When Philosophers Reinvent The Wheel

You may not believe this, but philosophers sometimes work in ignorance of research programs, bodies of literature, methodologies, and findings outside of philosophy that could be relevant to their work. In a post at his blog, Ethan Landes (Eindhoven) shares how he recently discovered that the relatively young philosophical subfield of conceptual engineering, to which he contributes, appears to have reinvented a wheel produced 50 years ago by scholars in the field of sociolinguistics. Neat find. But ouch. He writes: There is an entire literature that discusses things at a level that I (we?) all thought was unique to conceptual engineering. An entire literature the conceptual engineering literature could have drawn on for ideas and knowledge. But no one looked carefully, so we have a decade of literature of us forging our own paths. It reminds me of the time I spent an hour fighting my way up an English hill through thick, knee-high heather, only to discover at the top that [there] had…