More Than One Way to Go On

Reference, Function, and the Typing of Engineered Concepts

Abstract

Conceptual engineering is often described as the practice of fixing the reference of our terms. This article argues that the description misplaces both the source of the practice and the site of its assessment. The reason for revising a concept, wherever the literature supplies one, is functional, and the functional rationale is a debt to pragmatism, from the later Wittgenstein through Sellars and Brandom to Price. The pragmatist then owes an account of how revisions are assessed once reference is set aside, and the article supplies one by translation. Where Carnap and Montague translated natural into artificial language, the proposal translates normative role into functional type. A concept becomes an interface with laws, a way of using it an instance that satisfies the laws, and a revision becomes the replacement of one instance by another beneath a shared interface. Worked in Haskell and Julia and read through the propositions-as-types correspondence, the translation makes the pragmatist slogan that there is always more than one way to go on a checkable property of a typed language. Reference survives as one function among several that an interface may demand, and the metasemantic category earns its place only where a concept's job includes tracking.