A Lecture by Eleonore Neufeld of the University of Massachusetts

How feasible are conceptual engineering projects of social concepts that aim for the engineered concept to be widely adopted in ordinary everyday life? Predominant frameworks on the psychology of concepts that shape work on stereotyping, bias, and machine learning have grim implications for the job prospects of conceptual engineers: conceptual engineering efforts are ineffective in promoting conceptual change. This tradition, however, tends to ignore that concepts don’t only encode statistical, but also causal information. Paying attention to this feature of concepts, Neufeld argues, shows that conceptual engineering is not only possible. There is an imperative to conceptually engineer.