Research Projects

On this page you find information about my larger research projects. This is not a complete list of everything I’m working on. To get a sense of what else I’m interested in, please see my publications and work and progress page.

The Philosophy of Linguistic Interventions (POLI)

Linguistic interventions are active attempts at changing our linguistic practices – to change the meanings and usage of gender terms like “woman”, to stop using expressions like “fake news”, or to introduce new terms like “social distancing”. Linguistic interventions are increasingly popular in both public discourse as well as philosophical work, where they can be found in discussions of Carnapian explication, verbal disputes, generic speech, conceptual engineering and metalinguistic negotiations, among others. Linguistic interveners typically assume that their endeavors potentially have significant cognitive and practical benefits, for example, that they enable speakers to think and communicate propositions they could not have thought or said prior to the interventions. However, as of yet, the actual cognitive effects of linguistic interventions remain underexplored.

The Philosophy of Linguistic Interventions (POLI) project investigates the empirical underpinnings of and the constraints on linguistic interventions. It provides a comprehensive assessment of the empirical foundations of linguistic interventions with an emphasis on four carefully chosen strands of empirical research: (a) Neo-Whorfian investigations of linguistic relativity; (b) psycholinguistic investigations of nameability effects; (c) psychological research on word-learning and processing; and (d) psychological research on stereotypical inferences. The POLI project will assess these strands of research, transfer their main findings to the context of linguistic interventions and spell out the methodological consequences for philosophy insofar as it is concerned with linguistic interventions. In doing so, the POLI project seeks to (i) develop a comprehensive empirically informed account of the predictable cognitive effects of linguistic interventions, (ii) to use this account to assess the role of linguistic interventions in philosophical methodology, and (iii) to derive a toolkit, i.e., a set of concrete guidelines, for would-be linguistic interveners.

Project publications:

DFG Walter Benjamin position

  • PI: Steffen Koch
  • October 1, 2024 – September 30, 2026

Planned research visits:

Project partners:

In Defense of Conceptual Engineering (DOCE) (PhD Project)

Unlike conceptual analysis, conceptual engineering does not aim to identify the content that our current concepts do have, but the content which these concepts should have. Conceptual engineering thus aims to revise our current conceptual apparatus according to certain normative standards. Many philosophers believe this to be an underexplored but very fruitful approach to doing philosophy. The DOCE project offers a theory as well as a defense of conceptual engineering.

More specifically, the DOCE project proposes answers to three fundamental challenges to conceptual engineering:

  • the bootstrapping challenge to define the very notion of conceptual engineering, i.e. what types of representations are targeted by this method and what engineering them amounts to;
  • the implementation challenge to sketch a feasible course of actions by which conceptual engineering proposals can be implemented;
  • the continuity challenge to account for the limits of acceptable conceptual revisions.

Regarding the bootstrapping challenge, the DOCE project develops and defends a dual content view of concepts which allows for the engineering of both referential content and cognitive content. Simply put, conceptual engineers can either aim to modify what is being represented by a given concept, and also how it is being represented. Regarding the implementation challenge, the project acknowledges the difficulties of implementing conceptual engineering, but stresses that we nevertheless possess a kind of collective long-range control over words and concepts that is typically sufficient to validate the normative force of conceptual engineering proposals. Regarding the continuity challenge, the project seeks to disentagle various forms of (dis-)continuities and argues that neither of them provides a principled challenge to conceptual engineering qua method.

Project publications:

DFG Emmy Noether Group EXTRA

Research visits:

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑