(Not) going on in the same way – indeterminacy, no-fault-disagreements, and the coordination of action
Yvonne Huetter-Almerigi (Bologna)
The paper takes its start from recent developments in the longstanding discussion between Huw Price, Crispin Wright, and John MacFarlane on the nature and implications of truth, representation, and realism. I will take their discussion as a case-study: Price, Wright, and Macfarlane clearly believe that they are contributing to the same topic while equally clearly and overtly starting from diverging key-suppositions regarding the normative trappings of speech. My claim will be that given their respective background assumptions, Wright and MacFarlane could tell Price that he is changing the subject while Price, given his background assumptions, can tell them that he is not, and that all of them are right. I will analyze their debate with respect to how rules are understood, where and if indeterminacy kicks in, and how this plays out with respect to the engineering of “realism”. Is the change from antirealist representationalism to realist antirepresentationalism a change of subject and should we presume it is?
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Three flavors of discontinuity in conceptual revision
Sigurd Jorem (Oslo)
Projects in conceptual revision exhibit different kinds of continuity and discontinuity. I identify three kinds of discontinuity: Representational discontinuity, concerning differences of extension and intension; discontinuity of inquiry, concerning how the revisionary project relates to existing problems and methods; and functional discontinuity, concerning differences of which functions the concept is fit to perform. The objection expressed by “you’ve merely changed the subject” may be understood as an objection to a revisionary project’s discontinuity on one of these scores. This gives us three different objections to assess: The representational objection, the inquiry objection and the functional objection. I argue that the representational objection and the inquiry objection are principally misguided. In short, the former misidentifies what we care about preserving when we engage in conceptual revision, and the latter rests on a methodological commitment that is at best optional. By contrast, the functional objection is not misguided as there are, I argue, genuine limits of revision that are functional in kind.
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The nameability argument for linguistic engineering
Steffen Koch (Bielefeld)
Linguistic engineering is a form of conceptual engineering that aims to modify linguistic practices, such as altering the meanings and usage of existing terms or introducing entirely new ones. Despite its current popularity, it is unclear what positive effects linguistic engineering may bring us. In this talk, I employ psycholinguistic findings on the cognitive effects of verbal labels to construct a general and empirically founded rationale for linguistic engineering. In particular, I argue that linguistic engineering may improve the accuracy of our categorization practices, which may in turn bring considerable worldly benefits.
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“Not About Words”: The Fallacy of Semantic Descent
Alexander Kocurek (Cornell)
Quine famously introduced a method of clarifying disputes known as semantic ascent: when it’s difficult to state a dispute in a neutral way, we can clarify the disagreement by restating it in terms of the meanings of words or sentences. However, many philosophers have pushed back against semantic ascent, arguing it merely changes the subject: the original dispute is not about words but about the world. These authors thus advocate for semantic descent, framing disputes directly in the material, rather than the formal, mode. I argue this criticism of semantic ascent rests on a fallacy: it trades on an ambiguity between different senses in which a dispute is “about” something. I present a simple theory that explains how disagreements in the material mode may nevertheless be about language in the relevant sense and why semantic ascent is helpful, viz., it shifts us from a dispute that has no well-defined topic to one that does.
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Communication and conceptual change
Peter Pagin (Stockholm)
Communication fails when the thought expressed by the speaker is very different from the resulting thought picked up by the hearer. Some philosophers, including me, have argued that some differences are tolerable and hence compatible with communicative success. But then, how much difference is too much? I have argued that a lower boundary of success is sameness of truth value. If you expressed a true proposition and what I picked up is a false one, then, intuitively, communication failed.
It is natural to align communicative success with the truth of belief reports: if I understand what you expressed, I should be able to truly ascribe the thought to you by using the same expressions as I understand them. It is also natural to align both with belief updating, and hence with inquiry. I will not revise my belief by rejecting a sentence, when unbeknownst to me, the sentence expresses a thought very different from what it did express at the time when I affirmed it.
This has a bearing on the problem of topic change in conceptual engineering. In one type of case, the conceptual engineer replaces the concept C as expressed by an expression E by a different concept C'. The risk that the change from C to C' is a change of topic has been discussed in the literature. I will be concerned with the general connection between communication and conceptual change, and in particular with the claim by Herman Cappelen that topic can be preserved across conceptual change even when it results in a change of extension.
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Deliberate Meaning Change and Technological Communicative Assistance
Jessica Pepp (Uppsala), Rachel Sterken (Hong Kong)
This paper focuses on the fine balance between the feasibility and desirability of deliberate meaning change projects. In particular, we articulate how a variety of recent and emerging technologies, which we subsume under the broad heading of technological communicative assistants, are poised to increase drastically the feasibility of such projects, while raising serious concerns about their desirability. Taking emerging augmented reality technology as a vivid illustration, we suggest that the most pressing concerns are not about discontinuity of inquiry, but about loss of linguistic autonomy and authenticity.
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Topic Continuity and Philosophical Inquiry
Tristram McPherson (Ohio State), David Plunkett (Dartmouth)
In recent years, philosophers working on “conceptual engineering” have discussed the idea of “topics” and “topic continuity”. Put roughly, the idea has been that appeal to “topics”, and facts about their continuity, can help explain when, how, and why “conceptual engineering” projects can succeed at changing the meanings of words or concepts while still allowing people to think and talk about the “same things” as they did before these changes in meaning. Herman Cappelen has given one of the key arguments on behalf of this broad idea, and, since then, a number of philosophers (including ourselves) have developed ideas about what topics and topic continuity consist in. Extant work on “topic continuity” has mostly focused on the significance of this idea for conceptual engineering projects. In this paper, we argue that taking the idea of topic continuity seriously can have striking implications for how we understand philosophical inquiry more broadly. We illustrate this idea by exploring four sorts of possibilities that some theories of topic continuity (including our own) make salient: a) the possibility of preserving meaning (at the level of thought or talk) without preserving topic, b) the possibility of understanding nihilism in ways tied to topic, rather than meaning, c) the possibility of preserving topic across a change from using language in a “descriptivist” way to an “expressivist” one (or vice versa), and d) the potential role of topics in orienting us in metaphysical inquiry, such as inquiry into the real definition or essence of things (e.g., mind, meaning, law, knowledge, etc.).
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Bias, Machine Learning, and Conceptual Engineering
Rachel Rudolph (Auburn) - joint work with Elay Shech and Mike Tamir
Large language models (LLMs) reflect, and can potentially perpetuate, social biases in language use. Conceptual engineering aims to revise our concepts to eliminate such bias. We show how machine learning and conceptual engineering can be fruitfully brought together to offer a new perspective on what conceptual engineering involves, how it can be implemented, and how it can avoid the challenge of topic continuity. Specifically, we show that LLMs reveal bias in the prototypes associated with concepts, and that LLM "de-biasing" can serve conceptual engineering projects that aim to revise such conceptual prototypes. Even if changes in the intension of a concept involve "changing the topic" in an objectionable way, there remains an important kind of conceptual engineering (and one that can be implemented with the help of machine learning) that doesn't face this problem, namely engineering conceptual prototypes.