Friday, March 7 | 11a.m.
B853
Oliver Traldi
The Epistemology and Politics of Redefinition
Several recent political and philosophical projects involve, at least in part, redefining words in order to better reflect moral or political reality or better serve moral or political goals. Such projects - whether we call them conceptual engineering, ameliorative analysis, the rectification of names, or anything else - face both political and philosophical challenges. In this talk, I outline a series of such challenges. There is a background lesson lurking behind all of them: that at least one important ethical goal of political argumentation is to share not just our claims but our reasons for them, and to consider not just our interlocutors' claims but their reasons for those claims as well. This goal is impeded by redefinition on virtually any picture of how it works and what it can accomplish.
Contact:
Katharina Stevens | katharina.stevens@uleth.ca | (403) 329-2159