Paul-Mikhail Catapang Podosky

ABSTRACT This paper continues a debate on the normative limits of conceptual engineering. In particular, it responds to [Isaac, Manuel Gustavo. 2021. “Post-truth conceptual engineering.” Inquiry. doi:10.1080/0020174x.2021.1887758] claim, in response to [Simion, Mona. 2018a. “The ‘Should’ in Conceptual Engineering.” Inquiry 61(8): 914–928 and Podosky, Paul-Mikhail Catapang. 2018. “Ideology and Normativity: Constraints on Conceptual Engineering.” Inquiry. doi:10.1080/0020174x.2018.1562374], but in particular Podosky, that cognitive efficacy, rather than truth and knowledge, should be the normative standard by which we assess the legitimacy of a conceptual engineering project – at least for ideological concepts. I argue that Isaac has not done enough to show us that truth and knowledge are insignificant for the conceptual engineering of ideological concepts.

I argue, contrary to Queloz, Matthieu, and Friedmann Bieber. 2022. “Conceptual Engineering and the Politics of Implementation.” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 103 (3): 670–691, that institutionalising control over conceptual uptake can overcome the implementation challenge of conceptual engineering without violating liberal-democratic ideals. Institutional control can render implementation easy without generating unchecked concentrations of power or manipulated consent. Moreover, from a republican perspective, reducing arbitrariness in conceptual uptake through accountable institutional control can be necessary to address existing forms of unjust power over our conceptual lives.

We are invited to picture conceptual improvement as a kind of engineering. Extract the concept, repair what is defective, and return it to use. But the picture requires a background assumption that is rarely examined: that concepts can step outside the practices that give them life. I deny that assumption. Concepts are social phenomena sustained through ongoing labour: created, reproduced, contested, and policed within what I call conceptual economies. Once recognised, the engineering image loses its grip. There is no standpoint external to the economy from which design can occur, and the much-discussed implementation challenge is a misdescription of how conceptual change unfolds. Conceptual improvement is better understood as a mode of participation within a labour system. This offers a more realistic account of what philosophers are doing when revising our concepts.

What does decolonial justice require in response to the epistemic devastation of colonisation? Recent work proposes restoring lost epistemic status or compensating victims with epistemic goods. I argue that neither restitution nor compensation is a viable response to the destruction of Indigenous knowledge systems. Drawing on international law and reparations theory, I show that these frameworks neglect the role of proportionality as a normative constraint on adequate redress. Once this constraint is taken seriously, it becomes clear that the logic of repair is incompatible with the aims of decolonisation.

Calls to amplify marginalized voices are common. In this paper, we examine these calls by paying close attention to how the structure of online environments shape practices of amplification, and what this means for political communication and digital activism. We develop a conceptual and normative framework for understanding amplification as a technologically mediated practice of digital activism by answering three questions. Firstly, what is amplification, in the sense that features in calls to amplify marginalized voices? Second, what is at stake in amplifying well or badly? Third, how should those to whom calls to amplify are addressed respond? In answering the first question, we develop an account of amplification by exploiting an analogy with the amplification of sound in acoustics. In answering the second question, we identify several benefits of amplifying well and costs of amplifying badly. In answering the third question, we identify several heuristics that can be employed to increase the chances of achieving the benefits of successful amplification and reduce the chances of unsuccessful amplification.

Sensational claims portray AI as an entity beyond human control. We argue that while AI may exhibit characteristics that appear “beyond control,” this does not necessarily arise from its status as an independent entity. The prevalent “out-of-control” AI narrative obscures meaningful discussions on how we can effectively govern AI. This paper introduces a novel theoretical framework based on two variables: controllable/non-controllable AI and value-free/value-laden AI, yielding four distinct perspectives on AI ontology: Value-Free Instrumentalism, Determinism, Value-Laden Critical Theory, and Substantialism. We contend that AI's perceived lack of control stems not from value-free mind-independence, but from value-laden sociocultural power dynamics. Through the lens of Critical Theory, we elucidate that AI remains subject to control, despite prevalent perceptions suggesting otherwise. While AI may present legitimate existential concerns, these do not stem from an inherent “out-of-control” state, but rather from the exertion of control by entities whose motives may not align with public interest. This analysis aims to shift the discourse from panic-driven narratives to a nuanced understanding of AI's controllability, fostering more effective approaches to AI governance and development.

Grief-bots present a unique issue for the bereaved. As technology that can mimic the bespoke linguistic dispositions of a recently deceased loved one, grief-bots pose the heightened risk of the bereaved becoming dependent on them. One way to solve this problem is to restrict access to such technology, whether it is in the form of a complete ban, therapist-aided use, or technological limitations. I argue that such restrictions would constitute unjust affective paternalism. Marginalised people have long suffered from widespread failures of trust in their capacity to emotionally self-regulate. Restrictions on the use of such technology, in the name of improving emotional wellbeing, reinforce this system of injustice. In the end, I argue that rather than restrict access to grief-bots, services and government programs should be made available so that anyone who wants to avoid dependency, or overcome it, can access them if they wish.

Generative AI (GenAI) grading and tutoring systems are rapidly entering higher education, promising increased efficiency and personalized learning experiences. We believe this technology should be viewed with caution, particularly in the case of philosophy. In this article, we first outline the nature and purported benefits of these systems. Next, we examine the economic motivations driving their adoption within institutions, such as reducing labor costs. Finally, we argue that these motivations, while compelling to administrators, may fail to consider potential negative consequences. We present six pedagogical reasons to be critical of the widespread implementation of GenAI in education: (1) limitations on teacher efficacy; (2) increased student alienation; (3) the undermining of educators’ duty of care; (4) the outsourcing of core teaching tasks; (5) questions regarding the accuracy and utility of GenAI graders; and (6) the risk of implementing GenAI as a misguided solution to real problems in education.

In this paper, I grapple with the question: What attitude should we take to conceptual engineering? Particularly, I consider whether cautious optimism is warranted when conceptual engineering is understood as a means of promoting social justice. For Simion and Kelp (Noûs 54(4):985–1002, 2019), evolutionary biology and biotechnology serve as useful analogical sources for grounding optimism. In response, I argue that (1) even if the analogy holds, optimism cannot inferred from biology to conceptual engineering, and (2) the analogy breaks down. However, I show that this does not mean that optimism is unwarranted. There is still a case to made for the possibility that material conditions can be intentionally manipulated in a way that would generate welcomed conceptual consequences. I call this _the pre-implementation challenge._.

Conceptual engineering has strong political roots. But if conceptual engineering is to be a useful tool for promoting social justice, there must be a means by which the concepts we design can take root and propagate in dominant contexts. This is known as the implementation challenge. In this paper, I caution against movements toward a particular methodological perspective on the challenge called dialogical individualism. This perspective centres the role of speakers in speech-situations to persuade hearers to change their minds about currently held concepts. This individualism has a distorting effect: it warps our perception of the size of the challenge. In particular, dialogical individualism ignores the social environmental factors that make conversation an unfriendly site for conceptual change. Moreover, it is not sufficiently attentive to the history of conceptual change in communities of practice. In the end, I argue for a methodological perspective shift: discursive strategies, such as speaker persuasion, should be decentralized in our overall thinking about the best solutions to the implementation challenge. Our attention is better focused on tailoring strategies to deal with the social environment in which concept-users are embedded.

Kate Manne claims that her account of gaslighting rectifies regrettable deficiencies in existing theories. However, Manne hasn’t done enough to demonstrate the novelty of her view given that she fails to seriously engage with a significant portion of the gaslighting literature. This is an issue in the politics of methodology. Many theorists working on gaslighting exist within the margins, attempting to centre their perspectives over dominant points of view. We must listen to marginalised folk when aiming to understand a phenomenon that disproportionately affects them. If Manne had listened, she would have come to see difficulties with some of her suggestions, such as the possibility of unintentional gaslighting.

The phenomena of call-outs and call-ins are fiercely debated. Are they mere instances of virtue signaling? Or can they actually perform social justice work? This paper gains purchase on these questions by focusing on how language users negotiate norms in speech. The authors contend that norm-enacting speech not only makes a norm salient in a context but also creates conversational conditions that motivate adherence to that norm. Recognizing this allows us to define call-outs and call-ins: the act of calling-out brings with it the presupposition that its target's behavior is norm-violating, whereas the act of calling-in simply presupposes its target's willingness to revise their belief. With these definitions at hand, we evaluate whether call-outs and call-ins are suitable tools for combating social injustice.

Debate over the normativity of virtual phenomena is now widespread in the philosophical literature, taking place in roughly two distinct but related camps. The first considers the relevant problems to be within the scope of applied ethics, where the general methodological program is to square the intuitive (im)permissibility of virtual wrongdoings with moral accounts that justify their (im)permissibility. The second camp approaches the normativity of virtual wrongdoings as a metaphysical debate. This is done by disambiguating the ‘virtual’ character of ‘virtual wrongdoings’. Doing so is supposed to provide illuminating ontological distinctions that inform ethical aspects of the debate. We argue that each approach faces its own set of issues, and as a result, motivates consideration of an alternative. The alternative we suggest turns inquiry concerning the normativity of virtual wrongdoings into a distinctively conceptual question. Rather than asking whether some action is right or wrong, or whether some virtual phenomenon counts as a particular action at all, we argue that research into the normativity of virtual wrongdoings may be guided by reflecting on whether a concept that originated and developed within a non-virtual context should be exported into a foreign virtual domain. We consider this approach and several objections.

This paper continues a debate on the normative limits of conceptual engineering. In particular, it responds to Manuel Gustavo Isaac’s (2021) claim, in response to Simion (2018a) and Podosky (2018), but in particular Podosky, that cognitive efficacy, rather than truth and knowledge, should be the normative standard by which we assess the legitimacy of a conceptual engineering project – at least for ideological concepts. I argue Isaac has not done enough to show us that truth and knowledge are insignificant for the conceptual engineering of ideological concepts.

This paper explores the implications of Zeynep Tufekci’s capacities approach to social movements, which explains the strength of social movements in terms of their capacities. Tufekci emphasises that the capacities of contemporary social movements largely depend upon their uses of new digital technologies, and of social media in particular. We show that Tufekci’s approach has important implications for the structure of social movements, whether and what obligations they can have, and for how these obligations distribute to their members. In exploring these implications, we develop a tripartite taxonomy of social movements. Each type of social movement in the taxonomy corresponds to a different type of group: social campaigns, social struggles, and social agitations. We show that all three types of social movement can bear obligations in virtue of their capacities. Finally, we argue that a surprising upshot of the obligations of social movements is that members of oppressed groups can have obligations to resist their own oppression in virtue of being members of social movements.

Emmalon Davis has offered an insightful analysis of an under-theorized form of epistemic oppression calledepistemic appropriation.This occurs when an epistemic resource developed within marginalized situatedness gains inter-communal uptake, but the author of the epistemic resource is unacknowledged. In this paper, I argue that Davis's definition of epistemic appropriation is not exhaustive. In particular, she misses out on explaining cases of epistemic appropriation in which an intra-communal epistemic resource isobscuredthrough inter-communal uptake. Being attentive to this form of epistemic appropriation allows us to identify unique forms of epistemic oppression that emerge as a result of socially maintained active ignorance.

This chapter explores a case study in contemporary fanaticism. We adopt Katsafanas’s conceptualization of fanaticism to make possible an in-depth discussion of and evaluation of a diffuse but important social movement — the anglophone manosphere. According to Katsafanas, fanatics are fruitfully understood as members of a group that adopts sacred values which they hold unconditionally to preserve their own psychic unity, and who feel that those values are threatened by those who do not accept them. The manosphere includes several social movements, including incels, men’s rights activists, and men-going-their-own-way. We show that many members of these groups are well-characterized by Katsafanas’s theory of fanaticism, and that they have forged their fanatical group identity using tools that philosophers have tended to associate with more benign social movements and the task of “conceptual engineering.” Indeed, we think that manosphere groups have in many cases been more successful than more palatable liberationist movements, and that this case study in the dark side of conceptual engineering may be both sobering and informative.

I examine how the use of moral language is tactically employed by the meat-eating industry to exploit and manipulate the moral community. In particular, I discuss the treatment of the word humane in the context of factory farming. I argue that when the meat-eating industry employs phrases such as killing humanely, it deceitfully directs the attention of the moral community by inviting us to make judgments about the method of killing farmed animals, while ignoring judgments about the whether or not such killing ought to happen. This difference is between killing humanely and a humane killing.

This paper explores the question: What would conceptual engineering have to be in order to promote social justice? Specifically, it argues that to promote social justice, conceptual engineering must deliver the following: it needs to be possible to deliberately implement a conceptual engineering proposal in large communities; it needs to be possible for a conceptual engineering proposal to bring about change to extant social categories; it needs to be possible to bring a population to adopt a conceptual engineering proposal for the right reasons; and it needs to be possible to do – without producing harmful consequences. I show that, of the three dominant approaches to conceptual engineering in the literature, only one of them seems amenable to the idea that it is possible and legitimate to promote social justice in accordance with –.

In this paper, I explain the kinematics of non-ideal metalinguistic disagreement. This occurs when one speaker has greater control in the joint activity of pairing contents with words in a context. I argue that some forms of non-ideal metalinguistic disagreement are deeply worrying, namely those that involves certain power imbalances. In such cases, a speaker possesses illegitimate control in metalinguistic disagreement owing to the operation of identity prejudice. I call this metalinguistic injustice. The wrong involves restricting a speaker from participating in the processes that determine the epistemic/linguistic resources of a conversation, and/or undermining a speaker's ability to affect metalinguistic outcomes.

Emmalon Davis has offered an insightful analysis of an under-theorized form of epistemic oppression calledepistemic appropriation.This occurs when an epistemic resource developed within marginalized situatedness gains inter-communal uptake, but the author of the epistemic resource is unacknowledged. In this paper, I argue that Davis's definition of epistemic appropriation is not exhaustive. In particular, she misses out on explaining cases of epistemic appropriation in which an intra-communal epistemic resource isobscuredthrough inter-communal uptake. Being attentive to this form of epistemic appropriation allows us to identify unique forms of epistemic oppression that emerge as a result of socially maintained active ignorance.

In what sense do people doubt their understanding of reality when subject to gaslighting? I suggest that an answer to this question depends on the linguistic order at which a gaslighting exchange takes place. This marks a distinction between first-order and second-order gaslighting. The former occurs when there is disagreement over whether a shared concept applies to some aspect of the world, and where the use of words by a speaker is apt to cause hearers to doubt their interpretive abilities without doubting the accuracy of their concepts. The latter occurs when there is disagreement over which concept should be used in a context, and where the use of words by a speaker is apt to cause hearers to doubt their interpretive abilities in virtue of doubting the accuracy of their concepts. Many cases of second-order gaslighting are unintentional: its occurrence often depends on contingent environmental facts. I end the article by focusing on the distinctive epistemic injustices of second-order gaslighting: metalinguistic deprivation, conceptual obscuration, and perspectival subversion. I show how each reliably has sequelae in terms of psychological and practical control.

Recently there has been much philosophical interest in the analysis of concepts to determine whether they should be removed, revised, or replaced. Enquiry of this kind is referred to as conceptual engineering or conceptual ethics. We will call it revisionary conceptual analysis (RCA). It standardly involves describing the meaning of a concept, evaluating whether it serves its purposes, and prescribing what it should mean. However, this stands in tension with prescriptivism, a metasemantic view which holds that all meaning claims are prescriptions. If prescriptivism is correct, then one is faced with two options: either (1) give up on the possibility of RCA, or (2) come up with a version of RCA that is consistent with the idea that all meaning claims are prescriptive. In this paper we offer an argument for (2).

Assuming that there is an obligation to combat structural injustice, what does it look like? I suggest that discerning what this obligation is, and on whom it falls, first requires being sensitive to facts about social structure. Importantly, we need to know how social structure is constituted, and the ways in which it can be disrupted. I argue that since social structure is constituted, in part, by concepts that undergird social practices, then our critical attention should be focused on those concepts that undergird oppressive social practices. In the end, I suggest that the obligation to combat structural injustice falls on privileged social groups to significantly aid in the processes that give rise to conceptual change.

Miranda Fricker explains that hermeneutical injustice occurs when an area of one’s social experience is obscured from collective understanding. However, Fricker focuses only on the injustice suffered by those who cannot render intelligible their own oppression. I argue that there is another side to hermeneutical injustice that is other-oriented; an injustice that occurs when one cannot understand, to a basic extent, the oppression of others. Specifically, I discuss the hermeneutical injustice suffered by nonhuman animals made possible by objectifying concepts available in the collective hermeneutical resource.

What it is to be an object and what it is to be a whole are separate enterprises: answering the former is doing ontology, and answering the latter is not. By providing this distinction, a new metaphysics of objects emerges. The positing of a whole is a referential gesture, either by ostension or naming, and the alleged object is postulated without consideration of internal causal operations between its parts. An object, however, requires careful physical explanation. I explicate the concept of object as an ontological function which takes mereological sums as arguments, and by causal operations on the members of that sum as structural relata, returns holistic properties of a singular entity. With the revised notions of whole and object in mind, I consider what implications this bears on existential quantification. Following Meinong, I believe that the existential quantifier does not capture existence. Instead, I argue that the existential quantifier expresses a mereological notion of countability; the collecting of things as one. The existential status of a counted entity is left unstated until it is explicitly asserted as existing by a speaker, in the mental frame of a realist attitude, and this expression of existence is captured by the existence predicate. The existence of the counted entity, the alleged object, is confirmed or denied as an object in light of whether it satisfies the conditions specified by an endorsed theory of causally productive relations; the conditions under which something is an object.