Revisionary Analysis without Meaning Change (Or, Could Women Be Analytically Oppressed?)

This chapter develops a conception of philosophical analysis which makes sense of the idea that a correct analysis can be revisionary (in that it departs from ordinary or expert belief and linguistic usage). The view is superior to the alternatives defended by most proponents of ‘conceptual ethics’ and ‘conceptual engineering’ (according to which revisionary theorizing involves replacing words or concepts) because it better explains the arguments we advance when we engage with proposed revisionary analyses. A key idea is that analytic claims can emerge in the course of debate without change of meaning, so that our acceptance (perhaps late in the debate) of some analyticity can fix the meaning of a word as we used it all along. The discussion focuses on Haslanger’s revisionary analysis of gender.

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.

Strategic Conceptual Engineering for Epistemic and Social Aims

This chapter advocates strategic conceptual engineering, that is, the employment of a (possibly novel) concept for specific epistemic or social aims, concomitant with the openness to use a different concept for other contexts. We illustrate this approach by sketching three distinct concepts of gender and arguing that all of them are needed, as they answer to different social aims. The first concept serves the aim of identifying and explaining gender-based discrimination. It is similar to Haslanger’s account, except that rather than offering a definition of ‘woman’ we focus on ‘gender’ as one among several axes of discrimination. The second concept of gender is to assign legal rights and social recognitions, and is to be trans-inclusive. We argue that this cannot be achieved by previously suggested concepts (including Jenkins’s) that include substantial gender-related psychological features or awareness of social expectations. The third concept of gender serves the aim of personal empowerment through gender identity. This chapter points to contexts where a concept’s role in explanation and moral reasoning can be more important than determining the extensions of concepts.

Conceptual Engineering

This chapter develops and defends the Master Argument for Conceptual Engineering: (1) If W is a word that has a meaning M, then there are many similar meanings, M1,M2,...,Mn, W could have. (2) We have no good reason to think that the meaning that W ended up with is the best meaning W could have: there will typically be indefinitely many alternative meanings that would be better meanings for W. (3) When we speak, think, and theorize it’s important to make sure our words have as good meanings as possible. (4) As a corollary: when doing philosophy, we should try to find good meanings for core philosophical terms and they will typically not be the meanings those words as a matter of fact have. (5) So no matter what topic a philosopher is concerned with, she should assess and ameliorate the meanings of central terms. I respond to seven objections to this argument.

A Pragmatic Method for Normative Conceptual Work

How ought we to do work in conceptual ethics? Some have thought that conceptual choice should itself be guided by (heavyweight) metaphysics—for we should be sure that our concepts pick out things that exist or should aim to choose concepts that really ‘carve the world at its joints’. An alternative is to take a pragmatic approach to conceptual ethics. But pragmatic approaches are often criticized as unable to account for intuitions that some conceptual choices are objectively better than others, and intuitions that the world is structured. As a result, the fear is that a pragmatic approach leaves conceptual choices arbitrary and insusceptible to critique. This chapter confronts such worries and develops a pragmatic method for conceptual ethics that clearly avoids these problems. As a result, we need not rely on heavyweight metaphysics and become entangled in its epistemological mysteries to do conceptual ethics.

The Theory–Theory Approach to Ethics

One way to approach the theory of reference for proper names is by asking what proper names are good for in the sense of the valuable purposes they serve. Suppose we approach ethical terms and concepts in the same spirit, asking questions like: What purposes do they serve? How could we do something similar but do it better? This chapter explores the implications of this way of thinking about ethical terms and concepts, and explains why a theory–theory or moral functionalist account of them is so attractive when we approach matters from this perspective. The discussion is set inside an avowedly cognitivist, naturalist framework, and touches on the implications of this framework for how to adjudicate debates between rival views in ethics, and the relevance of evolutionary considerations.

Conceptual Ethics and the Methodology of Normative Inquiry

This chapter explores two central questions in the conceptual ethics of normative inquiry. The first is whether to orient one’s normative inquiry around folk normative concepts (like KNOWLEDGE or IMMORAL) or around theoretical normative concepts (like ADEQUATE EPISTEMIC JUSTIFICATION or PRO TANTO PRACTICAL REASON). The second is whether to orient one’s normative inquiry around concepts whose normative authority is especially accessible to us (such as OUGHT ALL THINGS CONSIDERED), or around concepts whose extension is especially accessible to us (such as BETRAYAL). The chapter aims to make vivid and plausible a range of possible answers to these questions, and important forms of argument that can be used to favor certain answers over others.

Reactive Concepts

This chapter recommends that we consider a kind of concept which bears a relation like the one traditional accounts of concepts bear to beliefs, but instead bears it to states individuated not only by their causal inputs, but also by their direct causal outputs. They will be called reactive representations, RRs for short. They are partially representational states which are reactive inasmuch as they bypass interaction with distinct desires to directly motivate behaviour. Associated with these representations are abilities that will be called Reactive Concepts. The chapter argues that taxonomizing mental states this way casts light on the nature of a range of phenomena, including hate speech, crypto-evaluative terms, and phenomenal concepts.

Variance Theses in Ontology and Metaethics

The chapter illustrates conceptual engineering by bringing up a number of issues in metaontology and metaethics. A prominent debate in metaontology relates to whether some existence concept is metaphysically privileged. On the one hand, ontological realists say yes, and, on the other hand, friends of quantifier variance say no. The chapter brings up the corresponding question in metaethics by asking, is some rightness concept normatively privileged? It investigates this question, and compares the metaethics case and the metaontology case. One aim is to arrive at conclusions regarding possible limits to the project of conceptual engineering.

Neutralism and Conceptual Engineering

Conceptual engineers often invoke a distinction between happy-face and unhappy-face solutions to alethic paradoxes. Happy-face solutions are thoroughly specific: they isolate a single, basic principle (“the culprit”). Unhappy-face solutions, meanwhile, are thoroughly non-specific: they merely establish the collective guilt of a group of principles which together produce the paradox. According to this taxonomy, conceptual engineering can only take place via unhappy-face solutions. In this chapter, I: (1) give an expanded taxonomy which allows for both Happy-Face and two forms of Unhappy-Face Conceptual Engineering and show that (2) happy-face treatments represent a limit case. (3) Unhappy-face treatments also represent a kind of limit case. (4) Between these limit cases are treatments which are neither maximally specific nor maximally unspecific but nonetheless specific enough to treat a paradox. (5) Such treatments become thoroughly neutralist when they reject some principle at work in a paradox from a theory-neutral perspective. The upshot is Neutralism—the view that philosophical progress can take place when (and sometimes only when) a thoroughly neutral, non-specific theory is adopted.