Recent work in the theory of conceptual engineering

Abstract

A philosopher argues that state-sponsored cyberattacks against central military or civilian targets are always acts of war. What is this philosopher doing? According to conceptual analysts, the philosopher is making a claim about our concept of war. According to philosophical realists, the philosopher is making a claim about war per se. In a quickly developing literature, a third option is being explored: the philosopher is engineering the concept of war. On this view, the philosopher is making a proposal about which concept we should have – even if it deviates from the extant concept, and even if it does not capture ‘what war really is’. The activity or method of proposing such revisionary definitions, as well as the metaphilosophical reflection on it, has become known as conceptual engineering.1 Herman Cappelen’s book Fixing Language (2018) played a central role in setting the terms of current debates, bringing fundamental questions to the fore and developing strategies for tackling them. The theory of conceptual engineering he develops in that book, which he calls the Austerity Framework, has proven to be highly controversial – and, as a locus of debate, very influential. Indeed, the Austerity Framework, along with Cappelen’s discussion more generally, is the starting point for much subsequent work in the field. Cappelen’s work is the foil against which new theories have been developed and defended. Cappelen sets the scene by pointing to a range of projects, inside and outside of philosophy, that he thinks of as conceptual engineering projects. These include projects such as Haslangerian ameliorative projects (Haslanger 2012), Carnapian explication (Carnap 1950) , revisionary views about moral language (Railton 1989), inconsistency theories of truth (Scharp 2013), the astronomical redefinition of ‘planet’ (I.A.U. 2006), public controversies over, for example, the meaning of ‘marriage’ (Ludlow 2014), and so on. According to Cappelen, a theory of conceptual engineering aims (in part) to draw out what is common to such examples: what the ‘conceptual engineers’ are doing and why and how they are doing it. But a theory of conceptual engineering