The Points of Concepts: Their Types, Tensions, and Connections

Canadian Journal of Philosophy 49 (8): 1122–1145. 2019. doi:10.1080/00455091.2019.1584940

By distinguishing four senses in which concepts might be said to have a “point,” this paper resolves the tension between the ambition of point-based explanations to be informative and the claim—central to Dummett’s philosophy of language, but also to the literature on thick concepts—that mastering concepts already requires grasping their point.

concepts, conceptual ethics, conceptual functions, conceptual engineering, metaphilosophy, normativity

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