Conceptual Hygiene Quotes

“In his review of Hacker's and Maxwell Bennett's 2003 book Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, Churchland argues that Hacker's and Bennett's criticisms of recent neurological theory:
do no more than highlight the independently obvious fact that the new theory violates some of the default conceptions of the average ten-year-old. But where is the crime in this? Why should we make those baseline expectations permanently critical for the meaningful use of the terms at issue? Were we permanently to cleave the standards of 'conceptual hygiene' thus imposed by [Bennett and Hacker], we would be doomed to only the most trivial of scientific advances. For our conceptual innovations would then be confined to what is currently taken, by the average ten-year-old, to define 'the bounds of sense.'
Churchland's charge is that Hacker and Bennett are simply imposing standards of conceptual hygiene that, if actually implemented, would hinder a sort of spontaneous linguistic imagination that is essential to scientific progress - and, I would add, to our everyday life with language as well.”
― Martin Gustafsson, The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics