Engineering Social Kind Concepts

Abstract This chapter does two things. First, it zooms in on projects in conceptual politics, and investigates the permissions and obligations involved in engineering social kind concepts. Second, it explores the political prospects of linguistic innovation for gender terms. It develops and defends a model that leaves the concept WOMAN in place but replaces the term ‘woman’ with a novel one that lacks the problematic social and political connotations. The chapter shows that, when it comes to social kind concepts in general, linguistic innovation often reaps all the social and political benefits of competing, conceptual engineering proposals, without any of the downsides.