Conceptual engineering in the philosophy of technology

Abstract

While a rich scholarship has examined how technology impacts our practices, norms, values, and beliefs, considerably less explicit attention has been devoted to investigating how technology impacts our concepts, i.e., the notions through which we understand, reason about, and navigate our world. For example, the emergence of autonomous weapons systems has put pressure on the concept CONTROL adopted in international humanitarian law, which proved inadequate in establishing clear lines of responsibility for uses of force in contexts in which control over weapons was no longer exercised directly by a human agent, but distributed among human and non-human entities. Similarly, the advent of autonomous vehicles has raised pressing questions about (among others) liability regimes, safety standards, and the differential impact of this technology across different social groups. Many of such questions are tied to the concepts that underlie them. This dissertation investigates how to navigate technology-induced conceptual disruption (i.e., the interruption in the functional adequacy of concepts) with conceptual engineering (i.e., the evaluation, design, and implementation of concepts). The dissertation is a sustained illustration of the claim that conceptual engineering and the philosophy of technology—two disciplines which have so far proceeded on largely parallel tracks despite engaging with related problems, operating on similarly conceived objects of inquiry, and sharing broadly comparable normative aims—are better positioned to address their respective research in dialogue rather than in isolation. This has led to contributions to both conceptual engineering—illustrating how insights and tools developed for the study of socio-technical artefacts can enrich the theoretical foundations and operationalisation of conceptual engineering—and the philosophy of technology—showing how the vocabulary of conceptual engineering can equip philosophers of technology with sharper tools for identifying, evaluating, and responding to conceptual disruptions.