Epistemology

Engineering

Philosophy

Sociology

Psychology

Engineering ethics

Technology in Society

New technologies have the potential to severely “challenge” or “disrupt” not only our established social practices but our most fundamental concepts and distinctions like person versus object , nature versus artificial or being dead versus being alive . But does this disruption also change these concepts? Or does it merely change our operationalizations and applications of the same concepts? In this paper, I argue that instead of focusing on individual conceptual change, philosophers of socially disruptive technologies (SDTs) should think about conceptual change as a change of a network or cluster of interrelated concepts. What really generates a potential social disruption are changes of inferential relations between concepts – whether or not this entails a change of the respective individual concepts. Philosophers of socially disruptive technologies are therefore in the privileged position of being able to avoid commitments regarding the individuation of individual concepts. • Explores an important aspect of a thriving research program. • Develops a defense of one of its most serious challenges. • Leads the way to developing a more principled language and methodology for this research program.

Do socially disruptive technologies really change our concepts or just our conceptions?