Fixing Contexts: A Conversational Engineering Project
Abstract
Projects in conceptual engineering investigate how our representational devices, or the things they represent, might be defective and therefore ought to be ameliorated, replaced or abolished. A fundamental question in this field concerns what the object of our engineering projects should be.
Although much of the literature assumes that concepts are the objects of inquiry (partly by virtue of the label ‘conceptual’ engineering), Cappelen’s influential work within the field introduces three options: words, the world, or concepts.
The purpose of this paper is to propose a fourth option which breaks away from the tradition of focusing on individual representational devices or the things that they represent. I will argue that engineering projects can, and often should, be about the context of conversations.
I thus propose that a project of conversational engineering is well-worth exploring – thereby aiming to establish a systematic study of what it is for a context to be defective, whether such defects should be ameliorated, and if so how to do so. I propose that contexts can be both internally and externally defective, where the former includes discrepancies between what interlocutors presuppose and the latter includes cases when interlocutors make false, immoral, or irrational presuppositions.
