Conceptual Engineering

In Metzler Handbuch Analytische Philosophie. Hans-Johann Glock, Christoph Pfisterer and Stefan Roski (eds.). Stuttgart: Metzler.

Conceptual engineering reorients analytic philosophy from the descriptive analysis of existing concepts to the normative task of assessing and improving representational devices to better serve our theoretical and practical purposes. This entry traces the method’s intellectual genealogy from Rudolf Carnap’s explication and pragmatist reconstruction to the contemporary ‘functionalist’ and ‘ameliorative’ frameworks championed by Haslanger, Simion, and Kelp. It concludes by examining the discipline’s current ‘applied turn,’ surveying how recent scholarship from 2024 to 2026 has operationalized these methods to address concrete problems in social ontology, artificial intelligence, and medicine.

conceptual engineering, analytic philosophy, explication, ameliorative inquiry, normativity, social ontology

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