Seminar with Genoveva Martí (ICREA [Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats] and Universitat de Barcelona)

Conceptual engineering, semantic tolerance and flexibility. (with Lorena Ramírez-Ludeña, Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

The seminar will be a hybrid meeting. It will be held in room 110 on Bracka 12, Kraków and Teams on May 16, 2023 (Tuesday, 17:30 GMT+2). 

Abstract:

There is a real question as regards what conceptual engineering consists in, what it means to engineer concepts, and what the aims, motivation and targets of conceptual engineering are.In this sense, conceptual engineering is remindful of cases in which there are some clear examples of a phenomenon (and some clear non-examples), but the final definite characterization of the phenomenon is still under dispute. In this paper we hope to provide more tools for reflection by examining some cases and raising questions as to whether they can be coherently understood as cases of conceptual engineering and if so why. We discuss two semantic phenomena that are particularly important when they affect the interpretation of the law. We examine their relation to conceptual engineering, and we discuss some social and moral aspects that alert to some of the perils of prolific engineering.

This research was funded by the Priority Research Area Heritage under the program Excellence Initiative – Research University at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow