Do socially disruptive technologies really change our concepts or just our conceptions?

New technologies have the potential to severely challenge or disrupt not only our established social practices but our most fundamental concepts and distinctions like person versus object, nature versus artificial or being dead versus being alive. But does this disruption also change these concepts? Or does it merely change our oper-ationalizations and applications of the same concepts? In this paper, I argue that instead of focusing on individual conceptual change, philosophers of socially disruptive technologies (SDTs) should think about conceptual change as a change in a network of interrelated concepts. What really generates a potential social disruption are changes of inferential relations between concepts - whether or not this entails a change of the respective individual concepts. Philosophers of socially disruptive technologies are therefore in the privileged position of being able to avoid commitments regarding the individuation of individual concepts.

Automated summary

New technologies have the potential to disrupt established social practices and fundamental concepts, causing changes in the relationships between concepts. Philosophers should focus on understanding the change in networks of interrelated concepts rather than individual conceptual change.