The Routledge Handbook of Social and Political Philosophy of Language

Justin Khoo, Rachel Katharine Sterken, Justin Khoo, Rachel Katharine Sterken

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000375497
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This Handbook brings together philosophical work on how language shapes, and is shaped by, social and political factors. Its 24 chapters were written exclusively for this volume by an international team of leading researchers, and together they provide a broad expert introduction to the major issues currently under discussion in this area.

The volume is divided into four parts:

Part I: Methodological and Foundational Issues
Part II: Non-ideal Semantics and Pragmatics
Part III: Linguistic Harms
Part IV: Applications

The parts, and chapters in each part, are introduced in the volume's General Introduction. A list of Works Cited concludes each chapter, pointing readers to further areas of study. The Handbook is the first major, multi-authored reference work in this growing area and essential reading for anyone interested in the nature of language and its relationship to social and political reality.

PART I

Social and Political Language

Methodological and Foundational Issues

1

Conceptual Engineering in Philosophy

Matti Eklund

1 Introduction

A good place to start when explaining and motivating what is variously called conceptual engineering, conceptual ethics, and ameliorative projects is the following passage from Nietzsche:

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…¹

Nietzsche puts this in characteristically dramatic terms. Put less dramatically, the basic idea is that there are concepts other than those we actually have and employ, and some of those concepts may be better suited for various purposes than our actual ones are. We can and should question our concepts, and consider whether there are better ones out there. And insofar as there are better ones out there, we should try to change our ways so that we come to employ the better concepts. There is then a philosophical project of critically assessing, and potentially revising or replacing, concepts.

I will later say more about how to understand the talk of concepts here. But there is one thing it is important to be clear on right away. The project is not just one of critically assessing our theories of various subject matters. It is one of critically assessing the concepts themselves, where “concepts” are the basic representational building blocks of thought. Sometimes in ordinary language, “concept” is used loosely, in such a way that mere changes in theory trivially count as changing one’s “concept”. Here I will employ a concept/conception distinction, such that while such changes trivially count as changing one’s conception of the matter at hand, it is a further question whether this counts as a revision of the concept itself. Maybe in some cases it does, but it is a theoretically contentious matter if and when it is so.²

This project described is not a new one. Philosophers have often (or always?) to some extent critically assessed concepts, coming up with their own technical concepts where the old concepts have not seemed up to the task, as well as revise and criticize existing concepts. Within the analytic philosophy tradition, Carnap (1950, ch. 1) and Quine (1960) both prominently stress explication. Within the continental tradition, theorists like Heidegger make up their own concepts for describing the world. Brandom (2002) describes Leibniz, Spinoza, and Hegel as conceptual engineers.³ As displayed by the passage quoted above, conceptual engineering is a central theme in Nietzsche. And these are just a few examples. But what arguably is new is systematically studying conceptual engineering, where that involves finding features common to seemingly quite disparate conceptual engineering projects and delving into general questions raised by such projects. For example, it can be claimed that the revision and replacement of concepts isn’t always self-conscious, and by making explicit what we are doing and being more systematic we can do it better; and by comparing conceptual engineering projects from different parts of philosophy we can shed useful light on them. Much of the discussion below will concern the study of conceptual engineering – the newer development – rather than the activity of conceptual engineering itself. There has been a flurry of work on conceptual engineering in recent years. There is too much to usefully list or summarize, but among more important work can be mentioned Burgess and Plunkett’s pioneering articles (2013) and (2013a), Cappelen (2018), Scharp (2013), the essays collected in Haslanger (2012), and the essays collected in Burgess, Cappelen, and Plunkett (2020).

In the discussion below I will keep returning to paradigm examples of conceptual engineering from the recent literature: Sally Haslanger on the concept woman and Kevin Scharp on the concept truth.⁴ This is partly for the sake of convenience. These examples are often discussed, and well-known. But it should be kept in mind that these are just some of many examples.

Different labels have recently been used for the kind of project I will describe – “conceptual engineering”, “conceptual ethics”, and “ameliorative project”. For the purposes of my discussion here I will not be concerned with differences between these labels, even though distinctions can be drawn.⁵

2 Examples

Here, in brief, are Haslanger’s and Scharp’s ideas.

Haslanger thinks that we should replace the actually used concept woman by the following one:

S is a woman iff S is systematically subordinated along some dimension (economic, political, legal, social, etc.), and S is “marked” as a target for this treatment by observed or imagined bodily features presumed to be evidence of a female’s biological role in reproduction.⁶

The motivation, put briefly, is that there is oppression of the kind described, and employing a concept that captures that is a way of raising the fact to salience, in a way that helps combat this oppression. I should perhaps stress that Haslanger at least sometimes clearly speaks of changing our conception of the concept woman rather than changing the concept woman itself: she emphasizes that how the concept seems to us (“the manifest concept”) differs from how the concept really works (“the operative concept”).⁷ However, in the discussion to follow my focus will be on Haslanger qua conceptual engineer.

Scharp argues that our concept truth is in a certain sense inconsistent, in a way that comes to light through semantic paradoxes such as the liar paradox. He then goes on to argue that because the concept truth is inconsistent we should replace it, and he proposes as replacement a pair of concepts which together can do the work that, in theoretical contexts, we want the concept truth to do for us.⁸ The differences between Haslanger’s and Scharp’s projects are stark, which is one reason for juxtaposing them in the context of discussing conceptual engineering. The concepts they focus on are obviously very different, and the considerations they bring to bear are also different.

3 Preliminary Remarks

Armed with these very brief sketches of two prominent conceptual engineering projects, let me now address some questions which likely arise.

What are concepts? There is no uncontroversial answer to this question. At a first stab, they are the basic building blocks of thoughts, or of the thoughts that have something like linguistic structure. Perhaps one can say that concepts are the meanings of (subsentential) expressions.⁹ Needless to say, these characterizations carry theoretical baggage, and can be questioned. And even if the latter gloss can be defended, it is only moderately helpful, for example because there are different theories of what meanings are. One important distinction between views on meaning is that between views on the meaning of an expression is its intension, and views on which meaning is something more fine-grained which determines its intension. Some authors in the conceptual engineering literature, e.g. Scharp, approach meaning and concepts via the question of what it is to be competent with an expression or concept. One might for example say that to be competent with a concept is to be disposed to accept such-and-such principles involving it, or (Scharp’s preferred view) entitled to accept such-and-such governing principles it. This approach allows for meanings or concepts to be more fine-grained than intensions: for different sets of governing principles can correspond to one and the same intension.

While as it is often discussed conceptual engineering concerns, precisely, concepts, this need not be taken very seriously.¹⁰ First, somewhat more neutrally one can speak of representational devices. And some may prefer to speak of words and their reference and extension, instead of speaking of concepts. Instead of asking which concepts we should have, one can ask which things we should have words for. Second, at least for some purposes one might sidestep representational devices altogether and instead directly speak in terms of that which such devices refer to or ascribe. Instead of saying, for example, “we should employ the concept green and not the concept grue” one can say: we should focus on the property greenness and not the property grueness. (Note that questions analogous to those of the individuation of concepts arise also in the case of properties: can there be two properties which are necessarily co-instantiated yet are distinct?) I say “for some purposes”, both because there are not always corresponding worldly items (consider e.g. non-representational language and thought), and because sometimes what is at issue is not just what is represented but the manner in which it is represented.

Who are “we”? In the above characterizations of Haslanger’s and Scharp’s projects, I have spoken of what “we” should do. But who are “we” here? Answers can differ depending on the project concerned. Scharp is at pains to emphasize that his proposal that the concept truth be replaced concerns only what certain kinds of theorists should do, in the context of their theoretical investigations. He is not at all concerned with everyday uses of the concept. By contrast, Haslanger is at least in part concerned with what concept woman should be used more broadly, even if her focus is on feminist theorizing.

Retail or wholesale? The previous remarks are relevant also another natural question. Is the conceptual replacement or revision supposed to be retail – the proposal concerns only some uses of the concept – or wholesale – concern all uses of the concept? As already the above remarks on Scharp indicate, Scharp’s revision is clearly retail. He only means to address the question of which truth concept should be employed in certain theoretical contexts. Whereas I don’t see Haslanger committing herself to a wholesale view, her view is at least closer to such a view.

What is it for a concept to be better than, or preferable to, another? First, it can be claimed that there are some possible outright defects that a concept can have and that a concept is generally better than another if the former is defect-free and the latter has one of these defects. Among such defects can be inconsistency and indeterminacy. Another defect might be that the use of the concept in some sense presupposes the truth of a false view, for example a false normative view.¹¹ (Perhaps the use of a concept expressed by a racial slur presupposes the truth of some false racist belief. Perhaps the use of concepts like those expressed by “promiscuous” or “chaste” presupposes the truth of certain false moral beliefs.¹²)

Second, there can be reasons that are more specific to the task at hand. A concept can be better than another in the sense that employing the former is more likely to generate positive social change. A concept can be better than another because it better tracks what is explanatorily powerful or inductively useful. A concept can be better than another simply because it is easier for creatures like us to work with. And so on. There will be many relevant dimensions along which a concept can be better than another.

What is it to revise a concept? Sometimes in discussions of conceptual engineering, the focus is on revising a particular concept: before the changes the concept has a particular intension and maybe some particular governing principles, and after the changes the concept has a different intension and maybe different governing principles. Such talk invites questions about what changes a concept can undergo and still remain the same concept. Can a concept really survive a change in intension or governing principles? My own view is that such questions are not very important. There are simply different ways of individuating concepts, and so long as we are clear on which method of individuation we choose, nothing of interest hinges on the choice. If we are strict about concept identity then what some people speak of as one concept undergoing changes is in fact the replacement of a concept by another, related one. I myself gravitate toward such strict individuation; but I do not see my favoring that as my taking a stance on a theoretically significant issue.

At any rate, not all changes to our overall conceptual repertoire in the spirit of the Nietzsche passage above would be instances of the kind of co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Social and Political Language: Methodological and Foundational Issues
• Part II Non-Ideal Semantics and Pragmatics
• Part III Linguistic Harms
• Part IV Applications
• Index