Samuela Marchiori

While a rich scholarship has examined how technology impacts our practices, norms, values, and beliefs, considerably less explicit attention has been devoted to investigating how technology impacts our concepts, i.e., the notions through which we understand, reason about, and navigate our world. For example, the emergence of autonomous weapons systems has put pressure on the concept CONTROL adopted in international humanitarian law, which proved inadequate in establishing clear lines of responsibility for uses of force in contexts in which control over weapons was no longer exercised directly by a human agent, but distributed among human and non-human entities. Similarly, the advent of autonomous vehicles has raised pressing questions about (among others) liability regimes, safety standards, and the differential impact of this technology across different social groups. Many of such questions are tied to the concepts that underlie them. This dissertation investigates how to navigate technology-induced conceptual disruption (i.e., the interruption in the functional adequacy of concepts) with conceptual engineering (i.e., the evaluation, design, and implementation of concepts). The dissertation is a sustained illustration of the claim that conceptual engineering and the philosophy of technology—two disciplines which have so far proceeded on largely parallel tracks despite engaging with related problems, operating on similarly conceived objects of inquiry, and sharing broadly comparable normative aims—are better positioned to address their respective research in dialogue rather than in isolation. This has led to contributions to both conceptual engineering—illustrating how insights and tools developed for the study of socio-technical artefacts can enrich the theoretical foundations and operationalisation of conceptual engineering—and the philosophy of technology—showing how the vocabulary of conceptual engineering can equip philosophers of technology with sharper tools for identifying, evaluating, and responding to conceptual disruptions.

In conceptual engineering, concepts are often likened to artefacts, yet engagement with the extensive theorisation of artefacts in the philosophy of technology literature remains rare. After advancing an account of concepts as akin to socio-technical artefacts that sets itself apart from Thomasson’s work on concepts as abstract cultural artefacts (Thomasson 1999, 2007, 2021), this paper draws on the philosophy of technology scholarship on socio-technical artefacts to develop three insights for conceptual engineering. First, alongside functions, concepts, like artefacts, bear affordances and produce side effects, enabling uses beyond their intended purpose. Second, (re-)engineered concepts are inherently value-laden, reflecting the priorities and biases of their designers and the socio-technical contexts in which they operate. Third, conceptual engineering would benefit from greater methodological systematicity, drawing on the structured approaches employed in the philosophy of technology for the evaluation, design, and implementation of artefacts. Together, these insights suggest that exploring a closer alignment with the philosophy of technology scholarship on socio-technical artefacts can refine the theoretical understanding of concepts as artefact-like, enrich the conceptual engineering toolkit, and open new and promising directions for research and practice.

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.

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.

Much of the existing literature on conceptual engineering in the philosophy of technology has concentrated on identifying when and how concepts are disrupted under pressure, and how such disruptions can be addressed through conceptual engineering interventions. By and large, this literature has predominantly resorted to conceptual engineering as an approach to diagnose and remedy disruption. Recent work by Lundgren (2024) suggests that a shift from restorative to preventative conceptual engineering is warranted: rather than analysing disruptions post hoc, concepts can be deliberately designed to resist disruption from the outset. This paper introduces and develops the notion of conceptual resilience as the capacity of concepts to maintain continuous functional adequacy despite tensions, pressures, or other disturbances. Unlike Lundgren’s (2024) account, which frames this phenomenon in terms of conceptual stability, we argue that resilience better accommodates a broader range of modes of resistance to disruption, including those that involve adaptive transformation rather than static continuity. We further argue that conceptual resilience is not a binary property, but a capacity exhibited in degrees. Drawing from interdisciplinary literatures, we introduce two heuristic framings—Conceptual Resilience as Immutability (CRI) and Conceptual Resilience as Adaptability (CRA)—which capture contrasting yet complementary ways in which concepts preserve their functional adequacy under pressure.

Conceptual engineering is a normative approach to conceptual work aimed at the improvement of concepts through evaluation, design, and implementation. To this end, conceptual engineers need to have a measure of what an adequate concept amounts to. Functionalism offers such a standard. Following the functional approach, concepts have functions and are adequate to the extent that they can fulfil their functions. Functional approaches have traditionally operated on the assumption that conceptual engineers ought to concern themselves with what concepts _should_ do. Recent contributions have advocated a more fine-grained and context-sensitive understanding of conceptual functions, extending beyond proper functions to encompass normative and possible functions. Building of these developments, this paper introduces the notion of _conceptual affordances_, understood as the potential actions, uses, and thoughts that a concept enables or constrains relative to a given user and within a given context. It is argued that an affordances-informed approach can and should supplement and enrich functionalism. Indeed, by attending to conceptual affordances, conceptual engineers can better capture what concepts _enable_ us to do, thus offering a more holistic and ethically attuned framework for conceptual evaluation, design, and implementation.

The AI Act advances a risk-based approach to the legal regulation of AI systems in the European Union. While we support this development, we argue that adequate AI governance requires paying attention to the broader implications of AI systems on the socio-technical landscape in which they are designed, developed, and used. In addition to risk-based impact assessments, this involves coming to terms with the socially disruptive implications of AI, which should be governed and guided in a dynamic ecosystem of regulation, law, ethics, and evolving human practice. In this paper, we outline a ‘social disruptiveness-based’ approach to AI governance aimed at addressing disruptions by AI that are not easily captured by legal regulation, but that are nonetheless of great societal and ethical concern. We argue that integrating the AI Act risk-based approach with a social disruptiveness-based approach can offer a more nuanced understanding of the dimensions of impact of AI systems on society at large, thus enhancing the governance of AI and other socially disruptive technologies.

Considering public moral attitudes is a hallmark of the anticipatory governance of emerging biotechnologies, such as heritable human genome editing. However, such anticipatory governance often overlooks that future morality is open to change and that future generations may perform different moral assessments on the very biotechnologies we are trying to govern in the present. In this article, we identify an ’anticipatory gap’ that has not been sufficiently addressed in the discussion on the public governance of heritable genome editing, namely, uncertainty about the moral visions of future generations about the emerging applications that we are currently attempting to govern now. This paper motivates the relevance of this anticipatory gap, identifying the challenges it generates and offering various recommendations so that moral uncertainty does not lead to governance paralysis with regard to human germline genome editing.