Conceptual control: on the feasibility of conceptual engineering

ABSTRACT

This paper empirically raises and examines the question of ‘conceptual control’: To what extent are competent thinkers able to reason properly with new senses of words? This question is crucial for conceptual engineering. This prominently discussed philosophical project seeks to improve our representational devices to help us reason better. It frequently involves giving new senses to familiar words, through normative explanations. Such efforts enhance, rather than reduce, our ability to reason properly, only if competent language users are able to abide by the relevant explanations, in language comprehension and verbal reasoning. This paper examines to what extent we have such ‘conceptual control’ in reasoning with new senses. The paper draws on psycholinguistic findings about polysemy processing to render this question empirically tractable and builds on recent findings from experimental philosophy to address it. The paper identifies a philosophically important gap in thinkers’ control over the key process of stereotypical enrichment and discusses how conceptual engineers can use empirical methods to work around this gap in conceptual control. The paper thus empirically demonstrates the urgency of the question of conceptual control and explains how experimental philosophy can empirically address the question, to render conceptual engineering feasible as an ameliorative enterprise.

KEYWORDS:

• Conceptual engineering
• experimental philosophy
• polysemy
• stereotypes
• philosophical methods

Acknowledgments

For helpful comments on previous drafts, I thank James Andow, Paul E. Engelhardt, Manuel Gustavo Isaac, Steffen Koch, and anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 An earlier paradigm of conceptual engineering, neglected in current debates, is provided by the non-formal dialogical method Friedrich Waismann developed in the 1930s to identify and remove indeterminacy of meaning arising from word use specifically in philosophical contexts (Waismann 1997; cf. Fischer 2019).

2 This surge in interest has been largely driven by dissatisfaction with use of the ‘method of cases’ to develop and test definitions, for conceptual analysis or metaphysical inquiry (cf. Machery 2017, ch.7; Nado 2019), as well as by a desire to make the study of concepts more societally relevant (in the wake of Haslanger 2000). Findings from ‘negative’ experimental philosophy suggest that the method of cases is unreliable (reviews: Mallon 2016; Stich and Tobia 2016). Psychological research suggests that most concepts lexicalised in natural language do not have the set of individually necessary and jointly sufficient application conditions that could be captured by a definition (Ramsay 1992). The move from descriptive conceptual analysis to prescriptive conceptual engineering promises to avoid these problems (Andow 2020; Schupbach 2017).

3 Cappelen (2018, 72–75) seems content to reduce conceptual engineering to a purely academic pursuit along the lines of some ‘ideal’ theorising in political philosophy. Against him, Koch (2018) argues that externalist theories allow for the possibility of meaning change through language users’ collective long-term efforts, and that such ‘collective long-range control’ suffices for the purposes of ameliorative conceptual engineering.

4 Sense 1.3 in: https://www.lexico.com/definition/zombie . Last accessed 15/12/2019.

5 This is intended as an empirical question in psycholinguistic terms. While disagreeing about how different senses of polysemous words are represented (review: Eddington and Tokowicz 2015), psycholinguists think of a ‘sense’ as a body of information (set of features; see Sec. 2.1 below) that enters into the interpretation of relevant utterances (see, e.g. Brocher et al. 2018). This information must be activated by the word in relevant contexts but need not be retrieved by default. The normative explanations of the conceptual engineers cited above specify information (features) that need to be included in such a body of information, to achieve an intended interpretation (e.g. that the ‘zombies’ envisaged by Chalmers have bodies just like ours). How these conceptual engineers – or any other philosophers – theorise about ‘senses’ is immaterial for present purposes.

6 Debates about the relationship between semantic and episodic memory are beyond the scope of this paper.

7 In priming studies, participants are presented with a ‘prime’ word or short text and then a ‘probe’ word or letter string, and have to, e.g. read out the word or decide whether the string forms a word. That the prime activates the probe concept, i.e. makes it more accessible and likely to be used by cognitive processes (from word recognition to forward-inferencing), is inferred from shorter response times (Lucas 2000).

8 To study automatic comprehension inferences, psycholinguists use the ‘cancellation paradigm’: Participants read or hear sentences where the expression of interest is followed by a sequel that is inconsistent with (or ‘cancels’) inferences the participant is hypothesised to automatically make when encountering that expression. If the hypothesised inference is made, the clash of the conclusion with the sequel will engender comprehension difficulties requiring cognitive effort. This effort is picked up by a variety of process measures including pupil dilations (Sirois and Brisson 2014), longer ‘late’ reading times (Clifton, Staub, and Rayner 2007), and signature electrophysiological responses (‘N400s’) (Kutas and Federmeier 2011).

9 This conclusion is consistent with Machery’s (2009) suggestion that, for the explanatory purposes of cognitive science, the notion of ‘concept’ should be replaced by more precise terms like ‘stereotype’.

10 Senses 2 and 4 in the Macmillan Dictionary (MEDAL) (last accessed 15/12/2019): https://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/see_1

11 This interpretation can be rapidly amended in the light of contextual information (‘He was mowing his front lawn’).

12 See, e.g. MEDAL (Fn.9), Oxford Dictionaries (https://www.lexico.com/definition/see), or Princeton WordNet. The Oxford English Dictionary, ‘see’ sense 11a, comes close but covers only non-perceptual experience (last accessed 15/12/2019).

13 In explaining his intended phenomenal use of ‘see’, Ayer subsequently proposes the neologisms ‘have in sight’ (Ayer 1956, 100 and 104) and ‘seem to see’ (pp. 101–104), to explicitly mark this use.

14 See http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/ for frequency information.

15 For a review of relevant methods from corpus linguistics, with philosophical applications, see Sytsma et al. (2019).