Iñigo Valero

Current debates on the nature of human biological sex often revolve around the question “Is sex binary?” In this paper, I argue that framing the debate in these terms is problematic as it already constitutes a significant theoretical commitment which results in oversimplistic characterizations of human sex. I argue, thus, that neither the positive nor the negative answer to the question “Is sex binary?” is satisfactory and that a more nuanced approach is required. More positively, I suggest that conceptual engineering provides promising tools to engage in this debate more fruitfully and transparently. Finally, I defend conceptual pluralism about human biological sex, the view according to which the term ‘sex’ may be legitimately paired with more than one concept of sex.

In this paper I argue against Simion’s (2018) Epistemic Limiting Procedure for conceptual engineering and put forward a more permissive alternative, according to which epistemic losses do not systematically block amelioration, but merely provide reasons against it. On this less restrictive view, epistemic losses will be permissible, provided that they are compensated by the non-epistemic gains of the amelioration. After fleshing out the details of my proposal, I discuss two case studies in relation to which Simion’s restrictive procedure seems to yield the wrong predictions. I argue that my alternative accommodates these cases significantly better.

Projectibility has traditionally been given a prominent role in natural kind theories. However, where most of these theories take projectibility to be a necessary but insufficient feature of natural kinds, this paper defends an account of natural kinds according to which the naturalness of kinds is to be identified with their degree of projectibility only. This view follows thus the path opened by Häggqvist (2005), although it goes significantly further on two main respects. First, I develop and discuss two important dimensions of projectibility that are overlooked in Häggqvist’s work. Second, I address two recent important objections (Magnus 2012 and Spencer 2015) against projectibility-based accounts.