Concepts 5
Explication or Amelioration? Carnapian Clarification as the Normative Basis for Conceptual Engineering
The Monist. Special issue on Explication and Conceptual Engineering.
As conceptual engineering fractures into explication pursuing exactness and amelioration pursuing justice, the field risks losing its focus. I argue that unifying these projects requires retrieving a crucial insight from Rudolf Carnap: that attempts to improve concepts must start with the preliminary stage of practical clarification. However, Carnap’s account of clarification in terms of predictive proficiency remains normatively inert and biased towards exactness. I expand it into a normative diagnosis of the needs underpinning a concept’s inferential structure. This reveals whether properties like vagueness are flaws that need fixing or features worth preserving.
Carnap, clarification, normativity, explication, amelioration, conceptual engineering
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Reasons of Love and Conceptual Good-for-Nothings
In Themes from Susan Wolf. Michael Frauchiger and Markus Stepanians (eds.). Berlin: De Gruyter. In Press.
Appealing to the instrumentality of concepts raises the worry of yielding the “wrong kind of reasons.” Drawing on Susan Wolf’s work on “reasons of love,” I argue this worry is misplaced. I further explore Wolf’s notion of “valuable good-for-nothings” to demonstrate how non-instrumental values ultimately reinforce the importance of reasons of love in concept use.
concepts, conceptual ethics, conceptual engineering, motivation, reasons of love, normativity
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Defending Genealogy as Conceptual Reverse-Engineering
Analysis 84 (2): 385–400. 2024. Symposium on my The Practical Origins of Ideas. By invitation. doi:10.1093/analys/anad010
Responds to commentaries by Cheryl Misak, Alexander Prescott-Couch, and Paul Roth.
analysis, concepts, conceptual engineering, conceptual reverse-engineering, genealogy, history
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Debunking Concepts
Midwest Studies in Philosophy 47 (1): 195–225. By invitation. 2023. doi:10.5840/msp2023111347
Argues that the debunking of concepts should extend beyond assessing their epistemological merits to include their evaluation on moral, social, and political grounds, based on their societal functions and effects.
concepts, conceptual ethics, genealogical debunking, genealogy, ideology critique, methodology
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The Points of Concepts: Their Types, Tensions, and Connections
Canadian Journal of Philosophy 49 (8): 1122–1145. 2019. doi:10.1080/00455091.2019.1584940
By distinguishing four senses in which concepts might be said to have a “point,” this paper resolves the tension between the ambition of point-based explanations to be informative and the claim—central to Dummett’s philosophy of language, but also to the literature on thick concepts—that mastering concepts already requires grasping their point.
concepts, conceptual ethics, conceptual functions, conceptual engineering, metaphilosophy, normativity
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