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.

Go to Editor View