Matthew Shields
Biographic Data
| ID | 5939806 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Matthew Shields |
| GIVEN NAMES | Matthew |
| FAMILY NAME | Shields |
| SIGNATURE | SHIELDS M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Wake Forest University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0142-0464 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 10 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 4 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 10 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Diving for pearls
References to conceptual abandonment are ubiquitous in philosophy. I argue that making a case for abandonment is much harder than philosophers have realized and that this difficulty has striking, broader implications. I introduce a distinction between ‘permanent’ conceptual abandonment and ‘temporary’ conceptual abandonment and argue that only temporary abandonment is possible in the vast majority of cases. Insofar as we are capable of conceptual…
The perils of epistemic idealism
I argue that philosophers are vulnerable to an occupational hazard that I call ‘epistemic idealism’. This is the assumption that a practice in our epistemic lives with harmful political consequences is best made sense of as the outcome of false beliefs and the attendant assumption that we should primarily address the practice and associated problems by correcting those beliefs. Epistemic idealism can often lead to misunderstanding the target prac…
Conceptual Engineering, Conceptual Domination, and the Case of Conspiracy Theories
Using the example of recent attempts to engineer the concept of conspiracy theory, I argue that philosophers should be far more circumspect in their approach to conceptual engineering than we have been – in particular, that we should pay much closer attention to the history behind and context that surrounds our target concept in order to determine whether it is a site of what I have elsewhere called ‘conceptual domination’. If it is, we may well …
Truth from the Agent Point of View
I defend a novel pragmatist account of truth that I call ‘truth from the agent point of view’ or ‘agential truth’, drawing on insights from Hilary Putnam. According to the agential view, as inquirers, when we take something to be truth-apt, we are taking ourselves and all other thinkers to be accountable to getting right a shared target that is independent of any individual's or community's view of that target. That we have this relationship to t…
Rethinking conspiracy theories
On stipulation
When we carry out a speech act of stipulation, it seems that we can shape our language however we see fit. This autonomy, however, also seems to make such acts arbitrary: it is unclear if there are any constraints on what counts as a "correct" or "incorrect" stipulation. In this paper, I offer a novel, detailed account of the pragmatics of stipulation and explain its crucial role in conceptual analysis and articulation. My account shows that stip…
Conceptual Change and Future Paths for Pragmatism
The pragmatist faces the challenge of accounting for the possibility of rational conceptual change. Some pragmatists have tried to meet this challenge by appealing to Neurathian imagery—imagery that risks being too figurative to be helpful. I argue that we can develop a clearer view of what rationally constrained conceptual revision looks like for the pragmatist. I do so by examining the work of the pragmatist who in recent years has addressed th…
Conceptual domination
Philosophical Speech Acts
The prevailing view among contemporary analytic philosophers seems to be that, as philosophers, we primarily issue assertions. Following certain suggestions from the work of Rudolf Carnap and Sally Haslanger, I argue that the non-assertoric speech act of stipulation plays a key role in philosophical inquiry. I give a detailed account of the pragmatic structure of stipulations and argue that they are best analyzed as generating a shared inferentia…
Conceptual change in perspective
I argue that Sarah Sawyer's and Herman Cappelen's recent accounts of how speakers talk and think about the same concept or topic even when their understandings of that concept or topic substantially diverge risk multiplying our metasemantic categories unnecessarily and fail to prove explanatory. When we look more closely at our actual practices of samesaying, we find that speakers with seemingly incompatible formulations of a subject matter take …
Philosophical Speech Acts
The prevailing view among contemporary analytic philosophers seems to be that, as philosophers, we primarily issue assertions. Following certain suggestions from the work of Rudolf Carnap and Sally Haslanger, I argue that the non-assertoric speech act of stipulation plays a key role in philosophical inquiry. I give a detailed account of the pragmatic structure of stipulations and argue that they are best analyzed as generating a shared inferentia…
Conceptual change in perspective
I argue that Sarah Sawyer's and Herman Cappelen's recent accounts of how speakers talk and think about the same concept or topic even when their understandings of that concept or topic substantially diverge risk multiplying our metasemantic categories unnecessarily and fail to prove explanatory. When we look more closely at our actual practices of samesaying, we find that speakers with seemingly incompatible formulations of a subject matter take …
On stipulation
When we carry out a speech act of stipulation, it seems that we can shape our language however we see fit. This autonomy, however, also seems to make such acts arbitrary: it is unclear if there are any constraints on what counts as a "correct" or "incorrect" stipulation. In this paper, I offer a novel, detailed account of the pragmatics of stipulation and explain its crucial role in conceptual analysis and articulation. My account shows that stip…
Conceptual Change and Future Paths for Pragmatism
The pragmatist faces the challenge of accounting for the possibility of rational conceptual change. Some pragmatists have tried to meet this challenge by appealing to Neurathian imagery—imagery that risks being too figurative to be helpful. I argue that we can develop a clearer view of what rationally constrained conceptual revision looks like for the pragmatist. I do so by examining the work of the pragmatist who in recent years has addressed th…
Conceptual domination
Rethinking conspiracy theories
Conceptual Engineering, Conceptual Domination, and the Case of Conspiracy Theories
Using the example of recent attempts to engineer the concept of conspiracy theory, I argue that philosophers should be far more circumspect in their approach to conceptual engineering than we have been – in particular, that we should pay much closer attention to the history behind and context that surrounds our target concept in order to determine whether it is a site of what I have elsewhere called ‘conceptual domination’. If it is, we may well …
Truth from the Agent Point of View
I defend a novel pragmatist account of truth that I call ‘truth from the agent point of view’ or ‘agential truth’, drawing on insights from Hilary Putnam. According to the agential view, as inquirers, when we take something to be truth-apt, we are taking ourselves and all other thinkers to be accountable to getting right a shared target that is independent of any individual's or community's view of that target. That we have this relationship to t…
The perils of epistemic idealism
I argue that philosophers are vulnerable to an occupational hazard that I call ‘epistemic idealism’. This is the assumption that a practice in our epistemic lives with harmful political consequences is best made sense of as the outcome of false beliefs and the attendant assumption that we should primarily address the practice and associated problems by correcting those beliefs. Epistemic idealism can often lead to misunderstanding the target prac…
Diving for pearls
References to conceptual abandonment are ubiquitous in philosophy. I argue that making a case for abandonment is much harder than philosophers have realized and that this difficulty has striking, broader implications. I introduce a distinction between ‘permanent’ conceptual abandonment and ‘temporary’ conceptual abandonment and argue that only temporary abandonment is possible in the vast majority of cases. Insofar as we are capable of conceptual…
Epistemology (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics (6 works) · Sociology (6 works) · Computer Science (5 works) · Law (4 works) · Linguistics (4 works) · Philosophy and Theoretical Science (4 works) · Political science (4 works) · Politics (4 works)