Explication or Amelioration? Carnapian Clarification as the Normative Basis for Conceptual Engineering

The Monist. Special issue on Explication and Conceptual Engineering.

As conceptual engineering fractures into explication pursuing exactness and amelioration pursuing justice, the field risks losing its focus. I argue that unifying these projects requires retrieving a crucial insight from Rudolf Carnap: that attempts to improve concepts must start with the preliminary stage of practical clarification. However, Carnap’s account of clarification in terms of predictive proficiency remains normatively inert and biased towards exactness. I expand it into a normative diagnosis of the needs underpinning a concept’s inferential structure. This reveals whether properties like vagueness are flaws that need fixing or features worth preserving.

Carnap, clarification, normativity, explication, amelioration, conceptual engineering

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