Conceptual misinformation

Misinformation is paradigmatically false. However, a great deal of contemporary political content misleads by invoking defective concepts, even when the content is true. This paper offers an account of conceptual misinformation, according to which the use of a concept constitutes misinformation when that concept both fails to adequately capture the world’s structure and receives uptake. Central to my account is the metaphysical notion of “joint-carving” concepts—those that capture the world’s structure and figure into good explanations. This notion can be extended to the social and normative domains, where socially and normatively joint-carving concepts (e.g., “farmer,” “legal free speech”) yield better social and normative explanations than gerrymandered concepts (e.g., “Pacific Islander,” “consequence-free speech”). The need to avoid conceptual misinformation carries practical consequences and imposes a constraint on ameliorative conceptual engineering projects.