Can we actually solve philosophical disputes if we keep treating our inherited vocabulary as fixed, rather than asking how to redesign it to represent the world better?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Herman Cappelen is Chair Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong. His work has focused on a range of topics, including semantics, philosophy of mind, political philosophy, and artificial intelligence.
2. Book Summary
In Fixing Language, Herman Cappelen argues that a huge amount of philosophy (and plenty of non-philosophical inquiry) is best understood as ‘conceptual engineering’: the critical/constructive activity of assessing and improving our representational devices, rather than merely describing what our words currently mean. He frames this as an opposition between ‘representational complacency’ (taking inherited conceptual tools for granted) and ‘representational skepticism’ (treating it as a first-order intellectual task to ask whether our framing devices are defective and how to do better). The book’s opening parts map the terrain through a wide range of illustrations—explication in the Carnap/Quine tradition, Haslanger-style amelioration, revisionism about truth and morality, and more—then uses that map to motivate the need for a general framework rather than a pile of disconnected case-studies.
Cappelen’s positive proposal is what he calls the ‘Austerity Framework’, built around an externalist metasemantics. On this approach, any serious theory of conceptual engineering has to start with an account of how expressions get and change their semantic values, and Cappelen treats semantic change as broadly analogous to reference change. A striking upshot is that the usual mentalistic talk of “engineering concepts” is misleading: the framework doesn’t treat ‘concepts’ (as philosophers/psychologists standardly use that term) as the primary items being manipulated, and it predicts that the process is typically not under our control or even transparent to us, often remaining messy and inscrutable. He also uses this machinery to explain why philosophers are tempted by diagnoses of “incoherent” or “inconsistent” concepts while denying that such entities play the explanatory role they’re often assigned.
A major challenge for any revisionary project is how it can preserve continuity of inquiry rather than merely “changing the subject”—a worry Cappelen traces to Strawson’s objection to Carnapian explication and treats as a central constraint on engineering. His response leans heavily on ‘topic continuity’: the key question is when significant shifts in extension/intension still count (in context) as staying on the same topic, and he argues there’s no clean set of necessary and sufficient conditions here—more like an ongoing practice of contestation, negotiation, and genealogy than a tidy theory. He then contrasts his framework with alternatives that foreground ‘metalinguistic negotiation’ (debates about what words should mean) and with approaches that appeal to a term’s “function,” objecting that in many real disputes we care about torture (or freedom, etc.), not the fate of a particular English string, and that purportedly substantive “functions” often collapse into thin, disquotational ones. The concluding posture is deliberately revisionary and anti-foundational: Cappelen is skeptical of ‘bedrock’ concepts that can’t be engineered, urging instead the working hypothesis that “everything is in flux,” with no natural endpoint to conceptual engineering.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
01:23 - Fixing language
06:18 - Conceptual engineering in history
08:38 - Descriptive and prescriptive traditions
11:31 - Motivations for conceptual engineering
14:58 - Concepts
20:38 - Semantic externalism
31:23 - Internalist rejoinder
35:17 - Meaning of meaning
40:39 - Lack of control
51:20 - Stipulating new uses
57:36 - Example
1:01:49 - Base and superstructure
1:06:42 - Meaning and use
1:16:27 - Limits of revision
1:23:38 - Relevance of conventions
1:27:59 - Issue with topic change
1:33:55 - Worldly effects
1:38:43 - Worry
1:43:51 - Upcoming books
1:48:37 - Value of philosophy
1:54:00 - Conclusion
