Guido Löhr

Disruptive technologies are a key theme in economics, the philosophy of technology, and situated cognition - yet these debates remain largely disconnected. This paper addresses four core questions that cut across them: (i) What, precisely, are disruptive technologies “disrupting” across the different contexts in which the literature situates them? (ii) Why do technological disruptions play such prominent roles, in multiple domains, concerning the development of our species, cultures, and personal lives? (iii) Are technological disruptions inherently beneficial or harmful, and how are potential benefits and harms brought about? (iv) What strategies are available for adaptation to disruptive technologies, and how accessible are they for different groups and individuals? To unify current debates and provide a conceptual and normative foundation for future research, we draw on niche construction theory. We argue that disruptive technologies cause technological niche disruptions (TENDs) that occur at various spatiotemporal scales. TENDs pressure social groups and individuals to adapt. As the abilities and resources that adaptation requires are often unevenly distributed, so are the harms and benefits TENDs produce. TENDs, therefore, both reflect and sustain existing inequalities.

The term ‘commitment’ plays a central role in the philosophy of language, the philosophy of social sciences, philosophy of action, and social ontology. Despite its centrality, the meaning of this term is seldom made explicit. It is not always clear what different authors mean when they use the term. This lack of clarity is especially apparent when using phrases like ‘shared commitments’ or ‘mutual commitment’. I argue that the term ‘commitment’ is used in at least two ways, which I call “private commitments” and “public commitments”. These senses can be distinguished by their different types of normative product. I then explicate different notions of the term ‘shared commitment’ derived from the two main notions. Finally, I apply these distinctions to try to make sense of paradigmatic uses of the term in the literature.

New technologies don’t just change how we act – they can also reshape our moral beliefs, practices, norms and values. Technological innovations like the mechanical ventilator, autonomous weapons and gene editing challenge existing concepts, such as death, responsibility and health, and create situations our conceptual frameworks can no longer fully explain. As these technologies disrupt familiar ideas and beliefs, they push us to rethink our ethical norms and values. Understanding how technology drives these shifts is necessary if we want to respond thoughtfully to the moral challenges of the future.

This chapter provides a theoretical lens on conceptual disruption. It offers a typology of conceptual disruption, discusses its relation to conceptual engineering, and sketches a programmatic view of the implications of conceptual disruption for the ethics of technology. We begin by distinguishing between three different kinds of conceptual disruptions: conceptual gaps, conceptual overlaps, and conceptual misalignments. Subsequently, we distinguish between different mechanisms of conceptual disruption, and two modes of conceptual change. We point out that disruptions may be induced by technology, but can also be triggered by intercultural exchanges. Conceptual disruptions frequently yield conceptual uncertainty and may call for conceptual and ethical inquiry. We argue that a useful approach to address conceptual disruptions is to engage in conceptual engineering. We outline what conceptual engineering involves and argue that discussions on conceptual disruption and conceptual engineering can benefit from closer integration. In closing, we discuss the relevance of studying conceptual disruption for technology ethics, and point to the promise of this line of research to innovate practical philosophy at large.

On the one hand, conceptual engineering appears to be pragmatist in spirit. Conceptual engineering scholars assume that concepts can be better or worse relative to our goals. We should engineer the concept that works best for our purposes. On the other hand, the conceptual engineering debate rarely engages with pragmatist authors or incorporates their central claims. Instead, the debate has been dominated by representationalist theories of concepts. Many of the problems discussed arise from this commitment (change of topic, implementation problem, or the impossibility of conceptual change). So, what would a pragmatist account of conceptual engineering look like? I argue that recent ‘pragmatist accounts of conceptual engineering’ focus too much on target objects and their function. What sets pragmatism apart is its conceptual ethics. Following Rorty, what's distinctive of pragmatism is its (second-personal) anti-authoritarianism.

What values and goals should guide conceptual engineering projects? In this paper, we propose that insights from responsible design, specifically Value Sensitive Design (VSD), can enrich current approaches to conceptual ethics. Philosophers of technology have long employed VSD as a structured way to create technologies that address real‐world problems while accommodating stakeholder values. Meanwhile, conceptual engineers have focused on how best to revise, introduce, or eliminate concepts in response to theoretical or practical needs. By bringing these two literatures together, this paper offers a systematic, empirically informed way to assess and design concepts. The approach uses VSD‐inspired methods to identify and weigh stakeholder values, goals, and concerns. To illustrate how this works in practice, the paper examines the technologically disrupted concept “colleague.” When advanced technologies, like robots or chatbots, begin performing roles similar to those of human workers, can they be considered colleagues?

I identify two kinds of failure in joint action. First, we can fail to ‘do our part’, that is, fail to contribute to fulfilling the joint intention. Second, we can fail to respect our collaborators. Recognizing the distinct natures of both normative relations helps us overcome a key challenge to a reductionist theory of collective intentionality posed by Margaret Gilbert. According to this objection, we have obligations towards others even in immoral joint actions – a claim that was recently supported experimentally. Except for a handful of experimental papers, work on the normativity in joint intention has stagnated. I hope the distinction breathes fresh air into the theoretical and empirical debate.

In this special issue, we focus on the connection between conceptual engineering and the philosophy of technology. Conceptual engineering is the enterprise of introducing, eliminating, or revising words and concepts. The philosophy of technology examines the nature and significance of technology. We investigate how technologies such as AI and genetic engineering (so-called “socially disruptive technologies”) disrupt our practices and concepts, and how conceptual engineering can address these disruptions. We also consider how conceptual engineering can enhance the practice of ethical design. The issue features seven articles that discuss a range of topics, including trust in blockchain applications and the evolving concept of nature. These articles highlight that as technology changes the world and our concepts, conceptual engineering provides invaluable tools and frameworks to reflect on these changes and adapt accordingly.

It is often stated that joint actions are linked to so-called _directed duties_. It is not just that we should “do our part” in a joint action simply because it is the right thing to do or because it is in our best interest. Instead, we “owe” it to the other participants. Despite its _prima facie_ plausibility, this claim is not well understood. Is it true that duties in joint action are directed? Which notion of directedness is relevant to understanding the normativity of joint action? I first argue that we can characterize the notion of directed duties in joint action in terms of a network of inferentially related normative relations and practices. I apply this analysis to show that duties in joint action _are_ directed. This analysis supports the view that the normativity in joint action is special as it involves what Stephen Darwall calls “individual authority” without entailing “representative authority”. A perhaps surprising conclusion derived from this account is that actions in joint action are owed to everyone involved in the group equally. This supports Margaret Gilbert’s joint commitment account of joint intention.

Emerging technologies can have profound conceptual implications. Their emergence frequently calls for the articulation of new concepts, or for modifications and novel applications of concepts that are already entrenched in communication and thought. In this paper, we introduce the notion of “conceptual appropriation” to capture the dynamics between concepts and emerging technologies. By conceptual appropriation, we mean the novel application of a value-laden concept to lay a contestable claim on an underdetermined phenomenon. We illustrate the dynamics of conceptual appropriation by analyzing the concept NATURE and its uptake in three discourses of emerging technology: cellular agriculture, solar geo-engineering, and biomimicry. We argue that NATURE and its cognate NATURALNESS are strongly valanced concepts upon which different stakeholders lay a claim. In doing so, stakeholders advance distinct conceptions of nature, typically to suit their own interests. Our case-studies illustrate how in discourses on emerging technology, the application of value-concepts is entangled with ideological stakes and power dynamics.

Conceptual Engineering (CE) is thought to be generally aimed at ameliorating deficient concepts. In this paper, we challenge this assumption: we argue that CE is frequently undertaken with the orthogonal aim of _conceptual adaptation_. We develop this thesis with reference to the interplay between technology and concepts. Emerging technologies can exert significant pressure on conceptual systems and spark ‘conceptual disruption’. For example, advances in Artificial Intelligence raise the question of whether AIs are agents or mere objects, which can be construed as a CE question regarding the concepts AGENT and OBJECT. We distinguish between three types of conceptual disruption (conceptual gaps, conceptual overlaps, and conceptual misalignments) and argue that when CE occurs to address these disruptions, its primary aim is not to improve concepts, but to retain their functional quality, or to prevent them from degrading. This is the characteristic aim of CE when undertaken in philosophy of technology: to _preserve_ the functional role of a concept or conceptual scheme, rather than _improving_ how a concept fulfills its respective function.

Many psychologists currently assume that there is a psychologically real distinction to be made between concepts that are abstract and concepts that are concrete. It is for example largely agreed that concepts and words are more easily processed if they are concrete. Moreover, it is assumed that this is because these words and concepts are concrete. It is thought that interesting generalizations can be made about certain concepts because they are concrete. I argue that we have surprisingly little reason to believe that the abstract‐concrete distinction is psychologically real.

According to predictive processing, an increasingly influential paradigm in cognitive science, the function of the brain is to minimize the prediction error of its sensory input. Conceptual engineering is the practice of assessing and changing concepts or word meanings. We contribute to both strands of research by proposing the first cognitive account of conceptual engineering, using the predictive processing framework. Our model reveals a new kind of implementation problem as prediction errors are only minimized if enough agents embrace conceptual changes. This problem can be overcome by emphasizing the importance ofsocial normsandconceptual pluralism.

Advancements in artificial intelligence and (social) robotics raise pertinent questions as to how these technologies may help shape the society of the future. The main aim of the chapter is to consider the social and conceptual disruptions that might be associated with social robots, and humanoid social robots in particular. This chapter starts by comparing the concepts of robots and artificial intelligence and briefly explores the origins of these expressions. It then explains the definition of a social robot, as well as the definition of humanoid robots. A key notion in this context is the idea of anthropomorphism: the human tendency to attribute human qualities, not only to our fellow human beings, but also to parts of nature and to technologies. This tendency to anthropomorphize technologies by responding to and interacting with them as if they have human qualities is one of the reasons why social robots (in particular social robots designed to look and behave like human beings) can be socially disruptive. As is explained in the chapter, while some ethics researchers believe that anthropomorphization is a mistake that can lead to various forms of deception, others — including both ethics researchers and social roboticists — believe it can be useful or fitting to treat robots in anthropomorphizing ways. The chapter explores that disagreement by, among other things, considering recent philosophical debates about whether social robots can be moral patients, that is, whether it can make sense to treat them with moral consideration. Where one stands on this issue will depend either on one’s views about whether social robots can have, imitate, or represent morally relevant properties, or on how people relate to social robots in their interactions with them. Lastly, the chapter urges that the ethics of social robots should explore intercultural perspectives, and highlights some recent research on Ubuntu ethics and social robots.

A philosopher argues that state-sponsored cyberattacks against central military or civilian targets are always acts of war. What is this philosopher doing? According to conceptual analysts, the philosopher is making a claim about our concept of war. According to philosophical realists, the philosopher is making a claim about war per se. In a quickly developing literature, a third option is being explored: the philosopher is engineering the concept of war. On this view, the philosopher is making a proposal about which concept we should have – even if it deviates from the extant concept, and even if it does not capture ‘what war really is’. The activity or method of proposing such revisionary definitions, as well as the metaphilosophical reflection on it, has become known as conceptual engineering.

Concept eliminativists argue that we should eliminate the term ‘concept’ from our vocabulary in psychology because there is no single natural kind that is picked out by it. I argue that the most developed version of concept eliminativism by Edouard Machery depends on the assumption that concepts are defined as stable and context-independent bodies of information. It is this assumption that leads Machery to eliminativism and it is an assumption we have reason to reject. Another assumption that leads to the eliminativist conclusion and that we have reason to reject is that the type of content represented in long-term memory is the relevant property based on which we should individuate certain natural kinds in cognitive psychology. Finally, I argue that certain pieces of information are functionally integrated enough to meet the conditions for being a natural kind.

In Löhr and Michel (2022), we proposed a neurocognitive model within the predictive processing paradigm for acceptability intuitions about copredication sentences. We also addressed “predicate order effects,” the phenomenon that the acceptability of copredication sentences can vary with the order in which the predicates occur. We discussed Murphy's interpretation of order preferences based on a hierarchy of semantic complexity and tried to motivate that other interpretations are worthwhile pursuing. In a reply letter, Murphy (2022) takes issue with our approach, putting forward several purported methodological and conceptual issues with our paper. In this reply, we first clarify where exactly we agree and disagree. Second, we focus on a crucial equivocation and some misrepresentations of our proposal by Murphy.

The claim I want to explore in this paper is simple. In social ontology, Margaret Gilbert, Abe Roth, Michael Bratman, Antonie Meijers, Facundo Alonso and others talk about rights or entitlements against other participants in joint action. I employ several intuition pumps to argue that we have reason to assume that such entitlements or rights can be ascribed even to non-sentient robots that we collaborate with. Importantly, such entitlements are primarily identified in terms of our normative discourse. Justified criticism, for example, presupposes that another person acted wrongly, i.e., was not entitled to this action. Praise is supposed to encourage another person and acknowledge that one did more than one was obligated to. I show that such normative talk serves the same function when cooperating with robots. This, I argue, suggests that they have the same kind of entitlements and duties at least in the context of a joint action.

New technologies have the potential to severely “challenge” or “disrupt” not only our established social practices but our most fundamental concepts and distinctions like person versus object, nature versus artificial or being dead versus being alive. But does this disruption also change these concepts? Or does it merely change our operationalizations and applications of the same concepts? In this paper, I argue that instead of focusing on individual conceptual change, philosophers of socially disruptive technologies (SDTs) should think about conceptual change as a change in a network of interrelated concepts. What really generates a potential social disruption are changes of inferential relations between concepts – whether or not this entails a change of the respective individual concepts. Philosophers of socially disruptive technologies are therefore in the privileged position of being able to avoid commitments regarding the individuation of individual concepts.

Several authors in psychology and philosophy have recently raised the following question: when is it permissible to intentionally change the meaning and use of our words and concepts? I argue that an arguably prior question has received much less attention: Even if there were good moral or epistemic reasons for conceptual or semantic changes, this does not yet justify pushing or lobbying for such changes if they are socially and conceptually disruptive. In this paper, I develop the beginnings of an ethics of conceptual disruption as well as a set of norms of linguistic interventions based on it.

On a representationalist view, conceptual engineering is the practice of changing the extensions and intensions of the devices we use to speak and think. But if this view holds true, conceptual engineering has a bad rationale. Extensions and intensions are not the sorts of things that are better or worse as such. A representationalist account of conceptual engineering thus falls prey to the objection that the practice has a bad rationale. To account for the assumption that conceptual engineering is worthwhile, we propose to view what is being engineered as inferential devices, as opposed to representational devices. The objective is not to establish that being or having an inferential role is all there is to meaning or conceptual content. Rather, our agenda is to recommend a shift of focus from the representational features of content to the inferential features of content for the purposes of doing and thinking about conceptual engineering. Inferentialism about conceptual engineering makes better sense of the practice than a representationalist approach: In addition to accounting for the rationality of engaging in conceptual engineering, inferentialism provides a sound interpretation of what is at stake in concrete examples of conceptual engineering.

There are two general views that social ontologists currently defend concerning the nature of joint intentional action. According to ‘non-normativists’, for a joint action to be established, we need to align certain psychological states in certain ways. ‘Normativists’ argue that joint action essentially involves normative relations that cannot be reduced to the intentional states of individuals. In two ground-breaking publications, Javier Gomez-Lavin and Matthew Rachar empirically investigate the relation between normativity and joint action in several survey studies. They argue that people's intuitions support neither current normativists nor current non-normativists. They suggest that there is a need for a ‘new normativism of joint action’. I first explore what a new normativism could amount to and conclude that the authors’ findings cannot support a demand for such a view. Finally, I suggest some ideas about how to move the field forward.

The aim of this commentary is to underpin Duffley’s notion of a stable mental content that corresponds to the literal word meaning with a computationally plausible cognitive theory. Our approach is to investigate what these stable contents could be according to the so-called Predictive Processing architecture. We argue that recent advances in cognitive science can make at least two contributions to the debate. First, they can provide some underpinning of Duffley's ideas of a stable linguistic meaning associated with the sign. Second, they provide resources to understand how the semiological principle is compatible with a dynamic and flexible notion of "meaning".

How can we capture the intuitive distinction between lying and misleading? According to a traditional view, the difference boils down to whether the speaker is saying (as opposed to implying) something that they believe to be false. This view is subject to known objections; to overcome them, an alternative view has emerged. For the alternative view, what matters is whether the speaker can consistently deny that they are committed to knowing the relevant proposition. We point out serious flaws for this alternative view, and sketch a simpler alternative that incorporates key insights of the traditional view.

It is largely assumed that conceptual engineering is essentially about revising, introducing, or eliminating representational devices, in particular the intension and extension of words and concepts. However, tying conceptual engineering too closely to representations is risky. Not everyone endorses the notion of representation as theoretically helpful or even real. Not everyone thinks that concepts or meanings should be understood in terms of the notion of representation. Does this mean that conceptual engineering is not interesting or relevant for these skeptics? In this paper, I motivate and propose a non-representationalist construal of conceptual engineering. I argue that conceptual engineers can be understood as primarily engineering linguistic entitlements and commitments rather than representational devices. Note that this account is non-representationalist, but explicitly not anti-representationalist. Representations may play a significant role when it comes to justifying and completing commitment engineering projects.

In psycholinguistics, concepts are considered abstract if they do not apply to physical objects that we can touch, see, feel, hear, smell or taste. Psychologists usually distinguish concrete from abstract concepts by means of so-called _concreteness ratings_. In concreteness rating studies, laypeople are asked to rate the concreteness of words based on the above criterion. The wide use of concreteness ratings motivates an assessment of them. I point out two problems: First, most current concreteness ratings test the intuited concreteness of word forms as opposed to concepts. This ignores the ubiquitous phenomenon of lexical ambiguity. Second, the criterion of abstract concepts that the instruction texts of rating studies rely on does not capture the notion that psychologists working on abstract concepts are normally interested in, i.e., concepts that could reasonably be sensorimotor representations. For many concepts that pick out physical objects, this is not reasonable. In this paper, I propose a characterization of concrete and abstract concepts that avoids these two problems and that may be useful for future studies in psychology.

Polysemy has only recently entered the debate on semantic minimalism and contextualism. This is surprising considering that the key linguistic examples discussed in the debate, such as ‘John cut the grass’ or ‘The leaf is green’ appear to be prime examples of polysemy. Moreover, François Recanati recently argued that the mere existence of polysemy falsi!es semantic minimalism and supports radical contextualism. The aim of this paper is to discuss how the minimalism-contextualism debate relates to polysemy. This connection turns out to be far from clear-cut. This is partly due to the fact that the term ‘polysemy’ is used in a number of different ways in the literature, which will be reviewed in this paper. Finally, I discuss and reject Recanati’s claim that the existence of polysemy supports radical contextualism against moderate versions and semantic minimalism. I show that minimalism has a number of plausible options to account for polysemy.