently, and thus the concept will need to be subjected to subsequent conceptual engineering. This can mean permanent conceptual engineering for value-laden concepts that impact power hierarchies and political systems. This idea is analogous to the Marxist concept of permanent revolution, which is why conceptual engineering is critiqued by right-wing political ideologues.
Concept Genealogy
All concepts are creations of the human mind.
Introductory event which demonstrated how something was done and its subsequent labeling. Later, descriptivists try to explain how this event occurred and why the label created for the concept was appropriate. Interestingly, this concept labeling and description could have been done by humans in remote prehistory, and the concepts were inherited through oral tradition. This means that modern humans cannot know the motivations of the remote humans who labeled and described these ancient concepts.
This tradition is based on what is known as chain of reference transition which means that during oral communication, the speaker and listener have the same frame of reference, and thus this communication is reference-preserving. Sometimes, the listener has a different frame of reference, and when (s)he communicates the concept orally to the next generation, uses his/her frame of reference thus creating a reference shift.
This shows that modern humans are not involved in reference determining process of inherited concepts, and thus had no control in reference determination of these inherited concepts.
Reference grounding
Defective representational devices
Hence the apt saying, “Human is to error”
Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny that is written by Manne, K, and was published by the Oxford University Press in 2017.
- Fricker, M. 2009. Epistemic Injustice. Oxford University Press.
- Cappelen, H. 2018. Fixing Language. An Essay in Conceptual Engineering. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Scharp, K. 2013. Replacing Truth. Oxford University Press.
- Burgess, A., & Plunkett, D. (2013). Conceptual ethics I. Philosophy Compass, 8(12), 1091–1101.
- Scharp, K. (2020). Philosophy as the study of inconsistent concepts. In A. Burgess, H. Cappelen, D. Plunkett (Eds.) Conceptual engineering and conceptual ethics (Chap. 19, pp. 396–416). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Tanswell, F.S. (2018). Conceptual engineering for mathematical concepts. Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 61(8), 881–913.
- Carnap, R. (1947). Meaning and necessity: a study in semantics and modal logic. University of Chicago Press.
- Searle, John (1995). The Construction of Social Reality. Free Press.
- Strawson, P. F. (1959). Individuals. Routledge.
- Isaac, Manuel Gustavo (2021). What should conceptual engineering be all about? Philosophia, 49(5):2053-2065.
- Haslanger, Sally (2012). Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique. Oxford University Press.
- Nietzsche, Friedrich. (1901/68). The Will to Power. Translated by W. Kaufmann. New York City: Random House.
- Quine, W. V. (1960). Word and Object. MIT Press.
An example of supervenience is the relationship between the internet and the world wide web (WWW). The WWW is part of the internet and is thus not synonymous with the internet but is a class below the internet.
