Introduction to Conceptual Engineering
Herman Cappelen · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2018
This book is about the process of assessing and improving our representational devices. This first chapter introduces the process of assessing and improving our representational devices, an activity that is called ‘conceptual engineering’ by the author. This nomenclature has some problems, which will become clear in later chapters, but it is useful for seeing the commonalities between various different projects that attempt to improve our representational devices. The chapter then lays out the structure of the book, introduces a distinction between representational complacency and representational skepticism, and introduces some of the central themes that will return in the chapters to come.