What is it about?
Philosophy of language in the analytic tradition is generally concerned with explanation - of meaning, of concepts, of our linguistic practice. Conceptual engineering, as a branch of philosophy of language, focuses on the adaptation of meaning or concepts - which concepts need to be adapted, what methods of adaptation are possible, what are the consequences of adaptation? An ongoing discussion in conceptual engineering is about the consequences of change - are we still talking about the same thing if we change the meaning of the concepts involved? The paper contributes to this discussion from the perspective of meaning holism, a particular approach to explaining the meaning of expressions.
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Why is it important?
Conceptual engineering in philosophy of language often presupposes representationalist approaches to explaining meaning, concepts, and linguistic understanding. Meaning holism offers a different explanatory approach. The integration of meaning holism to discuss problems of conceptual engineering offers some new perspectives on the problem of topic continuity.
Perspectives
I am very interested in all aspects of linguistic meaning and am particularly fascinated by meaning holism. Whereas representationalist approaches explain the meaning of expressions in terms of their relation to the non-linguistic objects to which the expression is directed, meaning holism looks first at the relations between linguistic expressions in order to explain their meaning. Looking from meaning holism to problems and discussions in philosophy of language often offers some interesting new perspectives that I like to explore.
Katja Stepec
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This page is a summary of: Topic Continuity in Conceptual Engineering and Meaning Holism, September 2024, Brill Deutschland GmbH,
DOI: 10.30965/9783969753026_006.
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