Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
open access
Conceptual Engineering is the practice of improving the concepts we use for a specific purpose. However, despite involving words and their meanings, this practice has not been looked at from the...Show moreConceptual Engineering is the practice of improving the concepts we use for a specific purpose. However, despite involving words and their meanings, this practice has not been looked at from the perspective of linguistics. This paper takes a small, niche scientific community, namely the Royal Society, and investigates to what extent Newton’s proposed distinction between mass and weight, which can be thought of as an instance of Conceptual Engineering, was consistently used in scientific journal articles between 1700 and 1920. Before Newton’s Principia, the lemma weight referred to both the amount of matter that makes up an object and the force of gravity acting on the matter. In 1687, Newton proposed that the former concept should be referred to as mass, and the latter as weight. Success, for this project, is differentiation based on sense and not on any other extra-linguistic factors. To discover whether the project was successful, 1500 tokens of mass and weight from the Royal Society Corpus were annotated for their lemma, ‘sense’, ‘object’, ‘subfield’, ‘author’, ‘year’, ‘type’, ‘plurality’, and part-of-speech. This data was analysed by looking at the frequencies of the respective senses over time, along with Ctrees and Random Forests to identify annotations that were the most important in predicting the lemma, and Principal Component Analysis to visually inspect clustering and patterns over time. The results showed that sense was not an effective predictor of the lemma, but that the extra-linguistic factors of ‘object’, ‘author’ and ‘subfield’ had great predictive power. Furthermore, the Principal Component Analysis confirmed clustering based on ‘object’, ‘author’ and ‘subfield’ rather than based on ‘sense’. It was concluded that Newton’s Conceptual Engineering of mass and weight was unsuccessful. From the perspective of Conceptual Engineering more generally, this work showed future research on more diverse communities with less coherent language ideologies is necessary when investigating cases of Conceptual Engineering, and also that linguists can be important contributors to Conceptual Engineering research in the future.Show less
