A philosopher argues that state-sponsored cyberattacks against central military or civilian targets are always acts of war. What is this philosopher doing? According to conceptual analysts, the philosopher is making a claim about our concept of war. According to philosophical realists, the philosopher is making a claim about war per se. In a quickly developing literature, a third option is being explored: the philosopher is engineering the concept of war. On this view, the philosopher is making a proposal about which concept we should have even if it deviates from the extant concept, and even if it does not capture what war really is . The activity or method of proposing such revisionary definitions, as well as the metaphilosophical reflection on it, has become known as conceptual engineering.1 Herman Cappelen s book Fixing Language (2018) played a central role in setting the terms of current debates, bringing fundamental questions to the fore and developing strategies for tackling them. The theory of conceptual engineering he develops in that book, which he calls the Austerity Framework, has proven to be highly controversial and, as a locus of debate, very influential. Indeed, the Austerity Framework, along with Cappelen s discussion more generally, is the starting point for much subsequent work in the field. Cappelen s work is the foil against which new theories have been developed and defended. Cappelen sets the scene by pointing to a range of projects, inside and outside of philosophy, that he thinks of as conceptual engineering projects. These include projects such as Haslangerian ameliorative projects (Haslanger 2012), Carnapian explication (Carnap 1950) , revisionary views about moral language (Railton 1989), inconsistency theories of truth (Scharp 2013), the astronomical redefinition of planet (International Astronomical Union 2006), public controversies over, for example, the meaning of marriage (Ludlow 2014) and so on. According to Cappelen, a theory of conceptual engineering aims (in part) to draw out what is common to such examples: what the conceptual engineers are doing and why and how they are doing it. But a theory of conceptual engineering may also go beyond concrete examples, laying out the prospects for using conceptual engineering to solve philosophical problems or to enhance social justice, laying out its implications for the nature of thought and language, developing an account of whether and how conceptual engineering should proceed, and so on. Plausibly, then, a theory of conceptual engineering should seek to balance a variety of normative and descriptive considerations. In our terminology, it should provide a rationalizing description of conceptual engineering practice. It should give a plausible description of what conceptual engineers are doing, where that description makes rational sense of conceptual engineering practice and serves as a blueprint for how future conceptual engineering projects should be undertaken. In this review, we aim to structure and systematize the rapidly growing literature on theories of conceptual engineering. We map out some of the emerging trends with respect to two core components of any such theory.2 The first component is a theory of targets, that is, of what conceptual engineers are (or should be) trying to engineer. The second component is a theory of engineering, that is, of how those targets are (or should be) engineered, of which mechanisms and processes are (or should be) used to carry out conceptual engineering. We begin by introducing the core components of the Austerity Framework, before distinguishing two kinds of objections and sketching a variety of theories that have been subsequently developed. We close with some thoughts about future research. © 2023 Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
