Abstract

Conceptual engineering means to provide a method to assess and improve our concepts working as cognitive devices. But conceptual engineering still lacks an account of what concepts are as cognitive devices and of what engineering is in the case of conceptual cognition. And without such prior understanding of its subject matter, or so it is claimed here, conceptual engineering is bound to remain useless, merely operating as a piecemeal approach, with no overall grip on its target domain. The purpose of this programmatic paper is to overcome this knowledge gap by providing some guidelines for developing the theories of concepts and of engineering (viz. ‘cognitive engineering’) that are presumably needed so as to make conceptual engineering an actionable method for the cognitive optimization of our conceptual devices.