Paul-Mikhail Catapang Podosky

Recently there has been much philosophical interest in the analysis of concepts to determine whether they should be removed, revised, or replaced. Enquiry of this kind is referred to as conceptual engineering or conceptual ethics. We will call it revisionary conceptual analysis (RCA). It standardly involves describing the meaning of a concept, evaluating whether it serves its purposes, and prescribing what it should mean. However, this stands in tension with prescriptivism, a metasemantic view which holds that all meaning claims are prescriptions. If prescriptivism is correct, then one is faced with two options: either (1) give up on the possibility of RCA, or (2) come up with a version of RCA that is consistent with the idea that all meaning claims are prescriptive. In this paper we offer an argument for (2).

Assuming that there is an obligation to combat structural injustice, what does it look like? I suggest that discerning what this obligation is, and on whom it falls, first requires being sensitive to facts about social structure. Importantly, we need to know how social structure is constituted, and the ways in which it can be disrupted. I argue that since social structure is constituted, in part, by concepts that undergird social practices, then our critical attention should be focused on those concepts that undergird oppressive social practices. In the end, I suggest that the obligation to combat structural injustice falls on privileged social groups to significantly aid in the processes that give rise to conceptual change.

Miranda Fricker (2007) explains that hermeneutical injustice occurs when an area of one’s social experience is obscured from collective understanding. However, Fricker focuses only on the injustice suffered by those who cannot render intelligible their own oppression. I argue that there is another side to hermeneutical injustice that is other-oriented; an injustice that occurs when one cannot understand, to a basic extent, the oppression of others. Specifically, I discuss the hermeneutical injustice suffered by nonhuman animals made possible by objectifying concepts available in the collective hermeneutical resource.

What it is to be an object and what it is to be a whole are separate enterprises: answering the former is doing ontology, and answering the latter is not. By providing this distinction, a new metaphysics of objects emerges. The positing of a whole is a referential gesture, either by ostension or naming, and the alleged object is postulated without consideration of internal causal operations between its parts. An object, however, requires careful physical explanation. I explicate the concept of object as an ontological function which takes mereological sums as arguments, and by causal operations on the members of that sum as structural relata, returns holistic properties of a singular entity. With the revised notions of whole and object in mind, I consider what implications this bears on existential quantification. Following Meinong, I believe that the existential quantifier does not capture existence. Instead, I argue that the existential quantifier expresses a mereological notion of countability; the collecting of things as one. The existential status of a counted entity is left unstated until it is explicitly asserted as existing by a speaker, in the mental frame of a realist attitude, and this expression of existence is captured by the existence predicate. The existence of the counted entity, the alleged object, is confirmed or denied as an object in light of whether it satisfies the conditions specified by an endorsed theory of causally productive relations; the conditions under which something is an object.