Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

Conceptual engineering is aptly characterized as the method to assess and improve our representational apparatuses. But little has been said so far on how to best construe these representational apparatuses for the very purposes of conceptual engineering — in other words, on what conceptual engineering should be all about. This paper takes up this `bootstrapping challenge' for conceptual engineering. It successively defends the theses that conceptual engineering should be: (i) About concepts, (ii) psychologically construed, (iii) as multiply realizable functional kinds. And thereby it claims to theoretically secure and justify the maximum scope, impact, and flexibility for the method of conceptual engineering on our whole cognitive life.