Uri
Brun

This paper builds on Stanley Cavell’s interpretation of Wittgenstein to develop an account of what I call “moral projection”: the everyday activity of creatively adapting and extending ethical concepts to new and unpredictable situations. Such projection consists neither in rare, dramatic ruptures nor in the introduction of radically new concepts, but in the ongoing labour of revising and reworking the concepts we already possess. It is a pervasive feature of moral experience, central to how we navigate complex and shifting situations – and therefore inseparable from the task of leading a moral life. Drawing on recent accounts of moral inquiry as hermeneutical, and more broadly on inquiry that aims at understanding, I argue that projecting ethical concepts onto new cases is itself a form of hermeneutical inquiry. This inquiry involves a twofold movement: making sense of new moral situations by bringing a familiar concept to bear on them, and interpreting that concept by exploring and renegotiating its criteria of application. We use the concept to bring the world more clearly into view and, in doing so, deepen the evaluative perspective within which the concept finds its point.

Contemporary debates on conceptual engineering treat the “implementation problem” as central: the difficulty engineers face in bringing about the conceptual change they endorse. This paper challenges the dominant framing of that problem by offering an alternative perspective on deliberate conceptual innovation. Rather than addressing the problem directly, I argue that it rests on a particular picture of conceptual innovation and its relationship to ordinary conceptual life. This picture makes the problem appear pressing by generating two gaps that implementation must overcome: between conceptual innovation and ordinary practice, and between the authority to prescribe meanings and the power to secure compliance. In this picture, engineers evaluate, design, and prescribe meanings independently of everyday practice, and only then confront the task of implementation.

Against this picture, I turn to Stanley Cavell’s vision of language, centred on his notions of projection – our ordinary capacity to carry words into new contexts – and attunement – the fragile, ongoing agreement in forms of life that makes such extensions intelligible. By situating conceptual change within ordinary practice, Cavell’s perspective dissolves the gaps that give the implementation problem its apparent urgency. Projection reveals innovation as continuous with our ordinary ways of going on together with concepts, while attunement reframes the lack of control over uptake as the inherent ethical condition of sharing language. From this perspective, implementation is not a technical problem of enforcing compliance with fixed meanings, but the collaborative, ethical work of finding ways of going on with concepts within shared forms of life.

Hans Sluga argues that Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance is “systematically ambiguous”, because it conflates two kinds of concepts: cluster concepts, unified by overlapping resemblances, and kinship-based concepts, grounded in causal and historical relations. By treating these as the same, Sluga suggests, Wittgenstein reveals a deeper limitation of his thought: his failure to reckon fully with the historical dimension of human existence. This paper challenges that diagnosis. What Sluga takes to be a problem – the interweaving of resemblance and kinship – is in fact what makes the notion philosophically productive. I develop the claim in three steps. First, I question the distinction between “cluster” and “kinship” concepts, arguing that even a supposedly paradigmatic “cluster” concept like “game” cannot be unified by purely synchronic relations of similarity. Second, I argue that Wittgenstein draws on our ordinary notion of family resemblance, which resists any sharp separation between synchronic and diachronic relations. Third, I suggest that this interdependence is integral to Wittgenstein’s use of family resemblance as a model of conceptual unity over time, rather than a synchronic account of conceptual structure at a given moment. This emerges in PI §67, where Wittgenstein introduces a temporal dimension in discussing how the extension of “number” develops. Taken together, these considerations direct us towards a genealogical reading of family resemblance, in which the unity of a concept consists in evolving patterns of resemblance internally shaped by historically developed practices.