Conceptual Dogmatism: Epistemology and Ethics of Consciousness Raising

Dogmatism is typically understood by reference to justification, namely as a refusal to rationally evaluate and update one’s beliefs and other commitments. In addition, however, research on concepts, narratives, and social perspectives has identified other sources of constraint that limit epistemic agency in a problematic fashion. The aim of this workshop is to reframe and explore the problem of dogmatism in terms of these various constraints that do not primarily operate on the level of belief. 

In particular, the workshop brings together two lines of inquiry that investigate concepts but have not been systematically explored together. On the one hand, conceptual ethics and conceptual engineering (CE) study the normative questions “What concepts should we use and why?”. On the other, a particular strand in the scholarship on genealogy emphasizes that people often, perhaps typically, do not fully understand the concepts they use, for instance, the underlying values and inferential commitments a given concept incorporates. If this is correct, then the rational control over concepts, which CE tends to take for granted, is not automatically available to concept-users but rather needs to be acquired. And consequently there is a task of consciousness raising whose primary focus is not beliefs but concepts, including the narratives and social perspectives that congeal and motivate a given conceptual repertoire. 

The workshop investigates how we should understand the nature, goal, and motivation of this task of consciousness raising, as well as its relationship to the justification of beliefs.