This year I’m applying to several PhD programmes, mostly Philosophy and History and Philosophy of Science (HPS). My writing sample is on structural realism, and my research proposal is on normative questions in scientific conceptual changes and classification, plus some conceptual engineering.
It’s a bit hard to say what motivates me, but some questions I’m interested in include: What shapes our conceptual and classificatory scheme (the descriptive side)? When should we make revision or replacement to a scientific concept and why? There has always been a tug-of-war between epistemic and non-epistemic reasons in these kinds of matters, which, I think, goes beyond the realist vs. social constructivist cliché as seen in the “Science War”.
Like the Strong Programme (Barnes & Bloor, 1982; Bloor, 1983; Barnes et al., 1996; Bloor, 1997), I am very sympathetic to the Wittgensteinian take on classification and sceptical of an a priori foundation of rationality, in the sense that it has both a biological basis and a social component (or what we usually see as epistemic vs. non-epistemic), but I wouldn’t go as far to claim that there is no universal rationality after all. Khalidi (2013) suggests that our categorisation should serve only epistemic purposes, of which I am also sceptical.
The recent literature in conceptual engineering is outspoken about its social and political considerations in engineering concepts, with Haslanger (2000, 2006) being the most prominent example. Díaz León (2020) articulated a similar concern in emphasising the normative aspect of concepts. Of course, there are a lot of concerns from the philosophy of language, for instance Strawson’s (1963) continuity problem. But my general impression is that non-epistemic factors are almost omnipresent and indispensable in our conceptual and classificatory structuring, and this is a problem that needs to be considered.
References
Barnes, B. and Bloor, D. (1982). Relativism, rationalism and the sociology of knowledge. In M. Hollis and S. Lukes (Eds.), Rationality and Relativism. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 21–47.
Barnes, B., Bloor, D. and Henry, J. (1996). Scientific Knowledge: A Sociological Analysis. London: Athlone; Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bloor, D. (1983). Wittgenstein: A Social Theory of Knowledge. London: Macmillan.
Bloor, D. (1997). Wittgenstein: Rules and Institutions. London: Routledge.
Díaz León, E. (2020). Descriptive vs. ameliorative projects: The role of normative considerations. In A. Burgess, H. Cappelen, & D. Plunkett (Eds.), Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics (pp. 295–314). Oxford University Press.
Haslanger, S. (2000). Gender and race: (What) are they? (What) do we want them to be? Noûs, 34, 31–55.
Haslanger, S. (2006). What good are our intuitions? Philosophical analysis and social kinds. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 80(1), 89–118.
Khalidi, M. A. (2013). Natural Categories and Human Kinds: Classification in the Natural and Social Sciences. Cambridge University Press.
Strawson, P. F. (1963). Carnap’s views on conceptual systems versus natural languages in analytic philosophy. In P. A. Schilpp (Ed.), The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap (pp. 503–518). La Salle, IL: Open Court.