At a conceptual level I’m completely on board. At a practical level I fear a disaster. Right now you at least need to find a word which you can claim to be analyzing and that fact encourages a certain degree of contact and disagreement even if a hard subject like philosophy should really have 5 specific rebuttal papers (the kind journals won’t publish) for each positive proposal rather than the reverse as they do now.
The problem with conceptual engineering for philosophy is that philosophers aren’t really going to start going out and doing tough empirical work the way a UI designer might. All they are going to do is basically assert that their concept are useful/good and the underlying sociology of philosophy means it’s seen as bad form to mercilessly come after them insisting that: no that’s a stupid and useless concept. Disagreements over the adequacy of a conceptual analysis or the coherence of a certain view are considered acceptable to push to a degree (not enough imo) but going after someone overtly (rather than via rumor) because their work isn’t sufficiently interesting is a big no no. So I fear the end result would be to turn philosophy into a thousand little islands each just gazing at their own navel with no one willing to argue that your concepts aren’t useful enough.
At a conceptual level I’m completely on board. At a practical level I fear a disaster. Right now you at least need to find a word which you can claim to be analyzing and that fact encourages a certain degree of contact and disagreement even if a hard subject like philosophy should really have 5 specific rebuttal papers (the kind journals won’t publish) for each positive proposal rather than the reverse as they do now.
The problem with conceptual engineering for philosophy is that philosophers aren’t really going to start going out and doing tough empirical work the way a UI designer might. All they are going to do is basically assert that their concept are useful/good and the underlying sociology of philosophy means it’s seen as bad form to mercilessly come after them insisting that: no that’s a stupid and useless concept. Disagreements over the adequacy of a conceptual analysis or the coherence of a certain view are considered acceptable to push to a degree (not enough imo) but going after someone overtly (rather than via rumor) because their work isn’t sufficiently interesting is a big no no. So I fear the end result would be to turn philosophy into a thousand little islands each just gazing at their own navel with no one willing to argue that your concepts aren’t useful enough.