Lidal Dror

Conceptual amelioration aims to make the world a more just place by ameliorating our concepts. I offer three arguments against this enterprise as currently practiced to show how social philosophy aimed at producing social change can be better practiced. First, ameliorators often fail to provide plausible stories to vindicate their claims about how conceptual amelioration will unfold in our nonideal world. Second, ameliorators’ focus on postulating meanings of “concepts” risks distracting from important normative theorizing about justice. Third, ameliorators tend to overstate the importance of conceptual change for social change. The upshot is that, since such projects tend to be done poorly on their own terms and to evince excessively idealistic views of social change, we should reconsider how to engage in such projects. Drawing on these criticisms, I argue that if conceptual amelioration should be practiced, it should be in service of ideology critique.

Do the oppressed have an epistemic advantage when it comes to knowing about the systems that oppress them? If so, what explains this advantage? In this paper, I consider whether an epistemic advantage can be derived from the oppressed's contingent tendency to have more relevant experiences and motivation than the non‐oppressed; or, alternatively, whether an advantage derives from the oppressed's very lived experience, thus being in principle unavailable to the non‐oppressed. I then explore the potential role of knowledge‐how for explaining an epistemic advantage. Ultimately, I conclude that the oppressed tend to have a contingent advantage, while rejecting that they have one in principle, except for when their phenomenological experience has an effect on the veracity of the claims they make. This has the important upshot that privileged people are not epistemically disadvantaged in principle and are thus often blameworthy for their ignorance about oppression.