Re-engineering knowledge: a case study in pluralist conceptual engineering

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.