Revision, endorsement and the analysis of meaning

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Abstract

Recently there has been much philosophical interest in the analysis of concepts to determine whether they should be removed, revised, or replaced. Enquiry of this kind is referred to as conceptual engineering or conceptual ethics. We will call it revisionary conceptual analysis (RCA). It standardly involves describing the meaning of a concept, evaluating whether it serves its purposes, and prescribing what it should mean. However, this stands in tension with prescriptivism, a metasemantic view which holds that all meaning claims are prescriptions. If prescriptivism is correct, then one is faced with two options: either (1) give up on the possibility of RCA, or (2) come up with a version of RCA that is consistent with the idea that all meaning claims are prescriptive. In this paper we offer an argument for (2).
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)693-704
Number of pages12
JournalAnalysis (United Kingdom)
Volume80
Issue number4
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Oct 2020
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • conceptual engineering
  • conceptual ethics
  • metaphilosophy
  • normativity of meaning

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