In both public and academic discourse, questions about the correct use of concepts regularly cause serious conflict. In 2020, author J.K. Rowling reacted critically to an online article’s use of the phrase ‘people who menstruate’ and insisted that simply using the word ‘woman’ is sufficient to refer to this group – which initiated a wave of accusations of transphobia.
Conceptual engineering (or conceptual ethics) concerns what it is for a concept to be defective and whether it should therefore be ameliorated or even abolished. The goal of this project is to shift the focus of conceptual engineering to analyzing the role of conversational contexts in linguistic conflicts. This will be done by applying a dynamic pragmatic framework according to which linguistic communication occurs against a background of information that is mutually assumed among the interlocutors.
The project has two more specific aims. The first is to investigate what it is for a conversational context to be defective or non-ideal. The second is to investigate how focusing on context has important benefits. One such benefit is that it can solve problems within conceptual engineering, and another is that it can increase our understanding of certain types of deep disagreements. The research provides novel ways to understand when, how, and why we need to engineer our linguistic devices, and how to tackle conflict about the meanings of our words.
