Making progress: pragmatism, conceptual engineering, and ordinary language

ABSTRACT

Pragmatists are interested primarily not in representing a purportedly unchanging Reality but in articulating prophetic future possibilities on the basis of the values most venerated by a culture/society in the present. This makes pragmatism sound a little like ‘Conceptual Engineering’. Conceptual engineers too are interested in transforming our ways of talking, which implies some notion of how such improvements are to be evaluated. Nevertheless, this paper argues that accounts of conceptual engineering that regard it as key to the project of elucidating an externalist semantics find it difficult to accommodate on their own terms the problem-phenomena taken to be of shared interest: regions of discourse where the demand for change are at their most pressing culturally. This difficulty takes the form of what I call the Conceptual Engineering Dilemma (CED), an inability to accommodate simultaneously the ethical and ameliorative dimensions of contestation. I argue that acknowledging the formalist commitments that undergird CED should make pragmatism more appealing to the practically-orientated analytic philosopher and conclude with a brief survey of some of the tools that it makes available for the pressing work of changing minds for the better.

KEYWORDS:

• Conceptual engineering
• metaphilosophy
• metasemantics
• ordinary language philosophy
• pragmatism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Since it’s moot among CEs whether or not CE involves actual changes to (actual) concepts, in this essay I use ‘concept use’ and ‘ways of talking’ interchangeably. For some non-pragmatic considerations see Löhr (2020).

2 Cf. Eklund (2014), Cappelen (2018), Richard (2019).

3 The need to make this clearer was pressed on me by Yvonne Huetter-Almerigi and an anonymous referee.

4 Who identifies its acknowledgement in the work of CEs including Haslanger, Richard, Ludlow and Railton (to name a few).

5 For a more nuanced consideration see Pinder (2020).

6 Cf. Richardson (2007), Limbeck-Lilienau (2012).

7 For an overview with a useful bibliography see Leitgeb and Carus (2021), Supplement H.

8 Thomasson (2020) likewise recognises that Cappelen’s presentation of the Strawson objection amounts to ‘a generalized challenge … that we shouldn’t take … with high seriousness’ (442). Although I am sympathetic to her Pricean approach, my contention is that the ‘deepest, though not most direct’ (ibid.) response to Cappelen is to emphasise the pervasiveness of what for the pragmatist is Strawson’s most trenchant criticism: the lure of formal systems. Without that awareness Thomasson’s own defence of function risks degenerating into an empty formalism.

9 This way of presenting the problem was suggested to me by an anonymous referee. I should add that I found the positive engagement of the referee with earlier drafts of the paper extremely helpful, and would like to take this opportunity to thank them.

10 Presumably, for those who avow ¬XX the ‘disappearance’ in question relates to the concept TRANS-WOMAN, not WOMEN. In other words the desired change is expressible as “What people use to call ‘Trans-women’ are women”. Cf. Gascoigne (2016) for more on this ‘eliminativist’ response to Haslanger’s views.

11 For a constructivist response to Cappelen that tries to redeem mind-changing but at the cost of amelioration see Flocke (2020).

12 Another way to approach from the ‘rule of thumb’ end is via another piece associated with ‘the ethics of controversy’. In Sidney Hook’s article of that name he offers 10 ‘ground rules’ for dealing with controversies which express ‘the logic and ethics of scientific inquiry’ (1980 [1954], 122). Although Rorty doesn’t acknowledge it, it’s unlikely he was unaware of this piece: Hook was a student of Dewey’s at Columbia and a friend of Rorty’s parents (Rorty 1995).

13 According to Voparil (2014) this early text’s concern with the ‘moral seriousness’ of philosophical inquiry is evidence of the persisting centrality to Rorty’s thinking of ‘a conception of ethical responsibility, both towards other and for our choices and commitments as philosophers’ (83).

14 Cf. Quine 2013, 61, fn. 7 for a brief but informative overview of the various criticisms offered by Quine, Mates, White (1950) et al. throughout the first half of the twentieth century.

15 For more on the conceptual connection account of transcendental arguments see Gascoigne (2020).

16 A version of this paper was presented at the online workshop Conceptual Engineering and Pragmatism in July 2021. My thanks to the organisers Céline Henne and Yvonne Huetter-Almerigi and fellow participants for their responses.