Conceptual change
3 writings
Conceptual Engineering and the Politics of Implementation
Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 103 (3): 670–691. 2022. With Friedemann Bieber. doi:10.1111/papq.12394
Argues that how much control we have over conceptual change is itself something we can control, and while some domains require the institutionalization of the power to enforce conceptual innovations, because there are strong practical pressures to coordinate on a single harmonized technical terminology, there are also liberal and democratic rationales for making conceptual engineering hard to implement by default.
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Choosing Values? Williams contra Nietzsche
The Philosophical Quarterly 71 (2): 286–307. 2021. doi:10.1093/pq/pqaa026
Highlights enduring epistemic and metaphysical difficulties for any project of evaluating and improving the values we live by, including contemporary work in conceptual ethics and engineering, and argues that attempts to sidestep these difficulties fall prey to “Saint-Just’s illusion”—the mistake of believing that a set of values from one political context can be successfully transplanted into a different political context.
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Left Wittgensteinianism
European Journal of Philosophy 29 (4): 758–77. 2021. With Damian Cueni. doi:10.1111/ejop.12603
Focusing on the social and political conceptual practices that Wittgenstein neglected, the paper presents a novel, more dynamic interpretation of Wittgenstein’s model of conceptual change, on which conceptual change becomes intelligible not just as a brute, exogenous imposition on rational discourse, but as endogenous and reason-driven. This counters the socially conservative tendencies of existing interpretations and renders intelligible the possibility of radical critique within a Wittgensteinian framework.
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