Conceptual Engineering, Inquiry and Communication

In our daily lives, we often take our concepts for granted.

Yet, in particular circumstances, it may turn out that the concepts we use are defective in relevant respects, and need to be revised (think, for instance, of the concept of marriage in several legal systems).

Analytic philosophers have coined the term “conceptual engineering” to describe processes of evaluation, revision or design of conceptual representations.

Often, the conceptual engineer modifies a word's intension (its “dictionary meaning”), thus changing the word's extension (its reference). Yet, as suggested by British philosopher P. F.

Strawson in a seminal paper, such revision may lead to a “change of subject”: while modifying the term's semantics, one ends up talking about something else.

In the current discussion, changes of subject are deemed detrimental to the unity of one’s inquiry, and are associated with the risk of communication breakdowns. The aim of CEIC is to assess the impact of the change of subject objection on conceptual engineering projects. CEIC consists of two workpackages (WPs).

WP1 will examine current strategies to respond to the change of subject objection (based on the notions of “topic”, of “concept function”, and on semantic externalism respectively), and will highlight their limitations.

WP2 will diagnose said limitations by pointing out a flaw in the objection itself: the notion of subject is highly indeterminate. The objection can, therefore, be downplayed.

The potential problems associated with it (namely, inquiry discontinuity and miscommunication) can, however, be addressed by adopting new strategies that highlight the importance of systematic meta-linguistic reflection throughout our inquiries.

Overall, CEIC will: (1) put the change of subject objection in the right perspective, and (2) explore novel methodological strategies for carrying out conceptual engineering projects both in philosophy and in other disciplines.