Eve Kitsik

Philosophers’ debates about gender often look like metaphysical debates about what it really is to be a woman or a man, or what gender really is. I argue that these debates should rather proceed in the conceptual engineering mode. Instead of saying things like “A woman is X”, philosophers should say things like “The word ‘woman’ should be used to mean X (in context C)” and spell out their arguments accordingly. Reaching this conclusion does not require establishing that the debates already are covertly about how we should use language. Even when some philosophers’ contributions to the debates currently are about reality and not (just) about how to use language, there can be good reasons for them to switch to the conceptual engineering mode.

I develop a Carnapian view on the epistemic value of a central philosophical enterprise: making our ordinary messy concepts more orderly. Drawing on recent accounts of non-factive understanding, I propose that orderly concepts contribute to the “non-mirroring” (or subject-fitting, as opposed to object-fitting) aspect of understanding. This account allows us to make sense of the epistemic value of an important part of philosophy from a metaphysically anti-realist perspective and to explain how philosophy can make progress, although philosophers fail to converge on the same answers to philosophical questions.

Some sociologists, psychologists, and philosophers, among others, have expressed worries about the inflation of concepts related to negative experiences, harm, or injustice (for example, the concepts of racism, sexual harassment, and human rights). Others welcome and contribute to the linguistic changes. What is at stake in these disagreements? In this paper, I first give an account of what conceptual inflation, in one important sense, is: change in linguistic practices that makes it easier to indicate a problem of a certain category. Then, I argue—building on work by Shen-yi Liao and Nat Hansen—that such conceptual inflation of problems neither significantly limits nor enhances our ability to communicate about the relevant sub-problems (such as workplace harassment and street harassment) and to recognize the similarities and differences between them. This is because our linguistic resources are flexible, and we are capable of creatively using and developing those resources. There is, however, another way of making sense of the disagreements. The issue at stake could be the allocation of collective attentional resources to (alleged) problems. There are plausible mechanisms whereby how we use the terms in question (such as “sexual harassment”) influences that allocation.

Many strategies for pursuing justice demand heightened attention to other people’s oppressed status. For example, we are told to be aware of people’s position in an unjust system when forming beliefs about them, and to bear in mind how marginalized people might interpret our words and actions as microaggressions. I argue that when such ‘woke attention’ becomes pervasive—when someone’s oppressed status is regularly, over time and across contexts, prioritized in many people’s minds—the person loses some control over their own narrative, over how the story of their life is constructed by others. An oppression-centred narrative, which they might want to reject, becomes a dominant one. In order to respect autonomy in the sense of authoring one’s own life, including the story of one’s life, we should therefore consider how we can reduce the need for woke attention in pursuing social justice—for example, by using debiasing techniques.

I will clarify when and how a tension arises between epistemic environmentalism (a new focus on assessing and improving the epistemic environment) and respect for epistemic autonomy (allowing, empowering, and requiring people to each govern their own beliefs). Using the example of participatory conceptual engineering (improving the linguistic environment through rational discussion with broad participation), I will also identify an option for avoiding the tension—namely, participatory environmentalism. This means a new focus on how people can each contribute to improving the shared epistemic environment through rational deliberation and thereby govern their own beliefs that are shaped by that environment.

This essay focuses on conceptual engineers who aim to improve other people's patterns of inference and attention by shaping their concepts. Such conceptual engineers sometimes engage in a form of epistemic paternalism that I call paternalistic cognitive engineering: instead of explicitly persuading, informing and educating others, the engineers non-consultatively rely on assumptions about the target agents’ cognitive systems to improve their belief forming. The target agents could reasonably regard such benevolent exercises of control as violating their sovereignty over their own belief formation. This is a pro tanto reason against such engineering. In addition to the relevant projects of conceptual engineering, paternalistic cognitive engineering plausibly includes certain kinds of nudging and evidence suppression. I distinguish the sovereignty-based concern from other ethical worries about conceptual engineering and discuss how one might justify the relevant conceptual engineering projects despite the sovereignty-based reason against them.

Does conceptual engineering as a philosophical method deserve all the attention that it has been getting recently? The important philosophical questions, one might say, are about the world, not about what our concepts are or should be like. This paper fleshes out one way in which conceptual engineering can contribute to philosophical progress. The suspicion that conceptual engineering is getting too much attention presupposes that it is important to distribute our philosophical attention well (for example, conceptual engineering should not get more than its fair share). The paper’s defense of conceptual engineering builds on that assumption. Conceptual engineering, it argues, is a way of configuring philosophers’ patterns of attention for the better: it serves attentional progress in philosophy.

I will argue that those thinking about conceptual engineering should think more about ways of believing. When we talk about what someone “believes”, we could be talking about how they are inclined to act, or what they have put forth as their position on a matter, or what gives rise to a feeling of endorsement when they reflect on the matter. If we further recognize that the contents of our beliefs are at least sometimes framed in certain concepts and that projects of conceptual engineering at least sometimes aim to change our beliefs by changing the concepts they are framed in, the question arises: which beliefs does conceptual engineering target? Is it always “belief” in the same sense? I will argue that it is not, using examples from feminist and mainstream metaphysics. Suppose that revisionary ontologists call on us to eliminate the non-joint-carving concept TABLE from our beliefs about the world. They then plausibly have in mind only “belief” in the sense of practically detached reflective assent: they want the concept eliminated from the content of such assent. On the other hand, when feminist metaphysicians of gender call on us to ameliorate the ethically problematic concept WOMAN, they target our “beliefs” in a sense that encompasses both the content of our everyday observations and experiences and what might be called practically engaged reflective assent; but they do not target the practically detached assent.

I will defend explication, in a Carnapian sense, as a strategy for revisionary ontologists and radical sceptics. The idea is that these revisionary philosophers should explicitly commit to using expressions like “S knows that p” and “Fs exist” differently from how these expressions are used in everyday contexts. I will first motivate this commitment for these revisionary philosophers. Then, I will address the main worries that arise for this strategy: the unintelligibility worry and the topic shift worry. I will focus on the latter worry and provide a solution that makes use of a distinction between practically and theoretically oriented beliefs. On my view, the revisionary philosophers who admit to departing from the everyday language can still criticize everyday knowledge and existence claims, by arguing that while the language embedded in these claims is suitable for beliefs-1, it is not suitable for beliefs-2.

Folk ontology seems baroque, compared to the austere ontology of many philosophers. Plausibly, the issue comes down to a choice between existence concepts: the folk and the austere philosophers employ different quantifier meanings. This paper aims to clarify and defend this hypothesis and explore its upshots. How do we choose between the alternative existence concepts; is the austere philosophers’ concept better than the folk’s undiscriminating one? I will argue that contrary to what Ted Sider suggests, the austere existence concept and the corresponding austere answers to existence questions do not prevail in the context of “inquiry”, i.e. the context of practically disinterested pursuit of epistemic excellence. Sider’s suggestion relies on a one-sided idea of epistemic excellence, as beliefs’ conforming to the world. Once we recognize another epistemic aim, namely the agent understanding connections between known facts, ordinary objects will be back in the game.