What Should Conceptual Engineering Be All About?
Manuel Gustavo IsaacPublished in: Philosophia (Ramat-Gan, Israel) (2021)
Conceptual engineering is commonly characterized as the method for assessing and improving our representational devices. Little has been said, however, on how best to construe these representational devices-in other words, on what conceptual engineering should be all about. This paper tackles this problem with a basic strategy: First, by presenting a taxonomy of the different possible subject matters for conceptual engineering; then, by comparatively assessing them and selecting the most conducive one with a view to making conceptual engineering an actionable method, that is, a method that can be applied effectively and consistently to specific case studies. The outcome is that conceptual engineering should be all about concepts on pain of pragmatic inconsistencies otherwise.