Abstracts for Workshop on Conceptual Engineering
CSMN, 13-14 January, 2015
Generics don't essentialise people; people essentialise people!
Jennifer Saul
In recent years, a lot of wonderful work has started to be done in philosophy on the wmany ways in
which discrimination and social injustice are perpetrated and perpetuated. This has been immensely
revealing. To my mind, one of the most interesting topics that has begun to be explored is how it is that
subtle, unnoticed behaviours by people of good will can contribute to the problems that these people
may be genuinely committed to eradicating.[1] This led me to initially be very excited by recent
arguments from Sally Haslanger and Sarah-Jane Leslie that the use of generic terminology plays a
particularly important role in the perpetuation of racist and sexist beliefs. And I am not alone in this: I
have started to hear feminists catching themselves using generic terms to describe social groups, and
trying to rephrase their utterances at conferences, citing Haslanger’s and Leslie’s work as the reason.
But, as I will explain here, I think we do not yet have good reason to think that we should single generics
about social groups out as peculiarly destructive, or that we should strive to eradicate them from our
usage. Indeed, I think they continue to serve a very valuable purpose and we should not rush to
condemn them.
I view the current attention to generics as a mistake in the battle against prejudice. This is not because
they pose no problems—they do pose problems (though I am not yet convinced about some of the
problems claimed by Leslie and Haslanger). But so do many other closely related constructions. If we
focus our energies on avoiding generics, substituting other phrases that we take to be innocuous, we
will be making a serious error. Instead, we need to think much harder about how to confront many
sorts of utterances which make reference to social groups.
Conceptual Change, Sameness of Topic, and Lexical Effects
Herman Cappelen
How is conceptual change different from a change in topic? If extensions change, haven’t we just started
talking about something else? Can “1.001" ever be a refinement of / improvement on ‘1’? Isn’t it just a
different number? Aren’t all the interesting cases of conceptual revision like that?
This talk responds to these challenges in four steps: 1. We can have sameness of topic through change in
reference - across contexts, across times, and across worlds. 2. Content pluralism can explain how we
can have both continuity and variability. 3. What D.Ball calls temporal externalism might help
characterise the stable element. 4. Even if there is a change of topic, there can be arguments for keeping
the same word: the author might want to preserve lexical effects. I give a brief account of lexical effects
focused on brand names and pejoratives.
Viewing a Scientific Concept Tied to Aims and Standards
Ingo Brigandt
Concepts have typically been construed in terms of beliefs about the referent (e.g., definitions,
intensions, or inferential role). I argue that in addition to such representations of nature, some scientific
concepts should be viewed as tied to values. Such values include aims (e.g., an issue being deemed in
need of explanation) and standards (e.g., standards of explanatory adequacy). The particular aims and
standards underlying a concept’s use have to be philosophically articulated, as depending on the case
they (1) motivate and normatively justify conceptual change, (2) motivate conceptual variation and
create scientific disagreement, and (3) coordinate interdisciplinary integration (to the extent to which
agreement about standards is achieved). I illustrate this based on two examples: the homology concepts
and the concept of evolutionary novelty.
Conceptual Analysis and the Concept of a Concept
Henry Jackman
There are many conflicting accounts of how one should best engage in conceptual analysis, and this
multiplicity of approaches arguably stems at least in part from an inconsistency/confusion/ambiguity in
the concept of concept itself. The dominant conceptions of the nature of our concept can be roughly
be understood as either ‘psychological’ or ‘epistemic’, and it will be argued here while both conceptions
of concepts leave room for us to ‘improve’ our concepts by understanding the purposes they serve, the
‘transparency’ of concepts conceived epistemically requires these improvements to be understood in a
radically different way.