Philosophical Issues, 27, Metaphysics, 2017 doi: 10.1111/phis.12106 METAPHYSICS AND CONCEPTUAL NEGOTIATION Amie L. Thomasson Dartmouth College Interest has been growing in the idea that metaphysics fundamentally involves normative conceptual work: work in what has come to be called ‘conceptual ethics’ and ‘conceptual engineering’. As Alexis Burgess and David Plunkett understand it, conceptual ethics involves questions about “which concepts [we should] use to think and talk about the world” (Burgess and Plun- kett 2013a, 1091). Work in conceptual ethics may also take us into concep- tual engineering: the work of (re-)designing concepts to better serve certain functions. The idea that philosophy centrally involves normative conceptual work is not entirely new. One sees it in Carnap (1950/1956), and more recently, in the work of Simon Blackburn, who writes that “just as the engineer studies the structure of material things, so the philosopher studies the structure of thought” (1999, 2). More recently still, similar views have been defended by David Plunkett (2015) and Matti Eklund, who suggests more broadly that “Philosophy should . . . be thought of as conceptual engineering” (2015, 364). For metaontological deflationists like myself, the idea that metaphysics has often been and can be engaged in normative conceptual work is par- ticularly helpful and important. I have argued elsewhere (2015) that onto- logical questions can be answered ‘easily’. That is, meaningful, well-formed questions about whether things of a given kind exist can be answered by a combination of conceptual work and (often) straightforward empirical work, and often can be answered (in the affirmative) by trivial inferences from un- contested premises. Metaphysical modal questions, too, I have argued (2007, 2013), can typically be addressed by a combination of empirical work and conceptual analysis. The central virtue of deflationism is that it takes us away from the epistemological mysteries of ‘serious metaphysics’. Those engaged in ‘seri- ous metaphysics’ see metaphysics as aiming to discover deep, worldly truths, C  2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.