Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Date of Degree
6-2025
Document Type
Doctoral Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Program
Philosophy
Advisor
Gary Ostertag
Committee Members
Michael Brownstein
Matt Lindauer
Eric Mandelbaum
Subject Categories
Other Philosophy | Philosophy of Language | Philosophy of Mind
Keywords
stereotypes, conceptual engineering, applied philosophy of language
Abstract
I offer an account of a novel variety of conceptual engineering, which I call stereotype engineering. Someone engineers a stereotype when they work to change the typicality effects associated with a category or expression (performance on goodness-of-example tasks, feature listing tasks, and accuracy rates and response times in recognition and retrieval tasks), without necessarily changing the concept of that category or the semantic value of the expression. I offer a number of examples of stereotype engineering in popular discourse – from rape activism to expansive uses of “white supremacy” and “ethnic cleansing,” to the hashtags #BlackGirlMagic and #MyNYPD, to advocacy campaigns for pit bulls and Saudi Arabia. Abstracting from the examples and from psychological and philosophical work on stereotype dynamics, I offer a rough model of stereotype change, on which engineers can change stereotypes through manipulating the virtual and real environment, expert education, generating a perceived social consensus, various forms of counterspeech, and a type of phrasal innovation I call specification. I describe three representational defects, or properties of representational devices that prevent them from being used to form more apt or accurate attitudes or perform more apt or accurate speech acts, that stereotype engineers might target – distracting unrepresentativeness, mismatched valence, and unreliable inference. I describe some challenges to other forms of conceptual engineering – the implementation problem, the change of topic problem, concerns about concept creep, concerns that conceptual engineering is nothing more than theorizing, and concerns that conceptual engineering is a kind of prescriptivism. In most cases, I show either that these challenges don’t apply to stereotype engineering, or that stereotype engineering can be practiced in a way that mitigates against them. The remaining cases I leave as open questions. The heart of the positive case for stereotype engineering is that it is a more robust way of correcting for the representational defects described above than other forms of conceptual engineering. I argue for this by comparing stereotype engineering with the dominant model of conceptual engineering in philosophy, which I call conceptual engineering by proposed definition. I present some challenges to stereotype engineering in particular. I argue that some of these are either not, ultimately, cause for concern, or that they actually constitute reasons to pursue stereotype engineering of a sort. Other challenges provide some substantive constraints on when stereotype engineering is a good idea, which I call the reduction constraint, the presumptuousness constraint, and the overheating constraint. I conclude by sketching some open questions to be taken up in future research.
Recommended Citation
Olasov, Ian, "Stereotype Engineering" (2025). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6327
