ABSTRACT

When fans of conceptual engineering discuss examples of their craft, they frequently focus on cases of ‘one-to-one’ conceptual engineering. That is to say, they focus on cases where a target pre-engineering concept is revised into, or replaced by, a single successor. The possibility that we might instead replace a suboptimal concept with multiple successors is, by contrast, comparatively underexplored. The goal of this paper is to defend this type of pluralist conceptual engineering as legitimate, and as a promising approach to unravelling certain traditional philosophical puzzles. I’ll do so largely by way of example, by exploring a preliminary application of the pluralist approach to one of the most notoriously recalcitrant targets of conceptual analysis: knowledge.

摘要

当概念工程的爱好者讨论他们的工艺示例时，他们经常关注“一对一”概念工程的案例。也就是说，他们关注的是将目标工程设计概念修改为单个后继者或替换为后继者的情况。相比之下，我们可能会用多个继任者代替一个次优的概念的可能性相对较少。本文的目的是捍卫这种类型的多元化概念工程是合法的，也是解决某些传统哲学难题的有前途的方法。我将主要通过示例的方式来进行探讨，方法是探索将多元方法初步应用到概念分析的最臭名昭著的目标之一：知识。