Conceptual Engineering
We're not fighting about the thing — we're fighting about the word.
The question
You've been in this argument so many times you could run it from memory. Someone says a thing isn't really X — isn't really violence, isn't really a disease, isn't really racism, isn't really art — and someone else says it absolutely is, and you both reach for examples, and the examples don't help, because for every one you bring they have a reason it doesn't count. And at some point — late, usually, when everyone's tired — you realise you haven't been disagreeing about the thing at all. You've been disagreeing about the word. About where to draw its edge. About what it's for.
And the first time you saw that, it felt like a breakthrough — like you'd finally got underneath the noise to the real question. Of course. We're not arguing about whether she's a woman; we're arguing about what "woman" should pick out. We're not arguing about whether it's a disease; we're arguing about what we want "disease" to do. The fight got clearer the second you stopped pretending it was about facts.
And then, just as fast, it curdled. Because if the fight is about what the word should mean — then isn't the person redefining it just… cheating? Moving the goalposts? Changing the dictionary mid-argument so they win? You've watched people do exactly that, in bad faith, and call it progress. And you've done it yourself, in good faith, and called it clarity. And you genuinely cannot tell, from the inside, which one you were doing. You don't even know if "you can just decide what a word means" is a power you have, or a thing you only pretend to have while the language goes on meaning whatever it was always going to mean, with or without your permission.
The episodes
Each episode builds on the one before, and the finale hands the question back to you sharper, not settled.
8 of 8 transcripts are readable now — audio is coming.
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1
The move you've been making
Some arguments no quantity of facts will close — whether it was really violence, really a disease, really racism — because the fight is about the word, not the thing. This first episode names the move, and separates two questions usually run together: what should the word mean, and can you change what it means?
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2
'You can't just redefine words' — and why that's a cartoon
"You can't just redefine words" is tested against the record: the whale stopped being a fish, "marriage" moved, and no one was cheated. The flat rule fails — but a sharper version of the objection is left standing for later.
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3
Designing a better word: explication and the ameliorative turn
The ameliorative method, in the line of Carnap and Sally Haslanger: stop asking what a word means and ask what concept we should have, given the work the word has to do. The episode builds the engineer's toolkit and hands it its first serious objection, from P. F. Strawson — is this fixing the concept, or changing the subject?
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4
The word only you are using
A well-designed concept that nobody adopts changes nothing. This episode separates designing a meaning from implementing one, drawing on Tyler Burge's account of how meaning lives in a community, and ends with an exercise: write down what it would actually take for your word to win.
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5
Can you even steer a meaning?
Herman Cappelen's challenge, from Fixing Language: what a word means is fixed by factors outside anyone's control — the history of use, millions of speakers, the world itself, in the externalist tradition of Kripke and Putnam. Deciding what a word should mean was never the same as changing what it does.
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6
But meanings DO move
And yet meanings do move — "gay," "marriage," and "planet," which a room of astronomers redefined in 2006. The episode holds both truths together and finds the real question underneath: not whether meaning can change, but which changes can be made on purpose, and by whom.
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7
Whose word is it?
If meanings move through collective uptake, implementing a concept is politics — whose purposes count, whose use sticks, against whose resistance. Kwasi Wiredu's question is put alongside: whether the very tools of the engineering are someone else's to begin with. The worst version — engineering as a polite name for winning — is held without rescue.
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8
The words you most want to fix
The final episode runs every question in the series on one word, "violence," and gives the honest reply — you can propose what a word should mean and argue for it well, but you cannot, by deciding, make it mean that. What the argument was ever about is handed back unresolved, as it was always going to be.
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Thinkers
The thinkers and traditions this series draws on: