Normativity ¹⁷

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

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

Needs of the Mind: How Aptic Normativity Can Guide Conceptual Adaptation

Philosophical Studies. 2026. doi:10.1007/s11098-026-02511-3

The article offers an account of “needs of the mind” in terms of a distinctively aptic normativity–a normativity of fittingness. After reconstructing the history of different conceptions of needs and their gradual subjectivization, the article focuses on conceptual needs and argues that they register a cognitive privation that goes beyond a shortage of words, marking a mismatch between our conceptual repertoire and our situation that reorients conceptual engineering from detached amelioration to situated adaptation. This makes a needs-first approach uniquely suited to guiding conceptual adaptation in times of technological disruption.

conceptual adaptation, needs, aptic normativity, privacy, philosophy of language, functions

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

Une normativité sans histoire ? Foucault, Engel et la normativité de la vérité

Forthcoming in Dialogue : Revue canadienne de philosophie

By shielding the concept of truth from Foucauldian historicism, Pascal Engel ends up leaving the “virtues of truth” even more exposed to Foucault’s negative genealogy. This article proposes a more ambitious reading of the positive genealogy of these virtues, demonstrating that cultivating accuracy and sincerity as intrinsic values is a functional necessity rather than a historical accident. Vindicating these dispositions’ status as virtues provides a more robust defence against both Foucauldian cynicism and contemporary indifference to truth.

truth, normativity, epistemic norms, epistemic virtues, belief, assertion

Can AI Rely on the Systematicity of Truth? The Challenge of Modelling Normative Domains

Philosophy & Technology 38 (34): 1–27. 2025. doi:10.1007/s13347-025-00864-x

Argues that the asystematicity of normative domains, stemming from the plurality, incompatibility, and incommensurability of values, poses a challenge to AI’s ability to comprehensively model these domains and underscores the indispensable role of human agency in practical deliberation.

AI, asystematicity, LLM, philosophy of technology, normativity, systematicity

On the Fundamental Limitations of AI Moral Advisors

Philosophy & Technology 38 (71): 1–4. 2025. Invited commentary. doi:10.1007/s13347-025-00896-3

Argues that while the asystematicity of truth militates against the personalization of AI moral advisors, it also imposes limitations on generalist AI moral advisors.

AI, AI ethics, deliberation, asystematicity, LLM, normativity

The Ethics of Conceptualization: Tailoring Thought and Language to Need

Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2025. doi:10.1093/9780198926283.001.0001

Philosophy strives to give us a firmer hold on our concepts. But what about their hold on us? Why place ourselves under the sway of a concept and grant it the authority to shape our thought and conduct? Another conceptualization would carry different implications. What makes one way of thinking better than another? This book develops a framework for concept appraisal. Its guiding idea is that to question the authority of concepts is to ask for reasons of a special kind: reasons for concept use, which tell us which concepts to adopt, adhere to, or abandon, thereby shoring up—or undercutting—the reasons for action and belief that guide our deliberations. Traditionally, reasons for concept use have been sought either in timeless rational foundations or in concepts’ inherent virtues, such as precision and consistency. Against this, the book advances two main claims: that we find reasons for concept use in the conceptual needs we discover when we critically distance ourselves from a concept by viewing it from the autoethnographic stance; and that sometimes, concepts that conflict, or exhibit other vices such as vagueness or superficiality, are just what we need. By considering not what concepts are absolutely best, but what concepts we now need, we can reconcile ourselves to the contingency of our concepts, determine the proper place of efforts to tidy up thought, and adjudicate between competing conceptions of things—even things as contested as liberty or free will. A needs-based approach separates helpful clarification from hobbling tidy-mindedness, and authoritative definition from conceptual gerrymandering.

Virtue Ethics and the Morality System

Topoi 43 (2): 413–424. 2024. With Marcel van Ackeren. doi:10.1007/s11245-023-09964-9

Shows that “morality systems” in Williams’s sense are not confined to Kantian ethics, but are characterized by the organizing ambition to shelter human agency from contingency. Argues that this ambition and the reconceptualization of human psychology it draws on can be traced back to Stoicism.

ethics, moral luck, morality system, moral psychology, blame, normativity

Function-Based Conceptual Engineering and the Authority Problem

Mind 131 (524): 1247–1278. 2022. doi:10.1093/mind/fzac028

Identifies a central problem for conceptual engineering—the problem of establishing the authority of engineered concepts—and argues that this problem cannot generally be solved by appealing to increased precision, consistency, or other theoretical virtues. Solving the problem requires engineering to take a functional turn and attend to the functions of concepts. This also helps us alleviate Strawsonian worries about changes of topic.

authority, conceptual engineering, conceptual ethics, conceptual functions, hermeneutics, metaphilosophy

Genealogy, Evaluation, and Engineering

The Monist 105 (4): 435–51. By invitation. 2022. doi:10.1093/monist/onac010

Argues that genealogical explanations can be used to evaluate and improve conceptual practices, taking as an example the demand for conceptual innovation around notions of legitimacy created by the increasing power of international institutions.

conceptual engineering, legitimacy, genealogy, ideology critique, conceptual ethics, international institutions

Theorizing the Normative Significance of Critical Histories for International Law

Journal of the History of International Law 24 (4): 561–587. 2022. With Damian Cueni. doi:10.1163/15718050-12340207

Addresses the question of whether the tainted history of international law should affect our present-day evaluation of it. It argues that critical histories derive their power in three primary ways: by subverting the historical claims that support a practice’s authority, by failing to meet the normative expectations readers bring to the past, and by tracing the functional continuities that link past problems to the present. The framework explains how history can be normatively significant even when its direct influence on legal argument is unclear.

genealogy, historiography, legitimacy, legal philosophy, methodology, political theory

Left Wittgensteinianism

European Journal of Philosophy 29 (4): 758–77. 2021. With Damian Cueni. doi:10.1111/ejop.12603

Focusing on the social and political conceptual practices that Wittgenstein neglected, the paper presents a novel, more dynamic interpretation of Wittgenstein’s model of conceptual change, on which conceptual change becomes intelligible not just as a brute, exogenous imposition on rational discourse, but as endogenous and reason-driven. This counters the socially conservative tendencies of existing interpretations and renders intelligible the possibility of radical critique within a Wittgensteinian framework.

conceptual change, conceptual engineering, conceptual ethics, history, Bernard Williams, language games

The Self-Effacing Functionality of Blame

Philosophical Studies 178 (4): 1361–1379. 2021. doi:10.1007/s11098-020-01479-y

Introduces the concept of “self-effacing functionality” to reconcile two opposing views on blame. While blame serves an important regulatory function, this very functionality requires that it be justified by non-instrumental moral reasons rather than by its functionality. This approach preserves the insights of instrumentalist accounts while vindicating the authority of our moral reasons for blame.

blame, moral psychology, ethics, functionality, normativity, justification

How Genealogies Can Affect the Space of Reasons

Synthese 197 (5): 2005–2027. 2020. doi:10.1007/s11229-018-1777-9

Attempts to derive reasons from claims about the genesis of something are often said to commit the genetic fallacy—they conflate genesis and justification. One way for genealogies to side-step this objection is to focus on the functional origins of practices. But this invites a second objection, which maintains that attempts to derive current from original function suffer from continuity failure—the conditions in response to which something originated no longer obtain. This paper shows how normatively ambitious genealogies can steer clear of both problems.

genealogy, Bernard Williams, Craig, epistemology, normativity, space of reasons

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

Wittgenstein on the Chain of Reasons

Wittgenstein-Studien 7 (1): 105–30. 2016. doi:10.1515/witt-2016-0108

This article examines Wittgenstein’s conception of rationality through the central image of the “chain,” arguing that reasons are defined by their relational role in making actions intelligible rather than by intrinsic properties. The author contends that unlike chains of causes, chains of reasons are necessarily finite and anchored in communal reason-giving practices, meaning that justification inevitably ends at the boundaries of a specific language game. Ultimately, the paper suggests that this finite structure liberates agents from the misleading expectation of infinite justification while simultaneously limiting the reach of reasons to the specific practices that sustain them.

action theory, Wittgenstein, reasons and causes, philosophy of mind, explanation, justification