The Ethics of Conceptualization: Tailoring Thought and Language to Need

Philosophy strives to give us a firmer hold on our concepts. But what about their hold on us? Why place ourselves under the sway of a concept and grant it the authority to shape our thought and conduct? Another conceptualization would carry different implications. What makes one way of thinking better than another? The Ethics of Conceptualization develops a framework for concept appraisal. Its guiding idea is that to question the authority of concepts is to ask for reasons of a special kind: reasons for concept use, which tell us which concepts to adopt, adhere to, or abandon, thereby shoring up—or undercutting—the reasons for action and belief that guide our deliberations. Traditionally, reasons for concept use have been sought either in timeless rational foundations or in concepts' inherent virtues, such as precision and consistency. Against this, the book advances two main claims: that we find reasons for concept use in the conceptual needs we discover when we critically distance ourselves from a concept by viewing it from the autoethnographic stance; and that sometimes, concepts that conflict, or exhibit other vices such as vagueness or superficiality, are just what we need. By considering which concepts we need rather than which are absolutely best, we can reconcile ourselves to the contingency of our concepts, determine the proper place of efforts to tidy up thought, and adjudicate between competing conceptions of things—even things as contested as liberty or free will. A needs-based approach separates helpful clarification from hobbling tidy-mindedness, and authoritative definition from conceptual gerrymandering. This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Appraising Concepts 1: The Authority Question 2: The Autoethnographic Stance 3: Confidence, Reflection, and Knowledge 4: Anchoring Authority: A Trilemma 5: Tidy-Mindedness 6: Concepts and Concerns 7: Conceptual Needs 8: Reasons for Reasons 9: The Essential Superficiality of the Voluntary 10: The Politics of Conflicting Concerns Conclusion: Tailoring Thought to Need

About the Author :
Matthieu Queloz is an Ambizione Fellow of the Swiss National Science Foundation at the University of Bern. Before that, he was a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, and a Member of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Oxford for three years. In 2022, he was awarded the Amerbach Prize of the University of Basel as well as the Lauener Prize for Up-and-Coming Philosophers of the Lauener Foundation for Analytical Philosophy. His books include The Practical Origins of Ideas: Genealogy as Conceptual Reverse-Engineering (OUP, 2021).

Review :
What are the grounds on which we should select the best concepts to use in representing our world and our psychology, in framing our ethical and political ideals? Matthieu Queloz offers an incisive and comprehensive exploration of how this issue has been, and ought to be, answered. The book, which argues persuasively for a needs-based response, promises to be a major contribution to a growing research program. One of the most sophisticated and subtle book-length works on metaphilosophical issues to come out within the last decade. This is a book that takes a step back and re-plots the logical terrain of its subject from a new perspective. Queloz draws from several key figures who have been given very little attention in the conceptual engineering literature-Nietzsche, Williams, Dworkin, and Murdoch, to name a few. But beyond these central inspirations, Queloz also displays an incredible depth of knowledge across a wide variety of fields, both across philosophy and beyond it.