AIMS

Conceptual engineering is a method of assessment and revision of conceptual representations, which is associated with intentionally pursued conceptual changes. One may say that many concepts in history underwent intentional changes at the collective level (no matter how slow and complex); for instance, the concept of health in the medical profession, the concepts of marriage and family in the law, as well as several scientific concepts (mass, gene) might be described as having been conceptually engineered. One philosophically interesting aspect of these cases is that intentionally implementing conceptual changes in a linguistic community may be associated with a number of so-called linguistic interventions. These are uses of language that are either implicitly or explicitly aimed at changing the use of certain expressions in a linguistic community. A significant problem for both conceptual engineering and linguistic interventions is that they can give rise to changes of subject and to communicative disruptions, thus compromising smooth sharing of information and practical coordination. CECODISP aims to study, understand, and evaluate the problems of subject-change and communicative disruptions in conceptual engineering and its implementation. This will imply examining these phenomena from two perspectives.

1) From a semantic/theoretical perspective, the focus will be on the phenomenon of changing the subject, with the aim of understanding its metaphysical and practical underpinnings, to prevent and address communicative disruptions. In a first phase of the project (WP1), the general idea of changing the subject, as well as that of communicative disruptions, will be assessed to determine the extent to which it poses a real challenge to conceptual engineering. The psycholinguistics notion of metalinguistic awareness will be proposed as a fruitful resource for providing an answer to these alleged problems. In a second phase of the project (WP2), the focus will be strictly on subject matter and on what it means to change the subject in a semantic and formal sense, once again trying to assess the prospects for an effective response to the change of subject problem.

2) From a pragmatic point of view, the project will investigate implementation strategies for conceptual engineers, like so-called linguistic interventions, which can cause communicative disruptions. In a third phase of the project (WP3), a variety of phenomena associated with linguistic interventions and communicative disruptions will be studied. First, the difference between collective and individual linguistic interventions will be scrutinized and systematized within a Gricean framework. Second, this Gricean framework will also permit studying power asymmetries, whereby communicative disruptions may be intentionally exploited, with better or worse intentions. In a fourth and last phase of the project (WP4), an optimistic case for communicative disruptions will be made, arguing that they pre-exist conceptual engineering, and most importantly that in some key cases, they can be morally justified and even beneficial.