Engineering concepts by engineering social norms: solving the implementation challenge

ABSTRACT

The classic programme of conceptual engineering (Cappelen, Herman. 2018. Fixing Language: An Essay on Conceptual Engineering. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Eklund, Matti. 2021. “Conceptual Engineering.” In The Routledge Handbook of Social and Political Philosophy of Language, edited by Justin Khoo, and Rachel Sterken, 15–30. London: Routledge) envisages a two-stage ameliorating process. First, we assess ‘F’ and determine what the term should express. Second, we bring it about that ‘F’ expresses what it should express. The second stage gives rise to a practical challenge: the implementation challenge. Engineering advocates need to explain by what means they can implement specific conceptual changes in the natural language shared by a community – a feat Herman Cappelen (2018. Fixing Language: An Essay on Conceptual Engineering. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020; “Conceptual Engineering: The Master Argument.” In Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics, edited by Alexis Burgess, Herman Cappelen, and David Plunkett, 132–151. Oxford: Oxford University Press) argues to be beyond our understanding and control both on an externalist and on an internalist meta-semantics. I devise a new answer to the implementation challenge. Enlisting the influential theory of social norms by Cristina Bicchieri, I argue that engineering social norms in Bicchieri's technical sense amounts to an effective, specific, and feasible means to implement specific conceptual change, at least on internalist premises. I also argue that Bicchieri's social norms are an essential addition to the more familiar conventions and moral norms when it comes to conceptual engineering.

KEYWORDS:

• Conceptual engineering
• implementation challenge
• social norms
• social engineering
• Christina Bicchieri

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Steffen Koch, Tim Henning, Rose Trappes, the Bielefeld ‘Research Group Theoretical Philosophy’ and audiences at Barcelona and the e-workshop ‘Conceptual Engineering – Feasibility & Norms’ for comments on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Please take my ‘intensions’ as stand-ins for whatever semantic values you favour. Intensions won't do anyway; any compositional semantics for a language containing indexicals needs at least to assign Kaplanian characters, or so I am ready to argue.

2 Bicchieri (2006) develops the theory in detail and with game-theoretic underpinnings. The coarser and less technical Bicchieri (2016) substantially adds to the picture, especially by relativizing compliance to reference networks and grading normative expectations by sensitivity. See Bicchieri and Muldoon/Sontuoso (2018) and Chung and Rimal (2016) for discussion and extensive bibliographies.

3 I employ ‘speaker’ to mark linguistic participants generally, irrespective of their pragmatic role as speakers or hearers.

4 I use ‘collective behaviour’ to designate the aggregate of how subjects behave individually.

5 Note that I resist Cappelen's talk of ‘control’. Solving the implementation challenge requires that we can deliberately influence linguistic behaviour such that specific changes occur. It does not require that any person or group has control – i.e. the ‘power of directing and regulating the actions of people or things’ (OED control n., 2a; my italics) – over collective linguistic behaviour in any non-trivial sense.

6 See footnote 2 for references.

7 To keep things simple, I use ‘should’ as a generic normative term and ‘ought’ to indicate normative force beyond the mere prudential.

8 Bicchieri (2006, 9–10) allows that a social norm in a community C isn't followed in C. Brennan et al (2013, 22–28) think this is problematic. They agree (ibid., 26) that Bicchieri could easily avoid it. I only consider social norms that are followed.

9 See UNICEF (2020) and UNICEFDATA (2020) for an overview and statistics.

10 My example is mindful of Bicchieri’s (2018, 145–146) argument that moderate social changes far short of the normative ideal have a greater chance of success.