The Metaethical Presuppositions of Conceptual Engineering

Concepts are tools. Like other tools, they can be better or worse in a variety of ways. Sometimes our tools don’t do their jobs very well. Sometimes we realize that we don’t have a tool for an important task, and we want to invent one. Sometimes we have a tool that fulfills its purpose quite well, but its purpose is unjust or oppressive. Each of these problems arise with concepts just as they do with other tools. Conceptual engineering is the project of adding, improving, or removing concepts. There are many projects in first-order conceptual engineering, as well as, more recently, reflection on the nature and metasemantics of conceptual change. What is more surprising, given the role of normative considerations in arguments for conceptual change, is that little if any sustained work has been done on the metanormative commitments of conceptual engineering. In this paper, I begin to fill that gap by connecting the metasemantic questions with the metanormative ones. The normative considerations of conceptual engineering are more deeply entwined with metaethics than other normative domains because of conceptual ethics’ murky relationship to metasemantic theory more generally. Ultimately, the possibility of many instances of conceptual engineering depends on normative truths that are intersubjectively shared. Or so I argue.