Conceptual engineering projects aim to improve our conceptual repertoire. Yet, they face at least two significant challenges. First, concepts may be revised so extensively that the resulting engineered concept no longer tracks the original subject matter, effectively leading to a change of topic. Second, the prospects for implementing conceptual change at scale are often limited, given the entrenched and socially distributed nature of our conceptual practices. This workshop is guided by the hypothesis that both challenges can be better understood (and potentially addressed) by attending to metalinguistic awareness. In psycholinguistics, this is typically understood as the ability to reflect on and manipulate the structural features of language, including its phonetic, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic dimensions. The aim of the workshop is to bring together perspectives that connect the notion (and practice) of metalinguistic awareness with central themes in conceptual engineering. Some of the questions to be addressed include: How does metalinguistic awareness help disentangle conceptual improvement from subject change? How can it support the uptake of engineered concepts? How might it be cultivated within scholarly practice to better understand case studies of conceptual change?

Speakers:

Pedro Abreu (NOVA University, Lisbon)

Isabella Bartoli (University of Oslo)

Delia Belleri (Spanish National Research Council, Madrid)

Teresa Marques (University of Barcelona)

Joanna Odrowąż-Sypniewska (University of Warsaw)

Yael Peled (MPI-MMG, Göttingen)

Rachel Katharine Sterken (Hong Kong University)

Yinqi Zhou (Hong Kong University)

Zoom Link

https://zoom.us/j/96542576120

Meeting ID: 965 4257 6120

SCHEDULE

Day 1 - May 7th (Thursday)

10:00–11:20 — Talk 1 — Teresa Marques: "Beyond Contestation and Manipulation: Rethinking Meaning Perversions"

11:20–11:50 — Break (30 min)

11:50–13:10 — Talk 2 — Rachel Katharine Sterken: "LLMs, Conceptual Disruption, and Metalinguistic Awareness"

13:10–15:10 — Lunch break

15:10–16:30 — Talk 3 — Delia Belleri: "Conceptual engineering, the subject-change challenge, and metalinguistic awareness"

16:30–17:00 — Break (30 min)

17:00–18:20 — Talk 4 — Pedro Abreu: "“Diversity”: Fading Semantics, Shifting Lexical Impact, and the Plurality of Meanings"

Day 2 - May 8th (Friday)

10:00–11:20 — Talk 5 — Isabella Bartoli: "Revising Semantic Deference"

11:20–11:50 — Break (30 min)

11:50–13:10 — Talk 6 — Yael Peled: “We the Users”: Conceptual Engineering and Metalinguistic Awareness as a Twenty-First Century Life-Skill

13:10–15:10 — Lunch break

15:10–16:30 — Talk 7 — Joanna Odrowąż-Sypniewska: "Topics, lying, and dual-character concepts"

16:30–17:00 — Break (30 min)

17:00–18:20 — Talk 8 — Yinqi Zhou: "Systems of Categorization and the Development of Discourse"

ABSTRACTS

“Diversity”: Fading Semantics, Shifting Lexical Impact, and the Plurality of Meanings

Pedro Abreu (NOVA University, Lisbon)

This presentation examines the recent career of the term “diversity” as a way of rethinking meaning and, especially, meaninglessness. It begins from a familiar but striking phenomenon: “diversity”, like many buzzwords, can seem at once semantically depleted and yet highly consequential in use, a contrast made especially vivid by the recent shift in its evaluative valence. I argue that this tension arises from a conflation of distinct dimensions of meaning.

My proposal starts from a pluralist picture of our ordinary notion of meaning. Rather than assuming that meaning is exhausted by a single, privileged form of linguistic content, I suggest that philosophy of language can be seen as engaged in a long and complex project of explicating a richer pre-theoretical notion of meaning, one that contains not only stable community meaning, but also locally coordinated meaning, speaker meaning, fragment meaning, function, and lexical effects. On this view, different accounts of meaning introduce selective cuts into a richer, more layered phenomenon, bringing some dimensions into focus while leaving others aside.

This broader framework has consequences for the notion of meaninglessness. Meaninglessness should not be treated as an all-or-nothing status, nor reduced to semantic failure alone. It is better conceived as aspect-relative: a term may lose stability, determinacy, or grip in one dimension while remaining meaningful in others. This helps make sense of “diversity”: what can appear to be meaninglessness may instead be the erosion of one dimension of meaning alongside the persistence of others.

The final part of the presentation considers in particular detail whether lexical effects should be counted as a bona fide dimension of meaning alongside the others, and what difference this makes to how we think about meaninglessness.

Revising Semantic Deference

Isabella Bartoli (University of Oslo)

In describing social externalism, Burge (1986) describes an idealized version of a “dialectic” and how this process generates meaning-giving characterizations. Burge argues that only epistemic reasons play a role in this dialect. However, I argue that, for socially and politically significant terms (which exhibit important features of “essentially contested” concepts), moral reasons ought to be considered to play a legitimate role in the Burgean dialectic. For those expressions, in fact, there is contestation both on the set of paradigmatic examples of a phenomenon (or archetypical applications), and on its characterization. Disagreements over the meaning of these terms appeal to moral reasons to motivate one characterization over another, and we cannot appeal solely to empirical investigation of the world to decide between them. I defend this idea by comparing my critique of the Burgean dialectic to feminist perspectives on the role of values in science. Arriving at a meaning-giving characterization of a term for a language is in fact relatively similar to choosing a scientific theory of some particular phenomenon. I conclude that Burge ought to allow that moral reasons play a legitimate role in the dialectic that generates meaning-giving characterizations (at least for contested socially and politically significant terms).

Conceptual engineering, the subject-change challenge, and metalinguistic awareness

Delia Belleri (Spanish National Research Council, Madrid)

Conceptual engineering aims at evaluating and revising concepts for the better, yet a common objection holds that such revisions risk “changing the subject”. This is problematic in two ways: theoretically, subject-change may undermine a concept’s identity; practically, it may generate communicative disruptions and threaten inquiry-continuity. Drawing on psycholinguistics, I argue that the practical (and partly, the theoretical) challenge is better understood through the notion of “metalinguistic awareness”. Empirical studies suggest that metalinguistic awareness is poorly distributed among speakers. This supports a reinforced version of the challenge, whereby limited awareness may facilitate unnoticed subject-changes and communicative failure. I then argue that, surprisingly, psycholinguistics data also offer some hope for resisting the challenge. Since (based on further literature) metalinguistic awareness seems to come in degrees, sweeping assumptions about speakers’ lack of awareness may be unwarranted. Moreover, practices involved in introducing engineered concepts may themselves raise metalinguistic awareness – following the language-learning literature.

Beyond Contestation and Manipulation: Rethinking Meaning Perversions

Teresa Marques (University of Barcelona)

In earlier work, I argued that meaning perversions can be distinguished from legitimate conceptual amelioration either by their harmful consequences or by the constitutive misuse of normatively loaded terms. This paper revises that account in response to Inga Bones’s comparison with essentially contested concepts and Justin D’Ambrosio’s analysis of manipulative speech. I concede that Bones’s objection requires revising my original view. I then examine D’Ambrosio’s account of manipulative speech as the covert strategic exploitation of conversational norms, a framework developed to explain Orwellian doublespeak. I argue that this framework fails to fully capture the core of meaning perversions, and that recognizing this failure answers Bones’s criticism. While some meaning perversions may involve ambiguity, vagueness, or semantic underspecification, many paradigmatic cases do not. Core cases of meaning perversions often consist in outright misapplications: a term is applied to something to which it does not apply under any admissible interpretation, while presupposing that its evaluative or normative force is warranted. Crucially, this misapplication is intentional: it aims to shape, constrain, or compel the audience’s practical attitudes and conduct toward the misdescribed referents. Describing sham plebiscites as free elections, authoritarian legal orders as instances of the rule of law, or systematically repressive regimes as democracies is not strategic ambiguity but a form of normative coercion. Meaning perversions thus constitute a distinct pathology of public language: practices that mobilize evaluative force, sever it from its conditions of fit, and deploy it to direct collective behaviour.

Topics, lying, and dual-character concepts

Joanna Odrowąż-Sypniewska (University of Warsaw)

My talk consists of three parts, each with a related aim. In the first part, I try to strengthen the arguments against samesaying as a criterion for sameness of topic, and I also claim that agreement tests are not significantly better in this respect. In the second part, I argue—contrary to Sterken (2020)—that conceptual engineers who employ revolutionary uses need not be considered liars, since the literal content of their utterances is often too absurd to be believed and they cannot plausibly be seen as asserting it; however, the interventionist project can succeed even without this assumption. In the third part, I suggest that conceptual engineering might proceed by eliciting the dual character of engineered concepts: on my view, the crucial first step for a conceptual engineer is to convince the audience that a concept has both abstract and concrete criteria of membership, and the subsequent steps involve securing agreement on the abstract value and convincing the hearer that this value can be realized by a different set of concrete criteria.

“We the Users”: Conceptual Engineering and Metalinguistic Awareness as a Twenty-First Century Life-Skill

Yael Peled (MPI-MMG, Göttingen)

Conceptual change can be argued to be a common - if not constant - historical occurrence. This owes, in part, to the complexity of the social and political life of the linguistic environments in which concepts are habitually coined, tested, contested, and sometimes also ultimately consigned to history. For the purpose of exploring conceptual change, and especially conceptual change resulting from purposeful conceptual engineering, a particularly capable approach lies in metalinguistic awareness; that is, the capacity for a higher-order critical reflection on language, its constitutive elements, mechanisms, dynamics and practices.

I explore in the talk the question of how might metalinguistic awareness advance the philosophical and scientific inquiry on conceptual change and conceptual engineering. I focus in particular on our contemporary twenty-first century world, and the emerging transformation of the very concept of ‘language’ itself, as a result of the combined pressure of contemporary developments in the social (and especially critical) theory of language, on the one hand, and the rapid rise of artificial intelligence and large language models, on the other hand. This current momentum of change to the very understanding of ‘ֿlanguage’, I contend, not only illustrates the philosophical merit of a metalinguistic awareness approach to the study of conceptual engineering; rather, it highlights the practical significance of metalinguistic awareness as a basic life skill in our contemporary twenty-first century world.

LLMs, Conceptual Disruption, and Metalinguistic Awareness

Rachel Sterken (Hong Kong University)

This paper argues that the debate over whether large language models (LLMs) produce meaningful speech is, fundamentally, a debate about concepts, and one that the theory of conceptual engineering is well positioned to adjudicate. I develop three claims. First, optimist positions that attribute meaning, reference, or communicative agency to LLMs propose revisions of concepts such as meaning, speaker, and assertion so substantial as to constitute changes of subject. Moreover, even granting LLMs rich internal organisation, the gulf between statistical text compression and human world-involvement makes it miraculous that their outputs would carry shared natural language content. Second, on the candidate view of LLM outputs (Radulescu & Sterken, ms), outputs are token sequences that acquire meaning and communicative force only through human adoption. This framing draws attention to the metalinguistic and metacommunicative work that adoption demands. Iterative exchanges between users and LLMs often display the surface form of metalinguistic negotiation but lack its normative substance. A finding that both clarifies what genuine negotiation requires and reveals LLM interaction as a site of metalinguistic self-clarification. Third, I propose that LLM outputs produce a distinctive form of communicative disruption, candidate disruption, that is structurally parallel to the disruptions arising from conceptual revision: in both cases, linguistic form and semantic or normative status come apart, and navigating that mismatch demands the kind of metalinguistic awareness that the CECODISP project identifies as central to managing conceptual change.

Systems of Categorization and the Development of Discourse

Yinqi Zhou (Hong Kong University)

This talk uses the tools of information structure to examine the structure of discourse in terms of its zetetic character and its embedded nature. Information structure tracks the organisation of conversation around sequences of logically related questions, known as questions under discussion (QUDs). Using Eric Swanson’s notion of common ground paths, I identify downstream effects on QUDs as a distinct kind of effect on the development of conversational common ground. First, I articulate the effects of systems of categorization upon the pursuit or abandonment of lines of inquiry (discourse’s zetetic character). Second, I employ the relation of contextual entailment to discuss ways in which discourses can be interrelated, such that broader discourses may constrain the common ground paths of more local ones (discourse’s embeddedness). This account lies at the intersection of philosophy of language, epistemology, and sociolinguistics, asking for a social understanding of the epistemic and a representation of discourse through its inquisitive dimension.