As part of that larger project, I want to introduce a frame that, to my knowledge, hasn’t yet been discussed to any meaningful extent on this board: conceptual engineering, and its role as a solution to the problems of “counterexample philosophy” and “conceptual analysis”—the mistaken if implicit belief that concepts have “necessary and sufficient” conditions—in other words, Platonic essences.
After reading the essay, I’m still confused by what conceptual engineering actually is. Is it a claim about how humans use language in general, a philosophical technique like conceptual analysis is, or both?
(You seemed to attack Chalmers for trying to offer a definition for conceptual engineering, but a brief definition for the concept was exactly what I found myself hoping for. I think you are saying that you don’t want to offer one because terms don’t have necessary and sufficient definitions so offering a definition goes against the whole spirit of the approach… but you also note that we learn words by seeing a specific example and expanding from that, so I wouldn’t think that it would be contrary to the spirit of the approach to offer a brief definition and then expand from that once the readers have something to hang their minds on.)
Yes, so the premise of Chalmers’s lecture, and many other texts being published right now in conceptual engineering (a quickly growing field) is to first treat and define “conceptual engineering” usingconceptual analysis—a strange ouroboros. Other philosophers are doing more applied work; see Kevin Scharp’s version of conceptual engineering in his work on truth, or Sally Haslanger’s version of it, “ameliorative analysis.” But broadly, Chalmers’s tentative definition is fine as a generic-enough umbrella: constructing, analyzing, renovating, etc. Right now, really anything in the ballpark of what “conceptual engineering” intuitively connotes is a fine description.
One place to start, as Cappelen does in his monographs on the subject, is with Nietzsche’s Will to Power, so I’ll quote that here:
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.
Might add to the main post as well for clarity.
EDIT: Also, to be clear, my problem is not that Chalmers attempts to offer a definition. It’s that, when presented with an intellectual problem, his first recourse in designing a solution is to consult a dictionary. And to make it worse, the concept he is looking up in the dictionary is a metaphor that a scholar twenty years ago thought was a nice linguistic turn of phrase.
After reading the essay, I’m still confused by what conceptual engineering actually is. Is it a claim about how humans use language in general, a philosophical technique like conceptual analysis is, or both?
(You seemed to attack Chalmers for trying to offer a definition for conceptual engineering, but a brief definition for the concept was exactly what I found myself hoping for. I think you are saying that you don’t want to offer one because terms don’t have necessary and sufficient definitions so offering a definition goes against the whole spirit of the approach… but you also note that we learn words by seeing a specific example and expanding from that, so I wouldn’t think that it would be contrary to the spirit of the approach to offer a brief definition and then expand from that once the readers have something to hang their minds on.)
Yes, so the premise of Chalmers’s lecture, and many other texts being published right now in conceptual engineering (a quickly growing field) is to first treat and define “conceptual engineering” using conceptual analysis—a strange ouroboros. Other philosophers are doing more applied work; see Kevin Scharp’s version of conceptual engineering in his work on truth, or Sally Haslanger’s version of it, “ameliorative analysis.” But broadly, Chalmers’s tentative definition is fine as a generic-enough umbrella: constructing, analyzing, renovating, etc. Right now, really anything in the ballpark of what “conceptual engineering” intuitively connotes is a fine description.
One place to start, as Cappelen does in his monographs on the subject, is with Nietzsche’s Will to Power, so I’ll quote that here:
Might add to the main post as well for clarity.
EDIT: Also, to be clear, my problem is not that Chalmers attempts to offer a definition. It’s that, when presented with an intellectual problem, his first recourse in designing a solution is to consult a dictionary. And to make it worse, the concept he is looking up in the dictionary is a metaphor that a scholar twenty years ago thought was a nice linguistic turn of phrase.
How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Chisel
As long as it’s not with a bulldozer...
https://medium.com/s/story/peterson-historian-aide-m%C3%A9moire-9aa3b6b3de04