Aapje

The thing is that you have not made the case for control over conviction, as something that is literally true.

I'm not sure how one could ever prove that, in the absence of hindsight and perhaps not even then. Many people didn't expect Hitler to prosecute the Jews, despite what he wrote in Mein Kampf, so as far as I can tell, even that book doesn't meet your standard of proving that Hitler wanted to prosecute the Jews in a way that is "literally true."

Of course, you can choose to always err in favor of petting animals unless that specific animal has already harmed someone, but that policy is only feasible in an... (read more)

One good way to think about concepts might be as a goods with network effects in a marketplace. So there is a cost to learning a concept (the price of the concept) and the concept has to be considered useful enough for people to freely adopt it. Yet not all goods are bought freely, but they can be forced on people, as well, just like concepts can.

The more people use the same concept, the higher the network effect value, similar to how beneficial it is for people to use the same fuel in their car. Yet those network effects also reduce diversity, but not all. It's sufficiently beneficial to have separate options... (read more)

...as I can see little about politics in it.

When introducing the evaluation stage, the paper only mentions ethics as a way to evaluate concepts: "And then there’s the evaluation stage, which plays a central role in the conceptual ethics work by people like Alexis Burgess and David Plunkett."

The idea that things should be evaluated first and foremost by ethics, rather than by other means, is central to the Social Justice ideology, and is extremely political. For example, papers have been removed from journals because some people consider the findings to be unethical, rather than wrong, which is a completely different standard than was used in traditional science. The examples he gives of... (read 365 more words →)

Do you think Foucault would disapprove of gay marriage? I can see him disapproving of marriage...

That is completely irrelevant. I just went with the example from the paper to demonstrate why the paper is flawed, on its terms. My claim is that 'conceptual engineering' is not a neutral attempt to understand and improve concepts, but an attempt to use language as a political instrument. Foucault recognized how language functions as such, but Chalmer's papers doesn't make that explicit, which encourages bad behavior, like portraying politically-driven concept-pushing as being politically neutral and unquestionably good.

We often see people claim that their subjective beliefs are objective and then (try to) abuse their power to force... (read more)

Chalmers' paper just seems to be an implicit defense of weaponizing language. He even uses the term "conceptual activism" and bemoans the difficulty in making others adopt his new definitions for existing words. He recognizes that "words have power" and argues that words should be redefined to use that power to "make for a more just world," like pushing through things like gay marriage, without having to change the law. He argues that "If everyone (including judges) uses ‘marriage’ as if it applies to same-sex marriage, then even if historical external links say that ‘marriage’ still refers only to unions between men and women, this will matter very little for practical purposes."

Of... (read more)