Conceptual Engineering and Metalinguistic Awareness

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)

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Schedule and further details to be posted.