FCE Conference // Sally Haslanger, "Concepts, Capacities and Social Functions"

The Foundations of Conceptual Engineering
Generous support provided by New York University's New York Institute of Philosophy and by University of Oslo's Project ConceptLab.

Prof. Sally Haslanger (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
"Concepts, Capacities and Social Functions"

Abstract:
On one externalist account of concepts, the content of a concept is a partition of logical space. To have a concept is to have a set of capacities responsive to that partition, e.g., capacities for attention, categorization, interpretation, memory, language, inference, affect, and the like, at some level of granularity. Capacities of this sort - shared capacities to access, share, and to respond to information - play a role in our interactions with others and, when they mesh in the right sort of way, they enable us to coordinate. Although concepts are typically assumed to have their content essentially, I argue that at least in some cases, the identity of the concept should be understood in terms of how it functions, that is, in terms of how it enables those who track its informational content to manage their lives together. As a result, in some cases we can undertake to improve, or ameliorate, the concept by changing its informational content. I consider social concepts such as marriage, family, and gender to be paradigms of this sort.