Forthcoming in Synthese – please cite published version 1 I acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this work was produced: the Wallumattagal people of Dharug Ngurra. I also acknowledge my Indigenous Filipino ancestors. What attitude should we take to conceptual engineering? Paul-Mikhail Catapang Podosky Macquarie University 1. Introduction Conceptual engineering appears to be in the grips of quasi-paradox. 1 It involves a tension between the fact of real-world conceptual change and the material processes required to achieve it. When we become fully aware of the social requirements needed to implement revisions to available concepts, we ought to be overwhelmed by the amount of infrastructure that regulates thought and talk. Yet, conceptual change is a reality and looks intentionally directed. So, we should accept that it is plausible and something of which we can, more or less, take command. 2 There are, at least, two broad ways of responding: cautious pessimism and cautious optimism (Simion and Kelp 2019). Where the former worries that concepts are hard to engineer because they are, in a very strong sense, “out of our control,” the latter accepts that control is within our power but still hard to execute. The main question I am interested in is this: What attitude should we take to conceptual engineering? My primary concern is the implementation challenge. Specifically, the attitude we should have with respect to our capacity to implement proposed changes to the conceptual resources of large communities – particularly for the purposes of resisting injustice. If implementing concepts is infeasible, then scepticism appears warranted of it as a means of achieving justice ends. 3 It is merely an exercise in counterfactual imaginings of what a better world might look like instead of realistic tools for dismantling oppressive hierarchies. As it stands, I am leaning toward pessimism. I first show the challenge of conceptual engineering by identifying norm-based infrastructure that supports and sanctions our conceptual practices. The upshot is that we cannot place the burden of implementing concepts on the shoulders of individuals. If not individuals, then on whom or what can we place this burden? This is the main focus of the paper. Rather than acting on individual minds directly, we might be able to take advantage of the infrastructure itself. But here's where pessimism takes its hold. I argue that even those with a strong non-individualist edge fail to deliver on the promise of giving reasons to be optimistic about conceptual engineering. Perhaps the theorists most inclined toward non-individualism are Simion and Kelp (2019). They tell us that we need only act on the environment to drive conceptual change, which shows why conceptual engineering is a reasonable enterprise. The analogical reasoning they offer to make this point relies on seeing concepts through the lens of evolutionary biology and biotechnology. Yet, this fails to ease scepticism about the feasibility of conceptual engineering. Rather, Simion and Kelp have made explicit its overwhelming difficulty. 1 I say “quasi” paradox to contrast with full-blown logical paradoxes, such as the liar. 2 Chalmers also suggests that “conceptual engineering is clearly possible and clearly difficult” (2020, p. 15), though this appears to imply cautious optimism. 3 See Haslanger (2000), Barnes (2016, 2020), Jenkins (2016), Dembroff (2016), Plunkett (2016), Manne (2018).