Tuomo Tiisala: The Two Aspects of the Critique of Constitution

ABSTRAKT: Many philosophers have argued that concepts can be evaluated and improved. How viable this is and what it involves, depends on details in a theory of concepts. From this perspective, a view that combines an inferentialist semantics with a normative pragmatics is appealing, because it can explain why concepts, in part, are unknown to concept-users, and how concept-users can increase and exercise their rational control over the concepts they use. This is an account of rules, both implicitly enacted and explicitly represented, in discourse as a social practice. It is an important feature of this account that concepts are not immediately available for evaluation and revision, but we have to bring them under rational control by making explicit rules of inference that are implicitly in play in a discursive practice. As I have argued, it is apt to view this work as a kind of critique whose goal is make the conceptual constitution of experience, roughly, how we make sense of things, available for evaluation and improvement. Only rarely, however, has it been asked what obstacles there might be, preventing or hindering this critical task. In this talk, I explore two aspects of this question. The first aspect concerns various ways in which one may seem to be stuck with a specific concept, being in some sense apparently forced to keep using it, when, in fact, the concept could be evaluated, revised and even rejected. The second aspect concerns the link between concepts and values. Given that concepts are formed for the purpose of attaining or promoting some value, epistemic or non-epistemic, it is essential to the assessment of a concept that we know what values it serves and what values it ought to serve. But how do we acquire knowledge about the links between concepts and values? I will argue that this  knowledge must be acquired from the history of concepts, through a genealogy whose aim is not to vindicate nor to debunk, but to disclose the role of values in shaping the given conceptual repertoire.