Matthieu Queloz
Matthieu Queloz

Explication 2

Conceptual Engineering

In Metzler Handbuch Analytische Philosophie. Hans-Johann Glock, Christoph Pfisterer and Stefan Roski (eds.). Stuttgart: Metzler.

Conceptual engineering reorients analytic philosophy from the descriptive analysis of existing concepts to the normative task of assessing and improving representational devices to better serve our theoretical and practical purposes. This entry traces the method’s intellectual genealogy from Rudolf Carnap’s explication and pragmatist reconstruction to the contemporary ‘functionalist’ and ‘ameliorative’ frameworks championed by Haslanger, Simion, and Kelp. It concludes by examining the discipline’s current ‘applied turn,’ surveying how recent scholarship from 2024 to 2026 has operationalized these methods to address concrete problems in social ontology, artificial intelligence, and medicine.

conceptual engineering, analytic philosophy, explication, ameliorative inquiry, normativity, social ontology

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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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