Speaker: Paul-Mikhail Podosky

Abstract: Conceptual engineering has strong political roots. But if conceptual engineering, understood as the development of non-dominant conceptual practices, is to be a useful tool to promote social justice, there must be a means by which the concepts we design in theory, or within smaller communities of practice, can take root and propagate in dominant contexts. This, broadly speaking, is known as the implementation challenge for conceptual engineering. Recent literature, I will argue, poses the challenge of implementation far too individualistically; focusing too squarely on the role of individual conceptual advocacy. In this talk, I will defend the claim that we, as conceptual engineers, should be more attentive to the social forces and infrastructure that support dominant patterns of conceptual engagement, and which stifle conceptual innovation. Specifically, we should take into account mechanisms of conceptual reproduction that maintain the conceptual status quo when developing implementation strategies. What we will see is that individuals are often mostly powerless against the conservative forces that work to keep things conceptually as they are.