Going On, Not in the Same Way

This chapter considers, within an externalist semantics, several ways we might understand the project of improving our concepts to promote greater justice. The tools that culture provides us with—such as language, concepts, and inferential patterns—provide frames for coordination and shape our interaction. There are multiple ways these tools can fail us, for example by the limited structure of options they make intelligible. However, we can sometimes reconfigure the resources so that our practical orientations are more responsive to what is good and coordinate in ways that are just. Such reconfiguration often happens in law; it also occurs in social movements, counter-publics, subaltern communities, and in fascist propaganda. Contestation over meaning is not “mere semantics” for—together with political and material change—it can shape our agency and our lives together.