Kevin Scharp

According to the folk conception of having evidence, if the butler killed the victim right in front of me, I have evidence that the butler killed the victim. According to the vast majority of experts in the nature of evidence, that’s only the case if I have the corresponding seemings and beliefs. Experts think the having relation is in the head. Laymen disagree. This paper argues that experts are wrong, and, furthermore, that the expert conception of the having relation is highly problematic functionally—in that it preempts evidence had from playing its roles in accountability, moral and legal. Experts should engineer their conception to fit the laymen’s.

Epistemology, for a large chunk of the twentieth century, was dominated by attempts to produce a conceptual analysis of knowledge. As everyone knows, it didn’t go too well. Gettier’s (1963) introduction of his eponymous counterexamples catalysed a flurry of attempts to pin down the elusive ‘missing ingredient’ that JTB apparently lacked. Yet to this day, despite reams of paper and gallons of ink spent, no solution has been found. Within the last quarter-century or so, there have been growing signs that the discipline has finally started to grow weary of the chase. Linda Zagzebski (1994), for instance, has argued that the Gettier problem is simply an inescapable consequence of fallibilism—that it cannot be ‘solved’. Fans of ‘knowledge first’ approaches (following Williamson, 2000) have, meanwhile, suggested that knowledge may simply be basic and unanalysable. Perhaps this looming sense of futility explains why epistemology’s primary focus has slowly started to shift away from the analysis of knowledge, to embrace a variety of more general epistemological topics such as epistemic value or the ethics of belief.

Conceptual engineering typically aims to fix some conceptual defects. Mona Simion, however, argues that it is permissible to engineer non-defective concepts too, but this mustn’t come with an epistemic loss. This paper holds that some conceptual resources should be fixed though because of serious ideological defects involved and it isn’t possible to engineer such concepts without an epistemic loss; still, this is the normative ground to engineer. In this spirit, Paul-Mikhail Catapang Podosky argues for an expanded version of Simion’s view to make engineering ideologically defective concepts permissible. Although Podosky’s critique of Simion is compelling, this paper critiques Podosky’s expanded version too: Podosky’s understanding of how ideological concepts work also generates prima facie prohibitions to engineer when engineering looks highly desirable. The paper thus proceeds to offer an alternative diagnosis of ideological defects. It subsequently raises another, less normative, issue about implementation: it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to merely ‘tweak’ ideological concepts. The discussion hence offers grounds to be skeptical about the feasibility of implementing new conceptual resources. It also urges modesty about how emancipatory ‘our’ attempts at conceptual innovation can be without this being enabled by alterations in background social conditions.

I argue that conceptual engineering, on the understanding I favour, is the identification and naming of the properties we need for this or that worthwhile purpose, independently of whether they are properties named in extant theories. So understood, it is obvious that conceptual engineering should be supported, and I give some non-controversial examples. I discuss the connection between our description of conceptual engineering in terms of properties and words, and the more usual one in terms of concepts. The implications of conceptual engineering for a number of live issues in analytical philosophy—knowledge, Swampman, narrow content, proper names—are discussed. I conclude by noting that our defence of conceptual engineering does not imply that traditional conceptual analysis has no worthwhile role to play but does imply that its role needs a certain amount of rethinking. I illustrate this with the example of personal identity.

In this paper I argue that the topic of epistemic justification offers promising terrain for conceptual engineering. For one thing, standards of epistemic justification themselves (and the concepts that capture them) aim to address certain practical and theoretical needs, and there is a clear rationale for engineering standards (concepts) to best suit these needs. In addition, neither of the two problems that plague conceptual engineering proposals in other domains—the implementation problem and the change-of-subject problem—seem particularly worrisome in connection with the proposal to engineer epistemological concepts. But the proof will be in the pudding, and in the second half of this paper I propose an engineered concept of epistemic justification. While the concept I characterize here is decidedly non-standard, I argue that it is the one we should use, in that it does a better job than rivals at addressing the needs to which a concept of epistemic justification should be responsive.

This paper makes a prima facie case for abandoning use of the terms ‘ideal theory’ and ‘non-ideal theory’ in social and political inquiry (across a central range of contexts). Our argument begins by observing two sorts of striking variation. The first is variation in how inquirers characterize “ideal” and “non-ideal” theory. The second is variation in the theoretical significance of idealization. Here, there is striking variation across theoretical contexts in the targets that can be usefully idealized, the degree of idealization that can be applied to those targets, and the ways that idealizations can be warranted or worrisome. Against the background of this variety, we argue both that central uses of these terms have the potential to obstruct inquiry, and that there is no theoretically appealing way to reform the existing usage.

Haslanger (Noûs 34(1):31–55, 2000) has argued that we should ameliorate concepts of race or gender to better capture existing structural inequalities. Her analysis was criticized by Simion (Inquiry 61(8):914–928, 2018a), who argued that a concept should be ameliorated only if doing so preserves epistemic accuracy. But, as I argue, this criticism misses Haslanger’s target. In response, Podosky (Inquiry 1–15, 2018) and McKenna (Logos Episteme 9(3):335–342, 2018) have argued that conceptual revisions need not preserve “epistemic accuracy” since concepts can “shape reality”, not just represent it. Here I argue that social kind concepts need not “shape” the corresponding social kinds: neither causally nor constitutively. This raises doubts about the function of ameliorative projects for social kind concepts as means to change social reality.

I begin, in Part I, with four general observations about engineering that have lessons for conceptual engineering. First, thoughtful engineering requires a design specification, a rough account of what the innovations in question are aimed at. Second, once we have the specification, we have to ask what’s necessary to achieve those aims. Third, there are usually many possible solutions, because (a) the aims are only vaguely specified and (b) there are all kinds of desiderata, each of which can be satisfied to a greater or lesser degree, and it’s both (c) unlikely that one solution is best with respect to all the constraints and (d) not clear how to rank them. Fourth, it can be very hard to predict how a proposed innovation might be taken up. This means that very often what’s needed is a trial-and-error process, in which proposals are made and we see what happens as they are and are not taken up.In Part II, I explore three observations we need to bear in mind when it is concepts, in particular, that are being engineered. First, we need to be clear what the aim is: in practice, it is to get people to use some word (old or new) in a particular way. Since what is involved is changing the behavior of large numbers of people in a coordinated way, what is going on is, in effect, a movement for social change. Also, second, because we are working on concepts, we need to be clear about some things about concepts: (a) they are best understood as embedded in theories, so that they come in clusters not one by one, and (b) most interesting concepts have very many conceptions, perhaps, at the finest grain, as many conceptions as users of a certain word. Third, the theories in question are going to be to some degree idealized. This means, I’ll argue, that truth isn’t all that matters.In Part III, I’ll explore some work in reshaping understandings of race in anglophone philosophy for the last half century, with these observations in mind.

This chapter investigates the question of when it is reasonable to replace an inconsistent concept. After surveying a number of proposals for how one might understand constitutive principles, it goes on to endorse Burgess’s (2004) account of being pragmatically analytic, as a possible source of insight into constitutive principles. The chapter then raises a question: If truth is an inconsistent concept, does it need to be replaced? According to the argument in the chapter, when an inconsistent concept paralyzes valuable projects, it is time to replace it. And if we are to replace a concept, our replacement should be able to do the work that the inconsistency-yielding one did. This, of course, raises a fundamental question concerning what work the notion of truth does for us. The chapter mounts a case for the claim that inflationists, but not obvious deflationists, about truth should offer a replacement for the concept of truth.

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.

This book explores innovative applications of conceptual engineering to specific case studies beyond philosophy. Conceptual engineering is described a method for reframing philosophy as a problem-solving method of direct relevance for, and bearing on, areas of practical concern. Based on lectures at the Conceptual Engineering Online Seminar 2020/2022 by leading philosophers, it opens new perspectives on a wide array of topics in relation to issues of high scientific, social, and political significance. This book is a must-read for professional philosophers, experts in metaphilosophy or those interested in applying the methods of conceptual engineering to issues in their own areas of specialization. It is also of great interest to philosophy students, eager to get acquainted with the most exciting and dynamic methodological developments of their discipline.

This book develops novel connections between conceptual engineering and a variety of fields and methods in analytic philosophy. Conceptual engineering is an exciting new movement in contemporary analytic philosophy that focuses on assessing and improving our concepts. In less than a decade, it has successfully spanned across the whole discipline. Based on lectures by leading philosophers at the Conceptual Engineering Online Seminar 2020/2022, this volume offers new perspectives on this wide array of topics and connects them to case studies of high philosophical, scientific, or social/political significance. This book is a must-read for professional philosophers, experts in metaphilosophy or those interested in applying the methods of conceptual engineering to issues in their own areas of specialization. It is also of great interest to philosophy students, eager to get acquainted with the most exciting and dynamic methodological developments of their discipline.

Aletheic pluralism is the view that there is more than one truth property, and logical pluralism is the view that there is more than one correct logic. Usually the truth properties described by the aletheic pluralist are familiar ones advocated by parties debating the nature of truth (e.g., the correspondence property, the pragmatic property, and coherence property). Likewise, the logics described by the logical pluralist are familiar ones advocated by parties debating the nature of logic (e.g., classical, intuitionistic, and relevant). However, one can be an aletheic pluralist by focusing on properties of truth that result from different approaches to the aletheic paradoxes instead. And one can be a logical pluralist by focusing on logics that result from different approaches to the aletheic paradoxes. Moreover, one could combine these two alternative pluralisms into a single view according to which the logic and the truth property differ depending on the context, but they are coordinated so that in contexts with stronger logics, the truth property is weaker, and in contexts with weaker logics, the truth property is stronger. I first formulate this coordinated pluralism about truth and logic and then evaluate it as a competitor with more traditional approaches to the aletheic paradoxes.

Recent work on philosophy of technology emphasises the ways in which technology can disrupt our concepts and conceptual schemes. We analyse and challenge existing accounts of conceptual disruption, criticising views according to which conceptual disruption can be understood in terms of uncertainty for conceptual application, as well as views assuming all instances of conceptual disruption occur at the same level. We proceed to provide our own account of conceptual disruption as an interruption in the normal functioning of concepts and conceptual schemes. Moreover, we offer a multilevel taxonomy thereof, where we distinguish between instances of conceptual disruptions occurring at different levels (conceptual scheme, conceptual clusters, and individual concepts), taking on different forms (conceptual gaps and conceptual conflicts), and leading to different degrees of severity (extending from mild to severe). We also provide detailed accounts through historical examples of how conceptual gaps and conceptual conflicts can occur at different times in the very same process of conceptual disruption. Finally, we make the case that different kinds of conceptual engineering can provide meaningful ways to assess and overcome distinct types of conceptual disruption.

One common criticism of deflationism is that it does not have the resources to explain defective discourse (e.g., vagueness, referential indeterminacy, confusion, etc.). This problem is especially pressing for someone like Robert Brandom, who not only endorses deflationist accounts of truth, reference, and predication, but also refuses to use representational relations to explain content and propositional attitudes. To address this problem, I suggest that Brandom should explain defective discourse in terms of what it is to treat some portion of discourse as defective. To illustrate this strategy, I present an extension of his theory of content and use it to provide an explanation of confusion. The result is a theory of confusion based on Joseph Camp’s recent treatment. The extension of Brandom’s theory of content involves additions to his account of scorekeeping that allow members of a discursive practice to accept different standards of inferential correctness.

Abstract: From familiar concepts like TALL and TABLE to exotic ones like GRAVITY and GENOCIDE, they guide our lives and are the basis for how we represent the world. However, there is good reason to think that many of our most cherished concepts, like TRUTH, FREEDOM, KNOWLEDGE, and RATIONALITY are defective in the sense that the rules for using them are inconsistent. This defect leads those who possess these concepts into paradoxes and absurdities. Indeed, I argue that many of the central problems of contemporary philosophy should be thought of as having their source in philosophical concepts that are defective in this way. If that is right, then we should take a more active role in crafting and sculpting our conceptual repertoire. We need to explore various ways of replacing these defective concepts with ones that will still do the work we need them to do without leading us into contradictions.

What is the property of being true like? To answer this question, begin with a Canberra-plan analysis of the concept of truth. That is, assemble the platitudes for the concept of truth, and then investigate which property might satisfy them. This project is aided by Friedman and Sheard’s groundbreaking analysis of twelve logical platitudes for truth. It turns out that, because of the paradoxes like the liar, the platitudes for the concept of truth are inconsistent. Moreover, there are so many distinct paradoxes that only small subsets of platitudes for truth are consistent. The result is that there is no property of being true. The failure of the Canberra plan analysis of the concept of truth, points the way toward a new methodology: a conceptual engineering project for the concept of truth. Conceptual engineering is assessing the quality of our concepts, and when they are found defective, offering new and better concepts to replace them for certain purposes. Still, there are many aletheic properties, which are properties satisfied by reasonably large subsets of platitudes for the concept of truth. We can treat these aletheic properties as a guide to the multitude of new aletheic concepts, which are concepts similar to, but distinct from, the concept of truth. Any new aletheic concept or team of concepts might be called on to replace the concept of truth. In particular, the concepts of ascending truth and descending truth are recommended, but the most important point is that we need a full-scale investigation into the space of aletheic properties and new aletheic concepts—that is, we need an Aletheic Principles Project.

Thinking about truth can be more dangerous than it looks. Of course, our concept of truth is the source of one of the most frustrating and impenetrable paradoxes humans have ever contemplated, the liar paradox, but that is just the beginning of its treachery. In an effort to understand why one of the most beloved and revered members of our conceptual repertoire could cause us so much trouble, philosophers have for centuries proposed “solutions” to the liar paradox. However, it seems that our concept of truth takes offense to our efforts to understand it because it appears to retaliate against those who propose “solutions” to the liar. It takes its revenge on us by creating new paradoxes from our own attempts to find resolution. That is, most proposed solutions to the liar paradox give rise to new, more insidious paradoxes—often called revenge paradoxes. For our attempts at understanding, truth rewards us with inconsistent theories, untenable logics, and a deep feeling of bewilderment. It is as if our concept of truth lashes out at us because it wants to remain a mystery. After a few run-ins with truth, many philosophers have the good sense to keep their distance. Far from being the serene, profound concept most people take it to be, those of us who think much about the liar paradox know truth to be a vengeful bully—a conceptual misanthrope.

Conceptual engineering is the method of critically assessing, improving, and replacing the concepts we use in thought and talk. Based on lectures by leading philosophers at the Conceptual Engineering Online Seminar 2020–2022, this first of three volumes is dedicated to core foundational issues in conceptual engineering: questions about the nature and varieties of conceptual engineering, whether engineering a concept necessarily preserves core features of a concept, and where the normative limits of conceptual engineering lie. It is of interest to professional philosophers with expertise in metaphilosophy or those who seek to apply the methods of conceptual engineering to issues in their own areas of specialization, as well as philosophy students who want to get acquainted with the exciting and dynamic methodological developments of their discipline. This volume includes chapters by Derek Ball & Bryan Pickel, Delia Belleri, Paul Egré & Cathal O’Madagain, Peter Gardener, Hans-Johan Glock, James Hampton, Allison Koslow, Esa Díaz León, and Sarah Sawyer.

Semantics for Reasons is a book about what we mean when we talk about reasons. It not only brings together the theory of reasons and natural language semantics in original ways but also sketches out a litany of implications for metaethics and the philosophy of normativity. In their account of how the language of reasons works, Bryan R. Weaver and Kevin Scharp propose and defend a view called Question Under Discussion Reasons Contextualism. They use this view to argue for a series of novel positions on the ontology of reasons, indexical facts, the reasons-to-be-rational debate, moral reasons, and the reasons-first approach.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) pervades humanity in 2022, and it is notoriously difficult to understand how certain aspects of it work. There is a movement—_Explainable_ Artificial Intelligence (XAI)—to develop new methods for explaining the behaviours of AI systems. We aim to highlight one important philosophical significance of XAI—it has a role to play in the elimination of vagueness. To show this, consider that the use of AI in what has been labeled _surveillance capitalism_ has resulted in humans quickly gaining the capability to identify and classify most of the occasions in which languages are used. We show that the knowability of this information is incompatible with what a certain theory of vagueness—_epistemicism_—says about vagueness. We argue that one way the epistemicist could respond to this threat is to claim that this process brought about the end of vagueness. However, we suggest an alternative interpretation, namely that epistemicism is false, but there is a weaker doctrine we dub _technological epistemicism_, which is the view that vagueness is due to ignorance of linguistic usage, but the ignorance can be overcome. The idea is that knowing more of the relevant data and how to process it enables us to know the semantic values of our words and sentences with higher confidence and precision. Finally, we argue that humans are probably not going to believe what future AI algorithms tell us about the sharp boundaries of our vague words unless the AI involved can be explained in terms understandable by humans. That is, if people are going to accept that AI can tell them about the sharp boundaries of the meanings of their words, then it is going to have to be XAI.

In the International System of Units (SI), ‘meter’ is defined in terms of seconds and the speed of light, and ‘second’ is defined in terms of properties of cesium 133 atoms. I show that one consequence of these definitions is that: if there is a minimal length (e.g., Planck length), then the chances that ‘meter’ is completely determinate are only 1 in 21,413,747. Moreover, we have good reason to believe that there is a minimal length. Thus, it is highly probable that ‘meter’ is indeterminate. If the meter is indeterminate, then any unit in the SI system that is defined in terms of the meter is indeterminate as well. This problem affects most of the familiar derived units in SI. As such, it is highly likely that indeterminacy pervades the SI system. The indeterminacy of the meter is compared and contrasted with emerging literature on indeterminacy in measurement locutions (as in Eran Tal’s recent argument that measurement units are vague in certain ways). Moreover, the indeterminacy of the meter has ramifications for the metaphysics of measurement (e.g., problems for widespread assumptions about the nature of conventionality, as in Theodore Sider’s Writing the Book of the World) and the semantics of measurement locutions (e.g., undermining the received view that measurement phrases are absolutely precise as in Christopher Kennedy’s and Louise McNally’s semantics for gradable adjectives). Finally, it is shown how to redefine ‘meter’ and ‘second’ to completely avoid the indeterminacy.

Of the dozens of purported solutions to the liar paradox published in the past fifty years, the vast majority are "traditional" in the sense that they reject one of the premises or inference rules that are used to derive the paradoxical conclusion. Over the years, however, several philosophers have developed an alternative to the traditional approaches; according to them, our very competence with the concept of truth leads us to accept that the reasoning used to derive the paradox is sound. That is, our conceptual competence leads us into inconsistency. I call this alternative the inconsistency approach to the liar. Although this approach has many positive features, I argue that several of the well-developed versions of it that have appeared recently are unacceptable. In particular, they do not recognize that if truth is an inconsistent concept, then we should replace it with new concepts that do the work of truth without giving rise to paradoxes. I outline an inconsistency approach to the liar paradox that satisfies this condition

Kevin Scharp proposes an original theory of the nature and logic of truth on which truth is an inconsistent concept that should be replaced for certain theoretical purposes. He argues that truth is best understood as an inconsistent concept, and proposes a detailed theory of inconsistent concepts that can be applied to the case of truth. Truth also happens to be a useful concept, but its inconsistency inhibits its utility; as such, it should be replaced with consistent concepts that can do truth's job without giving rise to paradoxes. To this end, Scharp offers a pair of replacements, which he dubs ascending truth and descending truth, along with an axiomatic theory of them and a new kind of possible-worlds semantics for this theory. He goes to develop Davidson's idea that truth is best understood as the core of a measurement system for rational phenomena (e.g., belief, desire, and meaning), and offers a semantic theory that treats truth predicates as assessment-sensitive (i.e., their extension is relative to a context of assessment) and solves the problems posed by the liar and other paradoxes.

This essay proposes a theory of the nature and logic of truth on which truth is an inconsistent concept that should be replaced for certain theoretical purposes. The paradoxes associated with truth (for example, the liar) and the pattern of failures in our attempts to deal with them suggest that truth is an inconsistent concept. The first part of the essay describes a pair of replacement concepts, which the essay dubs ascending truth and descending truth, along with an axiomatic theory of them and an empirical interpretation of the theory. The essay shows how to use these replacements in a familiar truth-conditional semantics as well. The second part of the essay offers a descriptive theory of our natural language truth predicate that takes it to be assessment sensitive, which means that it has the same content in every context of utterance, but its extension (that is, the set of things that are true) depends on a context of assessment. Contexts of assessment model situations in which a person interprets someone's utterance. From different contexts of assessment, the truth predicate has different extensions. The descriptive theory employs the concepts of ascending truth and descending truth, and they determine how the extension of the truth predicate varies across contexts of assessment. This assessment-sensitive theory of truth solves the liar and other paradoxes, it is compatible with classical logic and all the expressive resources we have in natural language, and it does not give rise to any new paradoxes