Conceptual Engineering can mean
- building things with Concepts, for example Models or Frameworks;
- assessment and amelioration of concepts to improve their usefulness.
While the first sense captures a lot of my work and especially how Facilitation helps meaning emerge in social groups, the second has greater potential impact and is more central to my overall Theory of Change.
Goals
- Create more adequate models of the world
- Enable effective action in complex systems
- Challenge and subvert ideological oppression
Assumptions
- The usefulness of concepts constrains the adaptiveness of thinking
- The usefulness of concepts can be objectively evaluated
- Concepts can be changed with conscious effort
Strategies
- Explain away folk ontology
- Treat concepts as nodes in a network
- Revise concepts to critique ideology
References
- Cappelen & Plunkett (2018): “A Guided Tour of Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics”
- Haraway (2016): Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene
- Haslanger (2018): “Going On, Not in the Same Way”
- Suspended Reason (2020): “A revolution in philosophy: the rise of conceptual engineering”