Hans-Johann Glock

Conceptual engineering (CE) is the program of deliberately and systematically assessing our concepts, with a view to improving or, where required, replacing them by superior ones (e.g. Cappelen, 2020, p. 132; Eklund, 2021, p. 15). ‘CE’ can refer either to the assessment and amelioration of a conceptual system through philosophical means, or to the meta-philosophical debate on the nature, scope and limits of that philosophical activity. The two sometimes go hand-in-hand, nevertheless it is important to keep them apart. The current debate remains marked by a preponderance of meta-philosophical ruminations over philosophical performance. But for the sake of such ruminations it is convenient to use the label for the philosophical enterprise, unless otherwise specified.

Hans-Johann Glock develops a capacity-based alternative to the currently widespread view that concepts and experiences are mental representations. He claims that experiences must be explained by way of perceptual and sensory capacities and that concepts must be explained by way of intellectual ones, in particular, by way of capacities for classification and reasoning. Glock does not, however, identify concepts with intellectual capacities. He rather conceives of them as rules that guide the application of capacities. He defines the relationship between perceptions and concepts by coupling rationalistic, Aristotelian, and Kantian motifs: perceptions are to be strictly distinguished from concepts; perceptual capacities genetically, causally, and conceptually precede conceptual ones; and conceptual capacities must, in principle, be applicable to objects of experience. Glock's “capacity approach” can accordingly be understood as a variant of non-conceptualism.

The idea of moral certainties is venerable, highly contentious, and nevertheless alive. What I call “hinge ethics” (in analogy to hinge epistemology) combines three currents – meta-ethical concerns about the scope and limits of moral knowledge and objectivity, the idea of limits of doubt as articulated in On Certainty, and sympathies for Wittgensteinian ideas about ethics. This essay critically assesses hinge ethics, focusing on Nigel Pleasants’ work. My main objection is not that Wittgensteinian ideas about certainty cannot be transferred from the domain of physical phenomena to the moral domain. Nor shall I nail my colours to the mast of moral relativism. Instead my main tack will be as follows: Several of the views hinge ethicists detect in or derive from On Certainty are intriguing and ingenious, yet either unwarranted and/or not echt Wittgensteinian. Purported moral certainties like the wrongness of killing are neither ineffable, nor non-propositional, nor quasi-transcendental preconditions of moral thought and action. In so far as morality has scaffolding foundations, it is not certainties but capacities. At least some of these capacities are cognitive, a matter of social cognition.

Wittgenstein was associated with conceptual analysis and it is widely presumed that that there is a Wittgensteinian account of concepts, yet sustained treatments of the topic in his work are difficult to find. My contribution shows that this irony is more apparent than real. Wittgenstein discussed concepts at some length in material from the early 1930s and manuscripts and lectures from his final period. On that basis I discuss Wittgenstein’s answers to five crucial questions about concepts – concerning their definition, possession, individuation, function and how best to investigate their nature. Wittgenstein and thinkers who influenced or were influenced by him (Frege, Dummett, Peacock) have contributed substantially to our understanding of concepts in two ways: first, methodological reflections on how to approach philosophically contested concepts, the concept of a concept included; secondly, elucidation of the nature and role of concepts through their connections with linguistic meaning, explanation, understanding, abilities and rules.

This chapter examines P. F. Strawson’s relation to Wittgenstein. Strawson was the leading figure in the later phase of post-war conceptual analysis at Oxford. He made seminal contributions to philosophical logic, metaphysics, epistemology and meta-philosophy. The first section outlines Strawson’s general assessment of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. The discussion then turns to Strawson’s understanding of Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy and its influence on his own work, highlighting both commonalities (section 2) and differences (section 3). The following sections explore Strawson’s take on Wittgenstein’s treatment of skepticism in On Certainty (section 4) and their shared resistance to revisionist and reductionist naturalism (section 5). Finally, section 6 addresses Strawson’s reception of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of psychology and two significant points of disagreement between them, concerning the possibility of a private language and the privacy of sensations.

According to philosophers influenced by Aristotle and Wittgenstein, it is a mistake to attribute psychological properties to objects that fail to resemble human beings in relevant respects, in particular to parts of an animal, notably its brain or parts thereof. There are two labels for this alleged mistake: mereological fallacy and homunculus fallacy. This entry reconstructs both and explains their differences. The charge that subpersonal psychology commits such fundamental errors has been subject to numerous objections, which are assessed in this entry. It also broaches areas of recent interest: the nature of explanation in cognitive neuroscience, the predictive processing framework, as well as implications for debates regarding the moral status of brain organoids.

Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action.

My contribution comments on the chapters by van Elk and Bekkering, Johnson, Liszkowski, and Schmidt and Rakoczy in a sequence taking us from concepts through language to social cognition and normativity. My perspective is philosophical in stressing conceptual questions, yet in a way that acknowledges their dynamic interconnections with empirical and methodological issues. What constitutes the phenomena investigated by 4E cognitive science, such as concepts, meaning, interaction and normativity? How are they understood in different scientific paradigms, research programs, and theories? One of my general conclusions is that at least some factors in the development of both the language faculty and specific languages are not side effects of purely biological adaptations; instead they are directly functional for cooperative and language-wielding primates, and they may be the result of cumulative cultural development or even of (admittedly complex and messy) intentional innovations.

The question of whether meaning is inherently normative has become a central topic in philosophy and linguistics. It also has crucial implications for anthropology and for understanding the evolution of language. This chapter defends the normativity of meaning against some recent challenges. Anti-normativists contend that while there are “semantic principles”—aka explanations of meaning—specifying conditions for the correct application of expressions, these are either not genuinely normative or they are not in fact constitutive of meaning. This dilemma can be defused if one clarifies the notions of norm, rule, and convention, distinguishes different dimensions of semantic normativity, and pays attention to different types of mistakes that can afflict linguistic behaviour. One needs to keep apart: norms of truth and of meaning, regulative and constitutive rules, rules and the reasons for following or disregarding them, pro tanto and all things considered obligations. On that basis the chapter argues that correctness is a normative notion and that constitutive rules in general and explanations of meaning in particular play various normative roles in linguistic practices. Furthermore, while speakers may conform to and occasionally violate semantic principle for defeasible prudential reasons, this is perfectly compatible with the principles having a normative status. The final section discusses the question of whether human communication requires communally shared rules or conventions and the age-old problem of circularity: how could such conventions be essential to language, given that the latter appears prerequisite for establishing and communicating conventions in the first place?