Title: Conceptual inflation, communication and understanding, and collective attention
Abstract: Some sociologists, psychologists, and philosophers, among others, have expressed worries about the “inflation” or “creep” of concepts related to negative experiences, harm, or injustice (e.g., ‘racism’, ‘sexual harassment’, ‘safety’). Others welcome and contribute to the linguistic changes. What is at stake in these disagreements? In this essay, I first give an account of what conceptual inflation, in one important sense, is: changes in linguistic practices that make it easier to indicate a problem of a certain category (e.g., racism, sexual harassment, or threat to safety). Then, I argue—building on recent work by Shen-yi Liao and Nat Hansen— that such conceptual inflation of problems neither significantly limits nor enhances our ability to communicate about the relevant sub-problems (e.g., workplace harassment and street harassment) or to recognize the similarities and differences between them. This is because of the flexibility of our linguistic resources and our own capacities to creatively use and develop those resources. There is, however, another way of making sense of the disagreements between the anti- and pro-inflation sides. The parties could be disagreeing about how to allocate collective attentional resources, or in other words, about what the community should treat as prioritized problems. There are plausible mechanisms whereby how we use the terms in question (e.g., “sexual harassment”) influences the community’s patterns of attention.
This is a hybrid event. If you would like to attend this event virtually by Zoom, please contact Harish Pedaprolou at the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas.
This event is sponsered by SalientSolutions.