Legal discourse evolves – old concepts die out (“trial by ordeal”), new ones are born (“genocide”); legal concepts also change their scope or referents (“torture” or “the right to privacy”). This evolution is perfectly natural, as it mirrors changes in the world or our knowledge about it. Sometimes, however, a new way of understanding a legal concept is introduced into the discourse for rather spurious reasons and improper purposes. Propagandists, ideologues, and politicians all have a vested interest in manipulating legal concepts. Such concepts are commonly manipulated, and even outright abused, in times of populism: there are plenty of historical and fictional accounts of language being misused to further populist and/or authoritarian ends. Orwellian “newspeak” and Klemperer’s “lingua tertii imperii” are some of the best-known examples of this phenomenon. If our concepts are hollowed out and replaced with ones that serve the interests of populist or authoritarian rulers, then language can be deprived of its ability to make the world better and our vision of it clearer.
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During this workshop we aim to analyse how conceptual changes occur in legal discourse; we also plan to discuss whether one could determine what distinguishes a justified (“proper”) change in our use of concepts from an artificial, unjustified, and propagandistic (“improper”) change imposed on the users.
It is usually assumed that language is characterized by a certain stability, but that this stability does not preclude conceptual change. The very notion of conceptual change can be understood subjectively (as a description of the process involved in learning) or objectively (as changes in the conceptuality inherent in a given field of knowledge). Such a change may generally involve adding a new meaning, or modifying (extending/narrowing) or deleting an existing one. The problem of conceptual change of law can be seen from numerous perspectives as offered by: philosophy of law, philosophy of language (including conceptual engineering), social ontology, sociology, cognitive science and linguistics.

We invite submissions from scholars interested in the problem of conceptual change/conceptual manipulation in legal discourse. Abstracts (ca. 300 words) should be sent to p.banas@uw.edu.pl (title: “SW: conceptual change”) by 12th May 2024. We will notify all authors no later than 15st May 2024 whether or not they were accepted to present their work during this Special Workshop. We do not require full papers and prefer to discuss “work-in-progress”.
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This Special Workshop is organized as a part of a research project (no. 2022/47/B/HS5/02073) funded by the National Science Centre of Poland.