Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/12/2019, Spi OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/12/2019, Spi
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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/12/2019, SPi Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/12/2019, SPi OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/12/2019, SPi Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics Alexis Burgess, Herman Cappelen, and David Plunkett 1 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/12/2019, SPi 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © the several contributors 2020 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2020 Impression: 1 Some rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, for commercial purposes, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. This is an open access publication, available online and distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution – Non Commercial – No Derivatives 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), a copy of which is available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of this licence should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2019946746 ISBN 978–0–19–880185–6 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198801856.003.0001 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/12/2019, SPi Contents Note to Readers vii Contributors ix Acknowledgements xi 1. Introduction: A Guided Tour of Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics 1 Herman Cappelen and David Plunkett Abstracts of Chapters 27 2. Revisionary Analysis without Meaning Change (Or, Could Women Be Analytically Oppressed?) 35 Derek Ball 3. Minimal Substantivity 59 Delia Belleri 4. Reactive Concepts: Engineering the Concept C 79 David Braddon-Mitchell 5. Strategic Conceptual Engineering for Epistemic and Social Aims 100 Ingo Brigandt and Esther Rosario 6. Never Say ‘Never Say “Never”’? 125 Alexis Burgess 7. Conceptual Engineering: The Master Argument 132 Herman Cappelen 8. Preliminary Scouting Reports from the Outer Limits of Conceptual Engineering 152 Josh Dever 9. Descriptive vs. Ameliorative Projects: The Role of Normative Considerations 170 E. Díaz-León 10. Variance Theses in Ontology and Metaethics 187 Matti Eklund 11. Neutralism and Conceptual Engineering 205 Patrick Greenough 12. Going On, Not in the Same Way 230 Sally Haslanger 13. The Theory–Theory Approach to Ethics 261 Frank Jackson OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/12/2019, SPi vi 14. Conceptual Ethics and the Methodology of Normative Inquiry 274 Tristram McPherson and David Plunkett 15. Conceptual Evaluation: Epistemic 304 Alejandro Pérez Carballo 16. Analyzing Concepts and Allocating Referents 333 Philip Pettit 17. The A-project and the B-project 358 Mark Richard 18. Talk and Thought 379 Sarah Sawyer 19. Philosophy as the Study of Defective Concepts 396 Kevin Scharp 20. Linguistic Intervention and Transformative Communicative Disruptions 417 Rachel Katharine Sterken 21. A Pragmatic Method for Normative Conceptual Work 435 Amie L. Thomasson Index 459 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/12/2019, SPi Note to Readers No perfect partition of the table of contents emerged in the editing process. This reflects the fact that we have a rich field on our hands, with a variety of cross-cutting themes. The Introduction details many of these. But here we want to offer some brief guidance for readers eager to dig in. (An important proviso: the chapters listed below are obvious places to start; they aren’t meant to imply that no other chapters contain material relevant to the indicated topics.) If you’re coming to the volume unsure about the status or nature of the whole field, you might start with, in addition to the Introduction, the chapters by Braddon- Mitchell, Cappelen, Pérez Carballo, Pettit, Richard, Thomasson, Sawyer, and Scharp. The chapters by Cappelen, Sawyer, Scharp, and Thomasson generally represent a pro-attitude toward the field, while chapters by Ball and Greenough develop some skepticism. The chapters by Burgess, Dever, and Sterken take up various methodological challenges for doing conceptual engineering and conceptual ethics. If you’re coming to the volume with more applied interests, you might consult the chapters by Belleri, Eklund, and Thomasson for work on metaphysics, or the chapters by Brigandt and Rosario, Díaz-León, Haslanger, Jackson, McPherson and Plunkett, and Pettit for work on ethics and social/political philosophy. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/12/2019, SPi OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/12/2019, SPi Contributors D B is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of St Andrews. D B is a fixed-term Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Vienna. D B-M is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney. I B is Professor in philosophy and Canada Research Chair in philoso- phy of biology at the University of Alberta. A B is an independent philosopher. H C is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oslo, and at the University of St Andrews (1/5th time). J D is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas. E. D´-Ló is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Barcelona. M E is Professor of Philosophy at Uppsala University. P G is a Senior Lecturer in Logic and Metaphysics at the University of St Andrews. S H is the Ford Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. F J is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University, Canberra. T MP is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Ohio State University. A P´ C is Assistant Professor in Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. P P is L.S. Rockefeller University Professor of Human Values at Princeton University and Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University, Canberra. D P is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Dart- mouth College. M R is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University. E R is a PhD student in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Alberta. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/12/2019, SPi x S S is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Sussex. K S is Reader in Philosophy and Director of Arché at the University of St Andrews. R K S is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Oslo. A L. T is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Dartmouth College. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/12/2019, SPi Acknowledgements Many friends, colleagues, and institutions helped us put this volume together. ConceptLab at the University of Oslo was particularly important: in the spring of 2016, ConceptLab hosted a workshop where many of the papers were presented and discussed. Several of the contributions were also discussed in other events hosted by ConceptLab. We are particularly grateful to Derek Ball, David Braddon-Mitchell, Matti Eklund, Øystein Linnebo, Tristram McPherson, Olav Gjelsvik, Kevin Scharp, Rachel Sterken, Tim Sundell, and Amie Thomasson. We are also grateful to Matthew McKeever for his help throughout the process of putting this volume together, and to Ira Richardson and Max Frye for their help with the index. Finally, we got invaluable help from our editor at OUP, Peter Momtchiloff. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/12/2019, SPi OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/12/2019, SPi 1 Introduction A Guided Tour of Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics Herman Cappelen and David Plunkett Introduction In The Will to Power, Nietzsche writes the following: 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.¹ Nietzsche here articulates a radical skepticism about all inherited concepts. Philo- sophers should question whether the concepts we have are good enough and should engage in conceptual critique. What emerges, thinks Nietzsche, is the following: we should not just improve the concepts we’ve been given, reforming or “polishing” them in minor ways, but also create new ones—concepts not tainted by the “most foolish of our ancestors”. Even if you think Nietzsche’s claim is more than a bit hyperbolic, you might think some more moderate version of his view is justified. For example: maybe some of the concepts we have inherited are defective, or at least not as good as they could be for our current purposes.