Needs of the Mind: How Aptic Normativity Can Guide Conceptual Adaptation
Publisher DOI
Abstract
How to appraise concepts? Against approaches focusing either on the goals of concept-users or on the functions of concepts, I advocate focusing on what concepts we now need. After diagnosing the historical ambivalence of “need” between subjective want and objective exigency, I characterise conceptual needs as possessing a distinctively aptic normativity – a normativity of fittingness. They signal a cognitive privation that marks a mismatch between our conceptual repertoire and our situation, reorienting conceptual engineering from detached amelioration to situated adaptation. To render this aptic normativity tractable, I introduce the analytic device of “need matrices.” As illustrated using the concept of privacy, need matrices and the “need vectors” they generate provide blueprints for fitting concepts by modelling needs as arising at the intersection of concerns, capacities, and circumstances. Unlike function-first approaches, the need-first approach is inherently prospective rather than retrospective; unlike goal-first approaches, it acknowledges that concepts are answerable to pressures we face unwittingly and unwillingly. Starting from potentially unprecedented predicaments rather than established goals or functions makes this approach uniquely suited to guiding conceptual adaptation in times of social and technological upheaval.
Date Issued
2026
Publication Type
Article
Subject(s)
Subjects
Cognitive needs
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Normativity
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Fittingness
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Concepts
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Hermeneutical injustice
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Conceptual adaptation
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Conceptual ethics
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Conceptual engineering
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Privacy
Language(s)
en
Journal
Philosophical Studies
Publisher
Springer
ISSN
0031-8116
Access(Rights)
restricted