Suchergebnisse

AbstractCan a machine be a person? Can a robot think, be our friend or colleague? These familiar questions in the ethics of AI have recently become much more urgent than many philosophers anticipated. However, they also seem as intractable as ever. For this reason, several philosophers of AI have recently turned their attention to an arguably new method: conceptual engineering. The idea is to stop searching for the real essence of friendship or our ordinary concept of the person. Instead, ethicists of AI should engineer concepts of friend or person we should apply. But what exactly is this method? There is currently no consensus on what the target object of conceptual engineers is or should be. In this paper, I reject a number of popular options and then argue for a pragmatist way of thinking about the target object of conceptual engineering in the ethics of AI. I conclude that in this pragmatist picture, conceptual engineering is probably what we have been doing all along. So, is it all just hype? No, the idea that the ethics of AI has been dominated by conceptual engineers all along constitutes an important meta-philosophical insight. We can build on this insight to develop a more rigorous and thorough methodology in the ethics of AI.

AbstractIt is largely assumed that conceptual engineering is essentially about revising, introducing, or eliminating representational devices, in particular the intension and extension of words and concepts. However, tying conceptual engineering too closely to representations is risky. Not everyone endorses the notion of representation as theoretically helpful or even real. Not everyone thinks that concepts or meanings should be understood in terms of the notion of representation. Does this mean that conceptual engineering is not interesting or relevant for these skeptics? In this paper, I motivate and propose a non-representationalist construal of conceptual engineering. I argue that conceptual engineers can be understood as primarily engineering linguistic entitlements and commitments rather than representational devices. Note that this account is non-representationalist, but explicitly not anti-representationalist. Representations may play a significant role when it comes to justifying and completing commitment engineering projects.

AbstractConceptual Engineering (CE) is thought to be generally aimed at ameliorating deficient concepts. In this paper, we challenge this assumption: we argue that CE is frequently undertaken with the orthogonal aim of conceptual adaptation. We develop this thesis with reference to the interplay between technology and concepts. Emerging technologies can exert significant pressure on conceptual systems and spark 'conceptual disruption'. For example, advances in Artificial Intelligence raise the question of whether AIs are agents or mere objects, which can be construed as a CE question regarding the concepts AGENT and OBJECT. We distinguish between three types of conceptual disruption (conceptual gaps, conceptual overlaps, and conceptual misalignments) and argue that when CE occurs to address these disruptions, its primary aim is not to improve concepts, but to retain their functional quality, or to prevent them from degrading. This is the characteristic aim of CE when undertaken in philosophy of technology: to preserve the functional role of a concept or conceptual scheme, rather than improving how a concept fulfills its respective function.