Conceptual Engineering and the Law
Workshop
Directions
- Date: Apr 28, 2023
- Time: 09:30 AM - 06:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
- Location: Freiburg, Fürstenbergstr. 19
- Room: Seminar room (F 113)
- Host: Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law
- Contact: e.fish@csl.mpg.de
Conceptual engineering aims to replace imprecise, misleading, or contradictory concepts with more accurate ones. Rather than asking how a concept is being used, it questions whether it is right to use it that way. It offers a new way of understanding many of our disagreements: even when we mean different things by the words we argue about, we don’t always talk past each other. Sometimes, we engage in a fundamental dispute about what these words ought to mean, and by extension, about the best way to describe reality.
In this workshop we will consider these questions within
the context of the law. Among other things, we will ask what happens when
concepts turn legal, and how legal concepts evolve, change meaning, and are
manipulated. We will discuss legal interpretation – including new ways of
understanding the concept of legal interpretation itself. We will raise some
normative questions about the right way of revising legal concepts, both in
general and in particular cases.