Diving for pearls: conceptual abandonment, conceptual engineering, and the limits of thought and language

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 engineering, it is almost always in principle possible to re-engineer – or, as I call it, ‘recover’ – a concept given a new relationship to our ends or the emergence of new ends. This tension between engineering and abandonment has been missed in contemporary and historical discussions. I give examples of recovery projects from philosophy, the sciences, and the arts. I conclude by considering two implications: first, that these arguments raise difficulties for categorizing a linguistic item or concept as nonsensical and, second, that our metaphilosophical posture requires a certain rethinking.