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Abstract. — The DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) is a classification of mental disorders. It is published by the American Psychiatric Association and revised by committees of psychiatrists ever fifteen years or so. This talk considers the DSM as a ‘conceptual building site’. For successful conceptual engineering to be possible we would need…

Abstract. — Precisifications of certain informal concepts could be thought of as instances of conceptual engineering: the concept of a Turing machine (human effective computability), the notion of a Kripke structure (possibility), the Kolmogorov axioms (probability), Tarski’s definition of truth in formal languages, to name just a few. Should we regard the technical notions these formalisms define as…

Abstract. — Let ‘epistemic concepts’ refer to those concepts which express the standards employed in epistemic assessment.   Such concepts offer an interesting test case for conceptual engineering.  On the one hand, they seem like they are tailor-made to be constructed de novo, answering to whichever of the varying interests we might have in epistemic evaluation.  On…