Conclusion

Some are sceptical that conceptual functions can do much work for us in conceptual engineering. Concepts and words serve many functions, the thought goes, we do a lot of things with them; it is impossible to put such a diverse bunch to much systematic work. The only thing all our representational devices (RDs) have in common is their trivial function: the representational one. But that’s not likely to be of much help, theoretically, the sceptical argument goes. Challenge accepted. This book was an exercise in functionalist optimism. We agree with the sceptic that the representational function is the only conceptual function that one can speak of in a systematic fashion—at least from the philosophical armchair, and in the absence of thorough historical investigation. We disagree, however, that this representational function can’t do much theoretical work for us. Indeed, we think that identifying the main function of a functional item is all one needs to build an entire evaluative and normative picture around it. As such, we close by looking back at conceptual functions, and what we have done with them in this book: functions have given us success conditions for conceptual engineering projects, permissions, and obligations governing them, and predictions as to what will and what won’t work when the rubber hits the road on implementing them.