Topic Preservation and Relevance

This essay defends conceptual engineering from the "topic preservation" objection, the worry that conceptual engineering proposals change the topic and thus do not answer existing philosophical questions. I argue that proposals made by conceptual engineers are often relevant to existing philosophical questions posed using existing concepts, since the proposed concepts share the old concepts' features of interest in context. I then argue that various accounts of "topic preservation" in the literature are implausible as general constraints on conceptual proposals, and that the initial plausibility of the topic preservation objection is due to a hasty inference from topic change to irrelevance. Since conceptual proposals can be relevant, the topic preservation objection fails as a general objection to conceptual engineering.