Re-engineering knowledge: a case study in pluralist conceptual engineering

ABSTRACT

When fans of conceptual engineering discuss examples of their craft, they frequently focus on cases of ‘one-to-one’ conceptual engineering. That is to say, they focus on cases where a target pre-engineering concept is revised into, or replaced by, a single successor. The possibility that we might instead replace a suboptimal concept with multiple successors is, by contrast, comparatively underexplored. The goal of this paper is to defend this type of pluralist conceptual engineering as legitimate, and as a promising approach to unravelling certain traditional philosophical puzzles. I’ll do so largely by way of example, by exploring a preliminary application of the pluralist approach to one of the most notoriously recalcitrant targets of conceptual analysis: knowledge.

KEYWORDS:

• Conceptual engineering
• metaphilosophy
• pluralism
• contextualism
• pragmatic encroachment
• knowledge norms

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 A notable exception here is Kevin Scharp’s excellent work on replacing the pre-theoretic concept of truth (see Scharp (2013)).

2 The practical approach has enjoyed substantial popularity in the recent conceptual engineering literature; see for instance Haslanger (2000, 2020), Prinzing (2018), Simion and Kelp (2019), and Thomasson (2020).

3 For a classic entry point into debates over doxastic voluntarism, see Williams (1973).

4 I have phrased these norms as placing a necessary condition on proper assertion and action, rather than a sufficient or necessary-and-sufficient condition. The difference won’t matter for our purposes, but see Brown (2008, 2010) for discussion of the alternative formulations.

5 To give just a small selection, see Williamson (1996, 2000), DeRose (2002), and Turri (2010) for the norm of assertion and Fantl and McGrath (2002), Hawthorne (2004), Stanley (2005), and Hawthorne and Stanley (2008) for the norm of action.

6 In particular, some of the arguments offered in support of the descriptive thesis that knowledge is the norm of assertion/action/etc. appeal to normative considerations; these considerations may often be redeployable in service of an engineer’s prescriptive recommendations.

7 Proponents of knowledge norms typically distinguish between norm-violation and culpability, arguing that some violations of knowledge norms may be blameless; the ‘only if’ phrasing here allows this by treating failure to have knowledge_ACT as a necessary but not sufficient condition to be blamed for a violation of the norm of action.

8 Compare with subject-sensitivity. If knowledge_ACT is sensitive only to subject circumstances, all parties should agree about whether or not Larry is blameworthy – there is an objective right answer.

9 Kauppinen (2018) makes very plausible suggestion that ‘epistemic punishment’ might involve e.g. lowering our willingness to believe future testimony from the subject and/or our confidence in their ability to properly conduct future inquiry or rational decision making.

10 These two claims are not to be read as any kind of definition of assertion, or as proposing an individuating feature of assertion. It’s enough for current argumentative purposes that most assertions are accompanied by such intentions, such that a hearer is justified in inferring said intentions (provided the hearer has no evidence of insincerity, etc).

11 A full proposal would need to give a definition of what it is to be the ‘audience’ of an assertion, but for current purposes a rough first stab will do: the audience consists of the persons such that the speaker intends them to hear (or read, or what have you) the assertion. Sally therefore is under no obligation to calibrate her assertions to a third-party eavesdropper’s stakes. The question of how the threshold for knowledge_AST is set when the audience consists of multiple persons with differing stakes might be answered in different ways, but a plausible proposal is that the highest-stakes member of the group sets the threshold.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Research Grants Council, University Grants Committee [grant number HKU 13603718].