The Metaethical Presuppositions of Conceptual Engineering

Conceptual engineering is the project of adding, improving, or removing concepts from our conceptual frameworks. Conceptual amelioration, in particular, purports to improve the conception or extension of a given concept for some epistemic, moral, or political purpose. While recent work has explored the nature and possibility of conceptual amelioration as a methodology, little attention has been given to its metaethical presuppositions. This chapter begins to fill that gap by connecting the metasemantic questions with the metanormative ones. The normative considerations of conceptual engineering are more deeply entwined with metaethics than other normative domains because of conceptual ethics’ murky relationship to metasemantic theory more generally. Ultimately, this chapter argues that the possibility of many instances of conceptual engineering depends on normative truths that are intersubjectively shared -a relationship here called Normative Metasemantic Entanglement.