Knowledge and Conceptual Engineering

Abstract Suppose you could change people’s way of thinking about the world at its very roots, by changing the very concepts by means of which they think. Suppose, further, that this would make the world a better place; that would be quite something. Conceptual engineering is concerned with this remarkable kind of feat. This book is a comprehensive and systematic study of the nature and normativity of conceptual engineering. The study is comprehensive in that it deals with all the central questions in the field: concerning the very possibility of conceptual engineering, its success conditions, the epistemic and moral permissibility of conceptual engineering, the nature of conceptual ignorance and conceptual understanding, duties to engage in conceptual engineering, as well as with political aspects of conceptual engineering, such as engineering social kind concepts, the nature of hermeneutical injustice, and conceptual disinformation. The study is systematic in that it answers these questions in a unified manner, whereby the accounts put forth centre on conceptual functions. We develop a functionalist approach to conceptual engineering that is wholeheartedly optimistic, in that it takes conceptual engineering to be something that we can and should do. In fact, it is argued, it is not even distinctively difficult to do it.