Conceptual engineering
11 writings
A Polyphonic Conception of AI Understanding
With Pierre Beckmann.
Argues that whether large language models understand what they talk about is a question both unavoidable and ill-framed: unavoidable because users must tell outputs that merit epistemic trust from those that do not, and no purely mathematical or statistical vocabulary can draw that line without reintroducing the concept of understanding in all but name; ill-framed because the inherited concept presupposes a single locus of understanding. Mechanistic interpretability instead reveals LLMs to be deeply polyphonic systems whose outputs emerge from parallel mechanisms of uneven reliability. Drawing on evidence of medical, mathematical, logical, and spatial understanding in LLMs, the paper engineers a conception fit for such systems: a model understands a domain insofar as it contains sound circuitry that tracks relevant structure and reliably recruits that circuitry to control its outputs—which turns seemingly idle metaphysical disputes into tractable empirical questions that can guide the allocation of trust.
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Re-Engineering the Concept of Understanding for AI
With Pierre Beckmann.
Argues that the concept of understanding needs to be re-engineered for artificial cognition in a way that is empirically informed by mechanistic interpretability research and theoretically informed by a grasp of the functions of the concept.
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Conceptual Engineering
In Metzler Handbuch Analytische Philosophie. Hans-Johann Glock, Christoph Pfisterer and Stefan Roski (eds.). Stuttgart: Metzler.
Conceptual engineering reorients analytic philosophy from the descriptive analysis of existing concepts to the normative task of assessing and improving representational devices to better serve our theoretical and practical purposes. This entry traces the method’s intellectual genealogy from Rudolf Carnap’s explication and pragmatist reconstruction to the contemporary ‘functionalist’ and ‘ameliorative’ frameworks championed by Haslanger, Simion, and Kelp. It concludes by examining the discipline’s current ‘applied turn,’ surveying how recent scholarship from 2024 to 2026 has operationalized these methods to address concrete problems in social ontology, artificial intelligence, and medicine.
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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.
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Needs of the Mind: How Aptic Normativity Can Guide Conceptual Adaptation
Philosophical Studies. 2026. doi:10.1007/s11098-026-02511-3
The article offers an account of “needs of the mind” in terms of a distinctively aptic normativity–a normativity of fittingness. After reconstructing the history of different conceptions of needs and their gradual subjectivization, the article focuses on conceptual needs and argues that they register a cognitive privation that goes beyond a shortage of words, marking a mismatch between our conceptual repertoire and our situation that reorients conceptual engineering from detached amelioration to situated adaptation. This makes a needs-first approach uniquely suited to guiding conceptual adaptation in times of technological disruption.
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The Ethics of Conceptualization: Tailoring Thought and Language to Need
Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2025. doi:10.1093/9780198926283.001.0001
Philosophy strives to give us a firmer hold on our concepts. But what about their hold on us? Why place ourselves under the sway of a concept and grant it the authority to shape our thought and conduct? Another conceptualization would carry different implications. What makes one way of thinking better than another? This book develops a framework for concept appraisal. Its guiding idea is that to question the authority of concepts is to ask for reasons of a special kind: reasons for concept use, which tell us which concepts to adopt, adhere to, or abandon, thereby shoring up—or undercutting—the reasons for action and belief that guide our deliberations. Traditionally, reasons for concept use have been sought either in timeless rational foundations or in concepts’ inherent virtues, such as precision and consistency. Against this, the book advances two main claims: that we find reasons for concept use in the conceptual needs we discover when we critically distance ourselves from a concept by viewing it from the autoethnographic stance; and that sometimes, concepts that conflict, or exhibit other vices such as vagueness or superficiality, are just what we need. By considering not what concepts are absolutely best, but what concepts we now need, we can reconcile ourselves to the contingency of our concepts, determine the proper place of efforts to tidy up thought, and adjudicate between competing conceptions of things—even things as contested as liberty or free will. A needs-based approach separates helpful clarification from hobbling tidy-mindedness, and authoritative definition from conceptual gerrymandering.
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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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Function-Based Conceptual Engineering and the Authority Problem
Mind 131 (524): 1247–1278. 2022. doi:10.1093/mind/fzac028
Identifies a central problem for conceptual engineering—the problem of establishing the authority of engineered concepts—and argues that this problem cannot generally be solved by appealing to increased precision, consistency, or other theoretical virtues. Solving the problem requires engineering to take a functional turn and attend to the functions of concepts. This also helps us alleviate Strawsonian worries about changes of topic.
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Genealogy, Evaluation, and Engineering
The Monist 105 (4): 435–51. By invitation. 2022. doi:10.1093/monist/onac010
Argues that genealogical explanations can be used to evaluate and improve conceptual practices, taking as an example the demand for conceptual innovation around notions of legitimacy created by the increasing power of international institutions.
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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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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.
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