No New Ideas in Philosophy: Conceptual Engineering Edition

The first time I heard “there are no new ideas in philosophy”, I thought it was risably absurd. I’ve since come around to appreciating its wisdom, but it’s easy to forget. And today I discovered a whopper of an example of conceptual engineering forgetting.

A fair bit of ink, including my own, has been spilled discussing whether conceptual engineering is in any sense “new”. (Conceptual engineering is the recent movement in philosophy to approach language and concepts as artifacts to be created or changed). In recent years I have come squarely down on the side that it isn’t. I’ve come see it’s non-novelty as almost trivial – humans invent new language and concepts all the time, and a lot of it, especially in academic and marketing scenarios, is intentional. Less trivially, Carnap was writing about explicating concepts almost a century ago, and despite a few notable differences, Carnap was essentially just proposing what conceptual engineers propose today. Moreover, as my coauthor Krzysztof Sękowski has argued, Carnap wasn’t even first to the punch.

Nonetheless, I assumed that the more (for lack of a better term) “scientific” aspects of the conceptual engineering literature was new. That the last decade-ish of literature is unique in that it clarifies and articulates the process of intentional concept or language change in a way that hadn’t been done before.

Today I read the introduction to Anne Pauwel’s 1998 book Women Changing Language. It’s about feminist projects of language reform and its relationship language planning, the latter of which she describes as bringing about changes to language in a deliberate manner. Pauwel goes on to say,

Language planning scholars working within this approach (e.g. Rubin 1971, 1973, Jernudd and Das Gupta 1971, Jernudd 1973, Fasold 1984, Cooper 1989) usually identify four stages in the [language planning] process: the fact-finding stage, the planning stage, the implementation stage and the evaluation and feedback stage. (7)

Anyone with cursory knowledge of the conceptual engineering literature will see the similarities almost instantly from, among others, Isaac, Koch, and Nedft (2021), who describe conceptual engineering has having 4 stages: Description. Evaluation, Improvement, and Implementation.

These two schema are somewhat further apart than they might first appear, as “evaluation” refers to different things. In conceptual engineering, “evaluation” is the evaluation of existing concepts or language, and in language planning, “evaluation” is the evaluation of how the project overall went. To translate between the two, the conceptual engineering step called “evaluation” occurs during the language planning’s fact-finding stage. Differences aside, here on paper is one of the parts of conceptual engineering that I had assumed could not possibly have been discussed before. Complete with citations dating back to the early 1970s.

Even worse, I think the language planning schema is better. I’ve been working on a paper that maps out what is known about how to engage in effective conceptual engineering, and one frustration I’ve been running into is that the traditional way of seperating out stages of conceptual engineering doesn’t capture the realities of practice. Describing what exists is only motivated if one already has a sense that there is something worth evaluating, and one can’t responsibly improve a concept or word unless one already has thought through the process of implementing it. These observations cut awkwardly across the conceptual engineering schema, but they fit quite well with the language planning schema. Language planning’s fact-finding proceeds from the sense that something is wrong, and planning involves thinking about the solution and spread of the solution at the same time. Not to mention that the language planners add in an extra step at the end that looks both valuable and extrordinarily responsible, namely learning what one can after a project has completed and collecting feedback from affected people.

I have, with only one exception, never seen language planning discussed or even cited by conceptual engineers (and that one exception is a cursory mention in one of my own papers - so I’m partially to blame for not digging deeper).

The upshot of this is a bit boggling.

There is an entire literature that discusses things at a level that I (we?) all thought was unique to conceptual engineering. An entire literature the conceptual engineering literature could have drawn on for ideas and knowledge. But no one looked carefully, so we have a decade of literature of us forging our own paths. It reminds me of the time I spent an hour fighting my way up an English hill through thick, knee-high heather, only to discover at the top that there had been an unmarked path 20 meters to my right the whole time. What a hubristic waste of time, effort, and intellect.

There are no new ideas in philosophy.