Navigating Meaning Spaces; A Contextualist Approach to Conceptual Engineering

PhD Research Project

Imagine attempting to reshape the way we think and communicate by redefining the words we use. This is the central focus of Conceptual Engineering (CE): modifying meanings to influence minds and, potentially, society. For instance, reinterpreting the concept of WOMAN in terms of social oppression rather than biology (Haslanger, 2000) reflects a deliberate attempt to align language with evolving social understandings.

While these ideas are thought-provoking, CE’s full implications and practical applications remain areas of ongoing exploration. My research investigates this potential, connecting philosophical insights with linguistic methodologies to examine how words influence—and are influenced by—their contexts. Rather than making bold claims about CE’s transformative power, my work seeks to explore its theoretical and methodological dimensions.

Words Aren’t Everything

Some approaches to CE focus heavily on the power of individual words, but language rarely operates in isolation. Consider a mother reassuring her child with a cut, saying, “You’re not going to die.” The literal interpretation of the words clearly doesn’t apply here (Bach, 1994). This demonstrates how meaning emerges from entire utterances and their contexts, rather than just isolated terms. Any comprehensive approach to CE must account for these layers of meaning to address the complexities of real-world communication.

Mapping Meaning in Use

My research combines theoretical inquiry with empirical methods to investigate how meaning varies across contexts. Spoken language, a primary medium of communication, often receives less attention in CE. To address this gap, I use contextualized word embeddings created with BERT on the spoken component of the British National Corpus 2014 (Love et al., 2017). This allows me to construct landscapes of meaning—quantitative and visual representations of how word usage changes depending on context. By examining these landscapes, my work aims to provide conceptual engineers with tools for understanding the nuances of their targets.

Implications

By integrating multiple levels and units of meaning, my research contributes to a more nuanced understanding of CE and its broader implications. While CE’s practical impact may be uncertain, its frameworks offer valuable insights into the dynamics of language, thought, and societal change. Beyond CE, this work has relevance for:

  • Diachronic linguistics, offering detailed models for understanding semantic change over time.
  • Sociolinguistics, anthropology, and philosophy, exploring the relationship between language and social structures.
  • Natural Language Processing (NLP), advancing methods for modeling context-dependent variation in word usage.

By focusing on the interplay between language and context, my work examines the potential and limitations of CE as a framework for understanding and influencing meaning.

Haket, N. (2024). Collaborative Conceptual Engineering: Philosophy and Linguistics. In Conceptual Engineering: Methodological and Metaphilosophical Issues (P. Stalmaszczyk, eds). DOI: 10.30965/9783969753026_012

Haket, N. (2023). Nullius In Verba: Conceptual Engineering and the Royal Society Corpus. Cambridge Occasional Papers in Linguistics, 15, 155–195.

Haket, N. and Daniels, R. BERT’s Conceptual Cartography: Mapping the Landscapes of Meaning

References