Conceptual Adaptation as Epistemic Niche Construction

One of the claims advanced in scholarship on technology-induced conceptual disruption is that conceptual engineering should not be understood in terms of detached amelioration, but rather in terms of situated adaptation (Hopster and Löhr 2023). Matthieu Queloz (2026) has recently picked up on this claim and presented a ‘needs-first’ approach to conceptual adaptation, as an alternative to a ‘goals-first’ or ‘function-first’ approach. In this presentation I use Queloz’ argumentation as a stepping stone to outline a general theory of conceptual adaptation and discuss to what extent this theory is compatible with Queloz’ needs-based account. I focus on two claims. First, the core examples of Queloz’ discussion are outdated conceptions of privacy which call for conceptual adaptation. This might be understood as a specific type of conceptual misalignment in the form of conceptual inertia, which occurs when socio-technical environments generate new conceptual needs, but existing schemes fail to adapt. However, a second type of misalignment can be distinguished – let’s call it conceptual backsliding – which occurs when new conceptual changes compromise pre-existent conceptual needs. I argue that the latter type also merits attention, especially given the conceptual agency of Big Tech, which may be strucutrally misaligned with our conceptual needs. Second, I claim that conceptual adaptation is best understood as a process of ‘epistemic niche construction’: just like organisms construct ecological niches, humans construct socio-epistemic niches, which influence the selection pressures operating on our concepts. Against this background, I argue that Queloz’ needs-first approach constitutes a plausible normative proposal for directed conceptual adaptation, but that a theory of conceptual change with explanatory ambitions had better be anchored in a function-first approach, which allows for the possibility that conceptual changes are adaptive, yet normatively problematic.