Debunking Concepts (in: Midwest Studies)

Midwest Studies in Philosophy Volume 47 (2023), pp. 195–225 DOI: 10.5840/msp2023111347 Debunking Concepts MATTHIEU QUELOZ University of Bern Abstract: Genealogies of belief have dominated recent philosophical discussions of genealogical debunking at the expense of genealogies of concepts, which has in turn focused attention on genealogical debunking in an epistemological key. As I argue in this paper, however, this double focus encourages an overly narrow understanding of genealogical debunking. First, not all genealogical debunking can be reduced to the debunking of beliefs—concepts can be debunked without debunking any particular belief, just as beliefs can be debunked without debunking the concepts in terms of which they are articulated. Second, not all genealogical debunking is epistemological debunking. Focusing on concepts rather than beliefs brings distinct forms of genealogical debunking to the fore that cannot be comprehensively captured in terms of epistemological debunking. We thus need a broader understanding of genealogical debunking, which encompasses not just epistemological debunking, but also what I shall refer to as metaphysical debunking and ethical debunking. Key words: genealogy, concepts, critique, subversion, conceptual needs *** “Debunking” is now sometimes used in philosophy to mean no more than “exposing as false.” But the term, which might be said to trace its genealogy to an act of Congress, carries a broader meaning. In 1820, Felix Walker, eager to speak for his constituents in the U.S. House of Representatives, delivered a wearisome and largely irrelevant “speech for Buncombe” that made “buncombe” (later respelled “bunkum” and shortened to “bunk”) a synonym for inflated claptrap and hollow nonsense. To debunk something is thus not necessarily to expose it as false, but to discredit it, deflate it, reveal its hollowness, or show it in its true light.1 1. See Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, s.v. “bunkum,” accessed July 18, 2023, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bunkum. In his 1923 novel Bunk, W. E. Woodward then introduced “debunk” to mean “taking the bunk out of things.” © Midwest Studies in Philosophy 196 Matthieu Queloz If these broader connotations of the term have been largely absent from recent philosophical discussions of genealogical debunking, it is because these have been dominated by genealogies of beliefs, which has in turn focused attention on debunking in an epistemological key.2 One way to challenge a belief is to offer a genealogical explanation of how it was formed that yields no reason to think it true (“You just believe that because . . .”). Or, even if true, the belief might be genealogically shown to fail to qualify as knowledge, because the mechanism by which it was formed is in some important respect unreliable, which undercuts the belief ’s justificatory standing. Such genealogical challenges to belief have proven fertile ground for epistemology, readily lending themselves to the application of the most sophisticated accounts of how belief, truth, justification, and belief-formation should interlock. It is accordingly tempting also to approach genealogical challenges to concepts, which have received less attention, by assimilating them to epistemological accounts tailored to beliefs. How much difference can it make if genealogical challenges primarily target concepts rather than beliefs? After all, concepts are the building blocks of beliefs. Is the point of debunking a concept not bound to lie, ultimately, in showing that certain beliefs are likely false or unjustified? “Concepts, just like beliefs, are representational devices,” one might reason, and thus an epistemological account of the debunking of concepts is appropriate because “their function is an epistemic one: to represent the world” (Simion 2018: 923). Against this line of reasoning, I argue that genealogical debunking which targets concepts should not be assimilated to the epistemological debunking of beliefs. This assimilation risks encouraging an overly narrow understanding of genealogical debunking in two respects. First, not all genealogical debunking reduces to the debunking of beliefs—concepts can be debunked without debunking any particular belief, just as beliefs can be debunked without debunking the concepts in terms of which they are articulated. Second, not all genealogical debunking is epistemological debunking. Focusing on concepts rather than beliefs brings distinct forms of genealogical debunking to the fore that cannot be comprehensively captured in terms of epistemological debunking. 2. See notably Joyce (2006: 211; 2013), Street (2006), White (2010), Mason (2010), Kahane (2011), Kail (2011), Srinivasan (2011, 2015, 2019, n.d.), Brandom (2015, 2019), Schoenfield (2014), Nichols (2015: 97–118), Bogardus (2016), Mogensen (2016), Braddock (2017), Queloz (2016, 2017a, b), Vavova (2018), Sauer (2018), Korman (2014, 2019), Clarke-Doane (2020: 97–120), Mogensen and MacAskill (2022), Cueni and Queloz (2022), Egeland (2022), and Königs (2022). Debunking Concepts 197 We thus need a broader understanding of genealogical debunking, which encompasses not just epistemological debunking, but also what I shall call metaphysical debunking and ethical debunking, where this differentiates types of debunking not, as is customary, by their object—is the item that is being targeted an epistemological, metaphysical, or ethical one?—but rather by the mode in which they are debunked. Even when people refer to debunking arguments about metaphysics or morality, they typically still have epistemological debunking in mind. My aim is to bring into view the distinctive character of modes of debunking that operate on different grounds. 1. EPISTEMOLOGICAL DEBUNKING If one regards genealogical explanations as paradigmatically challenging beliefs, this naturally encourages one to make sense of their debunking potential in epistemological terms, as threatening beliefs’ claim to being true and justified, and hence their claim to being knowledge. Conversely, if one considers genealogical explanations primarily through an epistemological lens, one is led to focus on the beliefs or claims the genealogy bears on, because these are the smallest units of thought on which the full arsenal of epistemology can be brought to bear. Only once concepts combine to assume propositional shape can we meaningfully ask whether a genealogy’s target is true, whether it is justified, and whether it constitutes knowledge. By themselves, concepts cannot be either true of false, nor can they be justified or unjustified; and while they can unlock (and possibly foreclose) forms of knowledge, a concept alone does not yet form a piece of knowledge. The focus on beliefs and the focus on epistemological aspects are thus mutually supportive. But a consequence of this double focus is to detract attention from the respects in which genealogies might primarily target concepts as opposed to beliefs, and do so primarily by highlighting non-epistemological features of a situation. Truth, justification, and knowledge are all very well, but they are not the only things we want from human thought. Insofar as philosophers who have offered detailed epistemological accounts of genealogical challenges to beliefs have addressed genealogical challenges to concepts at all, they have tended to do so by assimilating them to genealogical challenges to beliefs. In particular, they have suggested that a suitably sophisticated epistemological account of how genealogies can debunk beliefs would cover genealogies of concepts as well, as applications of the same type of reasoning. Amia Srinivasan, for example, writes: While my focus [is on] beliefs, much of what I say can be carried over to critical genealogies of concepts. . . . A genealogical critic might argue, for example, that we only think about the world 198 Matthieu Queloz in terms of the concepts of liberal democracy (equality, human rights, etc.) because we have been trained to use such concepts. (Srinivasan 2019: 132n7) For Srinivasan, a genealogy’s best hope of subverting a belief ’s epistemic standing, which is to say its claim to being true and justified, and hence to being knowledge, is to reveal the mechanism by which the belief was formed to be indifferent to the truth of the belief in question; on her preferred construal of this alethic indifference, the process of belief formation is revealed to be an unsafe mechanism for someone whose primary concern is to arrive at true beliefs, in Ernest Sosa’s (1999) sense of “unsafe”: it might easily lead one to false beliefs. And much of what she says about these genealogies of beliefs, Srinivasan maintains, can be carried over to genealogies of concepts. But how is this assimilation of the debunking of concepts to the epistemological debunking of beliefs supposed to work, given that concepts, unlike beliefs, cannot aim to be true?3 To render intelligible how concepts could be subject to the same kind of epistemological debunking that beliefs are subject to, one needs to find a way to link each targeted concept with some belief, or, more precisely, with some truth-evaluable claim (which may not in fact be believed by a given concept-user, but which use of the concept nevertheless commits one to). This then makes it possible to debunk the concept by genealogically undermining the epistemic standing of the claim associated with it. There are two prevalent ways of debunking concepts by debunking claims. The first operates in the spirit of Bertrand Russell’s theory of descriptions, by discerning straightforwardly criticizable existence claims within the logical entrails of concept use: by employing some concept F in articulating how things are, one commits oneself to the claim that there is such a thing as F. If that existence claim turns out to be false, the concept is revealed to suffer from reference failure: in the world we actually inhabit, it is a concept with an empty extension. A standard example is the concept of phlogiston, but, as Mark Wilson argues, such empty concepts have frequently proven to be significant obstacles in the history of science: “Often the chariot of scientific 3. It is along similar lines that Peter Kail reads Nietzsche’s genealogy of morality. Kail equates each value concept with a set of beliefs and argues that “Nietzsche’s account of the emergence of the beliefs distinctive of [morality] destabilizes the beliefs by uncovering the fact that the mechanisms productive of the beliefs are epistemically unreliable” (2011: 229). A further question, which I shall not pursue here, is to what extent this epistemological understanding of the debunking of beliefs is itself ultimately compelling—a question that various commentators thinking about these issues in an epistemological key, including White (2010), Srinivasan (2015, 2019), and Brandom (2015, 2019), have expressed serious doubts over. Debunking Concepts 199 progress might have rolled more swiftly onward if such specious forms of conceptual friction had not impeded its advance” (2006: 3). If the use of concept F commits one to an existence claim that turns out to be false, this in turn casts doubt on the entire set of what Richard Joyce calls the “positive beliefs” (2006: 242n6) involving the concept F: the beliefs that implicitly commit one to the existence of F. Restricting debunking to positive beliefs allows for the fact that at least some beliefs involving the concept F must survive the realization that there is no such thing as F: for example, the second-order belief “I used to believe that there was such a thing as F.” Genealogical challenges to concepts might be thought to aim for the same effect by offering genealogical explanations of concept-formation suggesting that we use some concept F not because we are conceptually sensitive to the existence of F, but for other reasons that have nothing to do with the existence of F. The genealogical challenge then takes the form: “You only use that concept because . . .” And the subversive force of that challenge is thought to come from the doubt it casts on the existence claim implicit in the use of the concept. If the mechanism by which concept F was formed suggests that there is in fact no such thing as F, then all our positive beliefs involving concept F are revealed to be likely misconceived. This may not conclusively show them to be false. But it casts serious doubt on their veracity. One of the most influential discussions of genealogical debunking, Richard Joyce’s The Evolution of Morality (2006), ostensibly presents genealogical challenges as primarily targeting concepts rather than beliefs; yet, upon closer inspection, Joyce still ends up assimilating the genealogical debunking of concepts to the epistemological debunking of beliefs. For, on his view, the way in which reflection on evolutionary origins puts pressure on our moral concepts is by undercutting our positive beliefs involving these concepts. By way of analogy, he imagines a “Napoleon pill” generating the disposition to form beliefs involving the concept of Napoleon. Whatever the exact content of these beliefs turns out to be, Joyce contends, the genealogical realization that one originally acquired the concept of Napoleon just because one was slipped a Napoleon pill some years ago would undermine all one’s positive beliefs involving the concept, because, on Joyce’s view, “[a] belief is undermined if one of the concepts figuring in it is undermined” (2006: 181). Again, this genealogical realization would not conclusively show these positive beliefs to be false. But it would cast doubt on their veracity—enough doubt, on Joyce’s view, to justify abandoning these beliefs unless and until sufficiently independent evidence for their truth emerged. Joyce then runs a parallel argument for moral beliefs. Natural selection, he argues, is like a Napoleon pill: it played an indispensable role in the de- 200 Matthieu Queloz velopment of moral concepts such as obligation, virtue, property, desert, and fairness. Were it not for the shaping hand of natural selection, we wouldn’t have concepts like obligation, virtue, property, desert, and fairness at all. . . . [O]nce we become aware of this genealogy of morals we should (epistemically) . . . cultivate agnosticism regarding all positive beliefs involving these concepts until we find some solid evidence either for or against them. (Joyce 2006: 181) This sounds as though the debunking of concepts were primary on Joyce’s account, and the debunking of claims or beliefs only a derivative consequence. But once one asks why the realization that one originally acquired the concept of Napoleon because one was slipped a Napoleon pill some years ago should undermine all one’s positive beliefs involving the concept, it soon emerges that it is an existence claim that is doing the work: acquiring a concept through a pill might easily lead one to believe in the existence of something which does not exist, and it is because such an existence claim underlies all our positive beliefs involving the concept that all those beliefs are debunked by tracing the concept’s origins to something other than the existence of its referent. The concept is debunked by debunking an existence claim, which in turn impugns all the beliefs that implicitly commit one to the existence of the concept’s referent. For Joyce, the possibility of tracing a concept’s origins to something other than the existence of its referent raises the strong possibility that our disposition to conceptualize things in those terms is “in the same ballpark as taking horoscopes seriously or believing that ancestral spirits move invisibly among us” (2006: 181–182). However, the uncovering of unsupported existence claims is neither necessary nor sufficient for the debunking of concepts. It is not necessary, because making unsupported existence claims is clearly not the only thing that can be wrong with our concepts. Many pejorative terms or slurs, for instance, are objectionable, but not necessarily because they suffer from reference failure. It would be Procrustean to press all of these concepts into this one mould by arguing that they have empty extensions—as Christopher Hom and Robert May invite us to do in “Pejoratives as Fictions” (2018), for example. Some concepts that do pick out something are nonetheless susceptible to being debunked by other considerations—for example, as we shall see in section three, by the realization that they serve objectionable concerns. But neither is the uncovering of unsupported existence claims sufficient for the debunking of concepts, because some concepts remain unaffected by the realization that they suffer from reference failure. Many concepts in the social and natural sciences, for example, are known to be mere heuristics, Debunking Concepts 201 idealizations, or caricatures, and are considered no less valuable for that.4 The same is true of many mythological and literary concepts.5 They are widely understood to be useful fictions, and genealogically underscoring their fictional character should not destabilize their use. Accordingly, some philosophers have sought to broaden our understanding of the genealogical debunking of concepts by presenting it as excavating not just unsupported existence claims, but unsupported claims of other kinds. This second way of spelling out the critical potential of genealogies of concepts highlights not reference failure, but presupposition failure: use of the concept presupposes a false claim.6 Siding with Gottlob Frege and P. F. Strawson against Russell, one might conceive of reference failure as being itself a kind of presupposition failure, where the use of a concept falsely presupposes the existence of its object.7 But the notion of presupposition failure is significantly broader, since the relevant presuppositions do not have to be existence claims—they can also be false normative claims, for example. This enables one to make sense of non-empty concepts that nonetheless make false presuppositions. In this vein, Matti Eklund proposes to understand a non-empty normative concept as objectionable “iff, roughly, its use in some sense presupposes a false normative claim” (2017: 73). A similarly presuppositional account is articulated by Alan Gibbard (1992). Some concepts expressed in slurs or epithets have been thought to offer prime examples of this: insofar as such concepts presuppose that their objects are contemptible in virtue of their race or ethnicity, the concepts presuppose falsely (and thereby disqualify the claims articulated in terms of these concepts from being candidates for truth or falsity).8 Take Eklund’s (2017: 13–14) example of the concept slutty. On his view, reflection shows this to be an objectionable concept, but not because nothing falls under the concept slutty. Rather, as Eklund argues, the concept 4. See Weisberg (2013), Elliott-Graves (2014), and Appiah (2017). 5. See Austin (2010) and Appiah (2017). 6. As with the earlier qualification that a concept’s association with a false existence claim does not necessarily impugn all beliefs involving the concepts, so presupposition failure is not necessarily catastrophic for all claims involving the concepts. See Yablo (2006) for a discussion of non-catastrophic presupposition failure. 7. For an account of the debate between Russell and Strawson and the subsequent evolution of Strawson’s views on these issues, see Beaver, Geurts, and Denlinger (2021: 6). 8. See Richard (2008: 18–22) and Mühlebach (2019, 2023a, 2023b, Forthcoming) for critical discussions of the literature taking this line. It should be noted that it is controversial whether the fact that some concept presupposes falsely disqualifies the claims articulated in terms of the concepts from being candidates for truth or falsity; see Beaver, Geurts, and Denlinger (2021: 6). 202 Matthieu Queloz slutty is indeed satisfied by some types of behaviour, but its objectionability stems from the normative claims with which the concept is inextricably associated. And while genealogical reflection may not always be necessary to bring to light the normative claims associated with a concept, it certainly can serve to do so, as the concept slutty itself indicates: genealogical reflection on how the concept was formed, when it was formed, and in whose interest it was to form it that way can do much to render salient the normative claims that conceptual debunking through presupposition failure would focus on. On this type of account, genealogies can debunk concepts by revealing their false presuppositions. Both the reference failure account and the presupposition failure account assimilate the debunking of concepts to the epistemological debunking of beliefs. On both accounts, genealogical challenges to concepts cast doubt on the epistemic standing of claims concomitant with the use of certain concepts: paradigmatically, they reveal a familiar kind of epistemic error, namely covert commitment to what is likely an unjustified or false claim. Since epistemological debunking operates by debunking claims, it can make sense of the debunking of concepts precisely to the extent that the latter involves the debunking of claims. But is this enough? Are the possibilities for the genealogical debunking of concepts exhausted by the epistemological debunking of claims associated with concepts? As I hope to establish in the next two sections, the debunking of concepts need not always take the form of showing that a concept suffers from reference failure because the world we inhabit does not in fact contain anything that might count as its referent. Nor need it take the form of showing that the concept suffers from some other kind of presupposition failure, so that one has reason to resist judgements articulated in terms of the concept on the grounds that a crucial presupposition of their becoming candidates for truth or falsity remains unfulfilled. If we can make sense of forms of debunking that do not fit this mould, we open up room for genealogical challenges to concepts that do not cast doubt on the epistemic standing of any of the beliefs and claims involving those concepts at all. We could then make sense of the possibility that even true and justified beliefs might be vulnerable to genealogical challenges not because they covertly presuppose some false claim, but simply by dint of the terms they are cast in. To get there, we need to ask: what does one leave out by understanding genealogical challenges to concepts purely in terms of epistemological debunking? Debunking Concepts 203 2. METAPHYSICAL DEBUNKING One type of consideration that epistemological debunking leaves out can be gleaned from a suggestive remark that Srinivasan makes in passing about how her approach to beliefs might carry over to concepts: “critical genealogies of concepts,” she writes, “purport to threaten the aptness of the concepts they genealogize—that is, the ability of such concepts to carve the world ‘at its joints’” (2019: 132n7). This points to a second type of debunking, metaphysical debunking, that is importantly different from the epistemological debunking she discusses in connection with beliefs: metaphysical debunking consists in showing that the concepts one uses do not match up with the structure of the world. Just as beliefs should correspond to the facts, concepts should be “apt” in the sense of carving the world at its joints; for a concept’s genealogy to indicate that we use the concept for reasons that have nothing to do with our becoming conceptually sensitive to the world’s joints consequently subverts the concept’s epistemic standing by presenting the mechanism by which one forms beliefs about the world as indifferent not so much to the truth of those beliefs as to whether the concepts they are articulated in carve the world at its joints; the process of concept-formation is revealed to be an unsafe mechanism for someone whose primary concern is to arrive at a joint-carving conceptual repertoire, in the sense that it might easily lead one to use non-joint-carving concepts. The underlying assumption here is well expressed by Mark Heller: “If we accept objects into our ontology because it is convenient, if we conceptually divide up the world into objects one way rather than another because doing so will serve our purposes better, then there is little chance that the resulting ontology will be the true ontology” (1990: 44).9 In other words, while epistemological debunking makes concepts answerable to the truth and justification of claims or beliefs, metaphysical debunking makes concepts answerable to “the true ontology”: the catalogue of objects and properties that actually makes up the world’s structure. Though this is not explicitly acknowledged in Srinivasan’s remarks, epistemological and metaphysical debunking are two distinct forms of debunking that can also come apart: as Theodore Sider argues, for example, a community can have perfectly true and justified beliefs, but nonetheless have “the wrong concepts,” because these concepts do not match the world’s “structure” (2011: 2). Truth is not enough. It needs to be couched in the right terms, which for Sider means the terms that reflect the basic structure of real9. Heller himself restricts his discussion to physical objects (1990: xiii). As the discussions by Srinivasan and Joyce illustrate, however, the picture Heller describes is sometimes taken to apply more widely. 204 Matthieu Queloz ity and thereby improve our understanding of the world (2011: 10). Similarly, the problem with a concept such as Nelson Goodman’s (1983) concept grue, which applies to all things examined before time t just in case they are green but to things observed at or after t just in case they are blue, is not that the concept is empty (reference failure), or that it makes a false presupposition (presupposition failure). Rather, it seems out of touch with the way things and colours actually tend to behave in the physical universe we happen to inhabit. This type of conclusion could well be reached and supported through genealogy. The genealogy of some future concept, for example, might reveal it to have been formed in a virtual universe in which the objects or properties it picks out systematically behave differently from the way they do in the physical universe. As a result, the concept is a bad match for the physical universe—it does not carve the physical world at the joints.10 Future children raised partly on virtual reality might thus find that some of the concepts they have picked up in it are ill-suited to physical reality. The virtual origins of these concepts will metaphysically debunk them as guides to physical reality. To articulate this demand that our concepts should match up with the antecedent order of things, some philosophers, following David Lewis (1983, 1984), also talk of “reference magnets.” The idea is that certain parts of reality attract reference by our concepts: they are more eligible for reference than other parts of reality, because they are metaphysically privileged in some respect—they are “more natural,” perhaps, or “more unified.” In Reality and Morality (2020), for example, Billy Dunaway extends the idea of reference magnetism to moral concepts, arguing that properties like “moral rightness” or “obligation” are objective, metaphysically privileged properties that our moral concepts should be accountable to. However, this is the kind of metaphysical privilege that genealogies of concepts are well-suited to debunk: inquiring into the way a concept was formed might reveal the property or object it picks out to be far from “unified” or “objective” in the sense required. It may reveal it to be a social rather than a natural kind, for example, as Edward Craig’s (1990) genealogy of the concept of knowledge does.11 Or, as Alexander Prescott-Couch (2014, 2015, n.d.) argues, it may reveal it to be a “historical individual,” i.e., a temporally extended but highly heterogeneous and disunified kind held together by nothing but the historical connections between its parts (Prescott-Couch offers Christmas as an example). There may be other, non-genealogical ways 10. See Chalmers (2022) for related examples of the problems raised by virtual worlds. 11. See also Haslanger (1999), Longino (2002), Fricker (1998, 2007, 2009), Kusch (2009, 2011, 2013), Kusch and McKenna (2020), McKenna (2022), and Lossau (2023). Debunking Concepts 205 to reach and support the relevant insights. But a genealogical approach is particularly, if not uniquely, well-suited to the task. While broadening one’s understanding of genealogical debunking to include the metaphysical debunking of concepts is an improvement, it still offers a restricted view of how genealogy can debunk concepts. For it is a highly questionable assumption that all concepts serve to carve the world at its antecedent joints.12 More plausibly, this is only what some of our concepts serve to do, and even then not necessarily everything that these concepts serve to do. Even those who, like Sider, foreground the demand on concepts to carve at the joints admit that only some concepts, such as the concepts of fundamental physics, actually stand any chance of carving at the joints; the concepts articulating higher-level descriptions merely approximate joint-carving descriptions to a greater or lesser degree, and if different nonfundamental concepts are equally far from carving at the joints, the choice between such nonfundamental concepts is “insubstantial” (2011: 7), on Sider’s view. Yet our conceptual repertoire encompasses a diverse array of cognitive techniques,13 and the various thick normative concepts that typically give us reasons for action and guide our conduct in the ethical, political, and legal spheres, for example, are not best thought of as joint-carvers. They primarily serve to motivate, guide, coordinate, and regulate behaviour. As Sally Haslanger (2020: 249) has argued following Tadeusz Zawidzki (2013), a more plausible generalization about concepts is that they are mind-shapers.14 On this picture, some concepts may still notably serve to shape the structure of our minds into a mirror of the structure of the world. But other concepts primarily serve to shape the social world we inhabit, and to shape how we respond to that world and to each other. In so doing, these concepts help us to live together. In order to do justice to these complications, one needs to broaden one’s understanding of genealogical debunking even further. One needs it to encompass not just epistemological and metaphysical debunking, but also ethical debunking. 12. For an extended argument questioning this assumption, see notably Price (2011). 13. On concepts as norm-governed cognitive techniques, see Glock (2006, 2009a, 2009b, 2010a, b, 2020). The Wittgensteinian idea that they constitute a highly diverse toolkit is developed notably by Wilson (2006, 2017), Price (2011), Blackburn (2013a, 2013b, 2017), and Sinclair (2021). 14. The term goes back to Mameli (2001). Haslanger herself encourages us to consider both the theoretical and the practical aims of classification, as she puts it: see Haslanger (2012: 188–190; 2020: 242). 206 Matthieu Queloz 3. ETHICAL DEBUNKING Epistemological and metaphysical debunking have one significant thing in common, namely that they diagnose in-built epistemic errors in concepts. If a genealogy raises the suspicion that there might in fact be no such thing as F, the concept F looks terminally misconceived—it runs on empty. Similarly, if a genealogy raises the suspicion that a concept makes a false presupposition, it reveals it to depend on a mistake that should be recognizable as such even to an enthusiastic user of the concept. And if a genealogy can show a concept to be out of touch with the structure of the world it seeks to represent, this is also a failing of the concept by its own lights. In each case, a concept is shown to suffer from an inherent epistemic flaw. It is, in the most literal sense, a misconception. There is an attractive clarity, objectivity, and finality to these verdicts. This comes notably from the fact that they locate what is wrong with certain concepts in those concepts themselves, or in what necessarily comes with them, and do not require one to consider the variable characteristics of those who use these concepts, or the different ways and contexts in which the concepts are deployed. But there can also be a kind of evasion involved in this. It may too comfortably cast as an epistemic error what is really an ethical failing demanding a more complex reaction. For even where this kind of genealogical critique is directed at a deserving target, it leaves untouched the many alternative conceptions in the vicinity that do not suffer from the same vulnerability. Critiques of the concept of race on the grounds that modern genetics has revealed it to be empty, for example, do nothing to undermine other conceptions of race in the vicinity that are simply too superficial, i.e., unconcerned with ancestry and genetic underpinnings, to be plausibly regarded as empty.15 These superficial concepts trivially have non-empty extensions, and cannot so easily be disposed of in epistemological or metaphysical terms. They call for a more ethical style of critique—a critique that cannot afford to ignore the human motives animating the use of these conceptions. This is the main reason why I think one should not rest content with an epistemological or a metaphysical understanding of the debunking of concepts. Many concepts that do not involve any kind of epistemic error nevertheless have something wrong with them. There could be, and probably 15. For an example of a critique of the concept of race as empty, see Smith (2020: 53–62). For an account which proposes to replace the empty conception of race with three non-empty conceptions tailored to different sets of needs, see Hardimon (2017). Four different conceptions of race that do not fall prey to this kind of debunking are also articulated in Glasgow, Haslanger et al. (2019). Debunking Concepts 207 are, many objectionable concepts that do not suffer from built-in epistemic errors, and can therefore not be expected to self-undermine in the long run. They pick out something alright, do not necessarily make any obviously false presuppositions, and do not even try to carve nature at its joints. But they nevertheless form proper targets of critique—of ethical critique, in the broad sense that includes social and political critique. The first step towards an understanding of ethical debunking is to focus not on whether the claims articulated using certain concepts are true, but on what the concepts do: what are the effects of using these concepts? What significant difference does their use make? The concepts we actually use have various kinds of effects: channelling our attention towards certain things, engaging our emotions in certain ways, and disposing us to draw certain inferences rather than others. This gives concepts a subtle kind of power, which makes it appropriate to ask whether they are a force for good or not. Have things been made better or worse by the introduction of a certain concept into our conceptual repertoire? Would we be better off without it? And who exactly benefits from the concept’s being in use? Cui bono? The challenge is that any concept worth examining in this light will tend to be associated with a protean hotchpotch of effects.16 Even a single instance of concept use already has multiple kinds of effects cascading in different directions. When a concept’s overall causal profile across all instances of its use is considered, its effects threaten to become almost limitlessly various. What effects the use of a concept entrains is, after all, highly sensitive to context, changing radically with the circumstances in which the concept is applied and the needs and purposes with which its users employ it. Moreover, a concept may have been appropriated and repurposed many times over in the course of its history, accruing new effects as a result. The resulting hotchpotch is apt to be too shapeless to permit clear evaluative conclusions. This is where philosophical genealogies come into their own, as analytic devices that render this seemingly intractable hotchpotch of effects philosophically tractable. Philosophical genealogies of concepts enable one to single out, explain, situate, and evaluate the effects of concepts that are the most significant for one’s philosophical purposes. Three features of genealogical narratives enable them to achieve this. First, a genealogical narrative, already in virtue of being a story about how human beings came to use a certain concept, receives guidance from human concerns in selecting certain effects to focus on; the causal web may be unsurveyably vast and complex, but viewing it in perspective, from the point of view of human beings who are more concerned about some effects 16. For a sharp articulation of this problem, see Prescott-Couch (2014: 158; 2015, 2023). 208 Matthieu Queloz than others, imposes a philosophically fruitful and relevant form of order on it by rendering some effects more salient than others. The genealogist therefore does not merely contemplate concepts and their myriad effects. The genealogist considers them in relation to human agents and their concerns, so that a concept’s humanly significant effects can be selected and organized around human agents and their concerns. Much of the work of rendering a causal system philosophically tractable can thus be achieved by taking guidance from human concerns. Second, instead of tackling the entire array of a concept’s present-day effects directly, a genealogical approach invites us to start further back, with some less complex situation out of which a concept first developed. That could be a real historical situation of origin; or it could be a hypothetical developmental model constructed in lieu of a historical description, such as the avowedly imaginary genealogies familiar from David Hume (2000: 3.2.2), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1977), E. J. Craig (1990), Bernard Williams (2002), Miranda Fricker (2007), Philip Pettit (2018), Lilith Mace (2022), or Krista Lawlor (2023).17 Either way, the idea is to start from an uncluttered and perspicuous state of affairs that gives us a firm grip on the concept’s explanatorily basic effects: those that most basically explain why it first gained currency. Considering a concept’s most basic practical origins can be a heuristic by which to narrow down the space of possibilities, inspire hypotheses, and draw attention to significant effects that the widespread use of a concept can be expected to have. Of course, explanatorily basic effects might not coincide with the most significant effects the concept now has, or indeed figure among its current effects at all. Consequently, asking what a concept originally did for those who introduced it is quite different from asking what it now does. Thanks to its genealogical dimension, however—and this is the third feature—a genealogical approach to a concept can accommodate these complexities by situating the most important developments that led the concept to develop whatever significant effects it now has along its genealogical axis. Such an approach can allow that explanatorily basic effects might not coincide with the most significant effects the concept now has; yet it can nonetheless exploit the respects in which asking what a concept originally did for those who introduced it can shed light on what it now does; and it can, at the same time, also place the developments that account for the subsequent alterations in its effects within a unified organizing narrative. In this way, 17. For a reconstruction of this genealogical tradition, see Queloz (2021b). For complementary discussions of how genealogical explanations can carry normative significance for the evaluation of the concepts and beliefs we now have, see Queloz (2020, 2022, 2023a) and Cueni and Queloz (2022). Debunking Concepts 209 the genealogical axis renders complexity tractable. And by unscrambling a complex historical phenomenon into its key constituents and the forces that shape it, genealogy enables us to think more productively about how these constituents might be reconfigured so as to remove its harmful effects while retaining its beneficial effects. Beyond these observations, it becomes harder to generalize, as philosophical genealogies exemplifying ethical debunking have taken various forms in the hands of thinkers as different as Rousseau, Nietzsche, or Foucault.18 What follows should therefore only be taken to illustrate one among many possible ways in which genealogy can be used not just as an analytic device, but as a diagnostic device permitting the evaluation of concepts. This illustrative sketch is loosely inspired by the genealogical methods of Nietzsche and Williams, but does not aspire to be faithful to them.19 Its purpose is to convey what the ethical debunking of concepts might more concretely look like and how starkly it differs from the epistemological debunking of beliefs. To get started on a genealogical explanation of concept F, ask who, and in what kind of situation, might have felt the need to introduce a concept like F. Of course, a concept is not the sort of thing one categorically needs, as one needs air or sleep.20 Conceptual needs, as we may call these needs that are specifically needs for certain concepts, are instrumental needs: insofar as a concept is needed, it will be as a means of realizing or satisfying one’s concerns. One’s conceptual needs will therefore be a function of one’s concerns, which is to say of what one cares about. But they are not simply a function of one’s concerns. They also depend on the limited capacities with which one pursues these concerns, and on the circumstances in which one pursues them. Consequently, to identify who would need a concept like F, one has to envisage some concatenation of concerns, capacities, and circumstances that together render something like concept F needful. These conditions specify how the pursuit of a certain concern with certain limited capacities under certain circumstances would engender a need for something like concept F, 18. On Rousseau’s debunking of inequality, see Neuhouser (2012, 2014). On Nietzsche’s debunking of morality, see May (1999), Owen (2003, 2007, 2008), Janaway (2007), Katsafanas (2011), and Richardson (2020). On Foucault’s debunking of morality, see Lichtenstein (2022) and Lorenzini (2020, 2022). 19. For a reading of Nietzsche’s method as a form of ethical rather than epistemological debunking that fits the profile I go on to sketch here, see Queloz (2023b). For other readings that also favour a broadly ethical rather than epistemological reading, see Leiter (2015), Owen (2007, 2008), Richardson (2020), and Reginster (2021). 20. On categorical needing, see Wiggins (2002: §6). 210 Matthieu Queloz because the deployment of F would meet the relevant need by having effects that would be conducive to the satisfaction of the concern under these conditions. Consider, for example, the concept of causation. As interventionists such as James Woodward (2003: 11) argue, we need it because (a) we are concerned to manipulate the world to our advantage; (b) we have the capacity to actively intervene in the world in order to manipulate it; and (c) we inhabit a world that lends itself to causal reasoning. Were any of these concerns, capacities, and circumstances sufficiently different, we would have no need for the concept of causation: were we intelligent trees capable only of passive observation, but not of active intervention of the world, for example, the concept of causation would be pointless for us.21 This illustrates the more general insight that a given concept only has a point, i.e., meets a need, if certain background presuppositions are fulfilled: users of the concept must pursue certain concerns, have certain capacities, and their circumstances must be propitious to satisfying these concerns using this concept. These are the conditions engendering an instrumental need for the concept in the first place. Let us say that when a philosophical genealogy highlights such a need-engendering concatenation of concerns, capacities, and circumstances, it purports to identify the need matrix out of which the concept grows.22 A genealogical explanation can help one identify such a need matrix. By going back to a simple or hypothetically simplified situation of origin in which the concept in question is lacking and considering what might have driven someone to introduce it, one can hypothesize what the instrumental need might be that the concept most basically answers to, and what concatenation of concerns, capacities, and circumstances engenders that need. In the light of such a need matrix, certain effects will be highlighted as the significant effects that give the concept its most basic point. Frank Ramsey’s approach to the concept of probability offers an example.23 He thought that John Maynard Keynes had only made the concept of probability more mysterious by treating it as an impression left in our minds by objective relations 21. The example is Dummett’s (1964). 22. Elsewhere (Queloz 2024), I make a further distinction between needfulness conditions and need matrices, which stand to each other as target systems stand to models of them: the totality of a concept’s needfulness conditions is the unwieldy array of conditions that engender instrumental needs for the concept; a need matrix, by contrast, is a simplified, but philosophically more perspicuous and fruitful model of these conditions. But I ignore this distinction here. 23. My presentation of Ramsey’s argument draws liberally on Misak’s (2020: 112–115) wonderfully colourful discussion of it. Debunking Concepts 211 between propositions. Ramsey disarmingly admitted that he did not perceive such relations, and suspected others didn’t either.24 The way to demystify the concept, Ramsey suggested, was to relate it to some of the most basic needs of thinking subjects rather than to objective relations. The concept of probability was less like an after-image impressed upon our minds by an antecedent object, and more like a technique we had developed to navigate the world more successfully. Were we omniscient, we would fully believe what is true and entirely disbelieve what is false. But human minds being mired in uncertainty, there are many things that we only believe to some degree. One may be fairly confident that this is the hiking path one planned to follow, but one’s confidence in that belief may wax and wane along the way, rendering one correspondingly more or less disposed to confer with others on the matter. Being concerned to navigate the world successfully despite one’s limited capacity to form true beliefs under circumstances of uncertainty, one thus has an instrumental need for a concept that will allow one to quantify and articulate the degrees of belief guiding one’s actions. This is the need matrix out of which the concept of probability grows. It may subsequently have been elaborated and repurposed, but its most basic point, Ramsey’s quasi-genealogical reflection suggests, is to help one get one’s degrees of belief right by allowing one to calibrate one’s degrees of belief against those of others. Connecting a concept to a need matrix thus puts us in a position to demystify and make better sense of it. But the key thing for genealogical debunking is that it also puts us in a position to evaluate a concept, and to do so in ethical rather than epistemological or metaphysical terms. In particular, connecting a concept to a need matrix opens up three dimensions of evaluation. First, to what extent are the conditions that engender a need for the concept conditions that we now share? Do we share the relevant concern, limited capacities, and circumstances? The thought here is that grasping who needs a concept puts us in a position to assess how it relates to our own concerns, capacities, and circumstances. Insofar as one shares the conditions that render the concept needful, one has reason to use it, because the presence of these conditions gives point to the concept. Insofar as one fails to share those conditions, however, one lacks reason to use it, because the concept is to that extent pointless. This is the first dimension of evaluation, encapsulated by the question: do we need this concept? A congenial example of evaluation along this first dimension is offered by Francesco Testini (2021, 2022) when he lays out how a genealogy of the concept honour might debunk the concept for us today. Who might need 24. See Ramsey (1990). 212 Matthieu Queloz such a concept? Some social scientists hypothesize that the need matrix out of which it grew was characterized, very roughly, by the following three features: individuals were concerned to hold on to their property; their capacity to prevent theft was severely limited, especially when it came to divisible and portable property such as cattle; and centralized institutions enforcing property rights were weak or lacking.25 Together, these conditions would have engendered a need for a concept that compensated for the lack of a centralized enforcer with a more diffuse deterrent. The concept of honour might conceivably have helped to fill this need, since it enables one to project a willingness to treat even a comparatively small theft as a serious offence calling for retaliation in the name of honour, even when the costs of retaliating exceed the value of the stolen good. By creating such an honour culture, people send discouraging signals to potential thieves, thereby going some way towards compensating for the lack of a centralized deterrent. This need matrix can be used to assess the value of the concept for us today. Insofar as we fail to share one or several of the three central planks of the need matrix, we will lack reason to think in terms of the concept honour. The concept will be pointless for us to that extent (which of course does not preclude its being made pointful by other factors). In grasping what made the concept helpful under certain conditions, we at the same time come to grasp that for us, it is to that extent no longer helpful.26 Genealogy ethically debunks the concept by revealing that we lack reasons to use anything like it. It may still facilitate true and justified judgements. But it does not help us to live. The second dimension of evaluation opens up once we ask whether the concept serves its point as well as it could. It might be that a concept we need fails to be as well-tailored to our conceptual needs as it could be. Indeed, it might to some extent even frustrate as well as further our concerns. When Quentin Skinner (1998, 2019) inquires into the genealogy of the concept of liberty, for example, it emerges not only that we need something like the concept of liberty, but that the particular conception which came to predominate in our own time, the conception of liberty as non-interference, serves us less well than the older conception of liberty as non-domination would, so that we have reason to revive the older conception and tailor it to the modern world.27 Genealogy then debunks not the concept, but a particular conception, by showing that we have reason to use another conception instead. 25. See especially Nisbett and Cohen (1996) and Shackelford (2005). This is not to deny that the concept might also meet other conceptual needs. Appiah (2010) describes its role as an engine of moral reform, for instance. 26. This type of evaluation is related to what Sauer (2018: 34) calls “obsoleteness debunking.” 27. Skinner draws on Pettit (1997, 2012, 2014), who advocates a conception of liberty as Debunking Concepts 213 The third dimension of evaluation opens up, finally, once we add the idea that one might not just fail to share the concern to which a genealogy traces a concept, but object to the concern. One might be not merely indifferent, but actively opposed to the pursuit of the concern in question. It is here that we can locate cases of conceptual oppression, where the powerful use a concept primarily to serve their concern to oppress the less powerful.28 When a genealogy uncovers this kind of pedigree in a concept, it still presents the concept as needful, but as needful for those concerned to oppress the less powerful—a realization that should ethically debunk the concept in the eyes of the less powerful. Although the realization that a concept serves a certain concern is vindicatory when the concern is one we identify with, that same realization can be incriminatory when the concern is one we are opposed to. Insofar as a genealogy reveals a concept to serve a concern one does not want to see served, it will to that extent give one reason not merely to abandon, but if possible to eradicate the concept. Here, a genealogical vindication in relation to the concept’s need matrix amounts, overall, to the ethical debunking of the concept due to the problematic nature of the concern involved. The cui-bono-question receives an unsettling answer. A significant advantage of this kind of ethical debunking by the lights of human concerns and conceptual needs is that it can do justice to the perspectival and political character of concept appraisal: it can enable me to see not merely that a certain concept is one which I have no reason to use, or even reason not to use; it can simultaneously enable me to understand that for others, who have different concerns and conceptual needs, it might actually be rational to use that concept. One person’s genealogical debunking can be another’s genealogical vindication. This is a complication which epistemological or metaphysical accounts of debunking find it harder to accommodate, since they are not obviously perspectival: they do not ask who has or lacks reason to use a concept; they simply ask whether, in light of its genealogy, a concept’s concomitant claims are true, or whether the concept carves at the joints. The answers to those questions are then supposed to be valid irrespective of perspective. As a result, a genealogy that debunks in an epistemological mode is led to present the processes of concept-formation as free of any kind of rationality, and more akin to coming under the pharmacological influence of pills. This, as we saw, is how Richard Joyce’s presents the genealogy of certain moral connon-domination in less historical and more normative terms. 28. On conceptual oppression in this Shklarian sense, see Queloz and Bieber (2022). This is also related to what Shields (2021, 2023) calls conceptual domination, where people seek to promulgate certain concepts primarily because these concepts promise to further their own material interests. 214 Matthieu Queloz cepts. By contrast, ethical debunking informed by the concerns and needs out of which concepts grew is better poised to recapture the rationality that animated those processes of concept-formation, just as it is better poised to make sense of situations in which the embrace of a concept by some and its rejection by others reflects not an epistemic error, but a political conflict. Despite these perspectival nuances, however, ethical debunking still issues firm and action-guiding verdicts on concepts. The concepts we absolutely want to be using, on this account, are the concepts that we have most reason to use, in view of our various reasons for and against using certain concepts rather than others. And the concepts that have been ethically debunked by genealogical reflection will be dead for us, however rational it may be for others to continue to use them. 4. DEBUNKING CONCEPTS WITHOUT DEBUNKING CLAIMS It thus emerges that while there is some overlap between the debunking of concepts and the debunking of claims, notably when concepts are debunked by debunking existence claims, these are in fact special cases, and there are also cases where the debunking of concepts and the debunking of claims come apart. It is not generally true that, as Joyce asserts, “[a] belief is undermined if one of the concepts figuring in it is undermined” (2006: 181). It is true just in case (1) the belief is a positive belief that implicitly commits one to the existence of F; and (2) the concept F is in fact vulnerable to being epistemologically undermined or debunked by reasons to doubt the existence of F. For, as we saw, giving one reason to doubt the existence of F is not always enough to epistemologically debunk the concept F, since the concept F may be widely understood to be a fiction, and to be none the worse for it. In such a case, the concept will not in fact be vulnerable to being epistemologically undermined or debunked by reasons to doubt the existence of F. And, as we also saw, there are ways of undermining or debunking a concept without epistemologically undermining or debunking it. If it is vulnerable to the style of ethical debunking I have sketched, the concept might be debunked by dint of its effects—in particular, by dint of the conceptual needs it meets and the concerns it thereby serves. Such ethical debunking of the concept does nothing to epistemologically undermine the positive beliefs involving the concept. If anything, it ethically undermines the beliefs, indicating moral or political reasons not to hold these beliefs by indicating reasons not to think in those terms at all. Once one appreciates the range of considerations that can inform the ethical debunking of concepts, it becomes evident that it bursts the bounds Debunking Concepts 215 set by the epistemological understanding of the debunking of beliefs. Concepts can be ethically debunked without epistemologically debunking any of their concomitant claims. My beliefs involving some concept F are not necessarily made to appear more likely to be false or unjustified by the realization that the concept meets conceptual needs I do not want to see met. Indeed, I may even continue to regard these beliefs as amounting to a form of knowledge—just not a form of knowledge I want to possess. Consider, by way of example, a young woman who comes to question the authority of the concept of chastity over her life. Reflecting on the genealogy of the concept, she comes to lose confidence in the explanations of its origins that trace it to divine commands, and comes to suspect instead that it now mainly answers to the conceptual needs of men concerned to restrain women’s sexual behaviour.29 This realization is likely to shatter the confidence with which she previously relied on the concept in her judgements and conduct: insofar as the concept serves the concerns of a group she is not part of at her expense, she now sees, she has reason not to think in these terms. And if no countervailing reason has sufficient force with her, this will lead her to move away from the concept—only gradually, perhaps, as the concept’s grip on her emotions is likely to require time to loosen, and doubt or guilt may intermittently resurface. Eventually, however, the concept may completely lose its sway over her life. Note how different this is from epistemological debunking. She does not necessarily come to consider false what she used consider true: claims about whether a certain behaviour or person is chaste will continue to be as true or false as they were before she engaged in ethical debunking. Nor does she come to think that claims involving the concept of chastity are now less justified than before. The reasons that the concept adverts to have not changed, and claims to the effect that some person is or is not chaste will be as justified as hitherto. What changes, rather, is that she ceases to think in these terms in her own practical deliberation. She is no longer disposed to structure and evaluate her affairs in terms of the concept of chastity. As a result, she is no longer rationally and emotionally responsive to the reasons that this concept adverts to. But the epistemic standing of the claims articulated in terms of the concept of chastity remains untouched by this. Those claims are as true and justified as they ever were. It is merely that the distinctive way in which 29. For a critique of the concept of chastity along these lines, see Smith’s (2013: 103–104) explication of an argument in Williams (1995: 37–38). Again, there may be other, non-genealogical ways to reach and support this type of insight—see Queloz (2019). But a genealogical approach is particularly, if not uniquely, well-suited to the task, for reasons laid out in Queloz (2021b, ch. 3) and Cueni and Queloz (2022). 216 Matthieu Queloz the concept operative in these claims links certain patterns of behaviour to certain evaluative conclusions now seems to her objectionable, on grounds that are ethical rather than epistemological: they are ethical grounds in the broad sense encompassing both moral and political considerations concerning how to live, and whether the use of a certain concept helps or hinders one in doing so. She can even grant that those who continue to articulate their practical deliberation in terms of chastity can form beliefs that rise to the level of knowledge. After all, the claims in question are granted to be, in good part, true and justified, and there is nothing in the example to suggest that the process by which people form beliefs concerning whether a given person is chaste might be an unsafe process, for instance. On the contrary—that particular concept’s coercive power derives notably from the fact that its applicability is relatively easy to determine, and correspondingly hard to dispute. She can thus still accept that there is knowledge to be had under this concept. But it is a form of knowledge she no longer wants anything to do with.30 5. CONCLUSION There are thus three different types of demands on human thought that genealogical debunking might present some way of thinking as flouting: the epistemological demand that our thinking should be true and justified; the metaphysical demand that it should carve at the joints; and the ethical demand that it should help us to live. There is a constant temptation in philosophy to privilege one of these perspectives at the expense of the others, or to overgeneralize one perspective by inferring, from its paradigmatic applicability to some concepts, that it should yield the primary standard for other concepts as well. In truth, a balanced approach must consider all three perspectives, and assess their relative weighting on a case-by-case basis, with an eye to what the interests are that animate a given project of genealogical debunking in the first place. If any of these three perspectives is prior to the others, however, it is the ethical perspective, because the other two can be subsumed under it. The pursuit of truth and the aspiration to carve at the joints themselves reflect two among the many concerns on the basis of which the ethical perspective proposes to appraise concepts. As Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Bernard Williams, Steven Shapin, Huw Price, and Philip Pettit remind us, the human obsession with truth itself has a history, and genealogical expla30. I elaborate on this line of argument, which is informed by the work of Williams (2011: 163–164) and Moore (1997, 2006), in Queloz (2024). Debunking Concepts 217 nations can be given of why we came to place such great value on it.31 The same goes for the aspiration to make the structure of thought mirror the structure of things. In considering whether and how concepts help us to live, the ethical perspective can acknowledge that among the things we now certainly want our concepts to do is to help us get at the truth and the structure of the world. But these are by no means the only things we want from our concepts—and hence not the only respects in which they might, in a suitably broad sense of the term, be debunked.32 References Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2010. The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen. New York: W. W. Norton. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2017. As If: Idealization and Ideals. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674982178 Austin, Michael. 2010. Useful Fictions: Evolution, Anxiety, and the Origins of Literature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1dfnsfj Beaver, David I., Bart Geurts, and Kristie Denlinger. 2021. “Presupposition,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta. Spring 2021 ed. 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