Marchiori radicalises the familiar metaphor of concepts as tools by treating them as socio-technical artefacts embedded in practices, institutions and value regimes. This move displaces conceptual engineering from the isolated refinement of definitions toward the design, evaluation and maintenance of devices that afford action, constrain interpretation and generate unintended effects. Three consequences follow: concepts possess affordances beyond their intended functions; they are irreducibly value-laden; and their responsible construction requires systematic methods comparable to those developed in technology assessment and design ethics. The paper’s methodological force lies in importing operational vocabularies—affordance, side effect, stakeholder, implementation, maintenance—into a field often dominated by abstract functionalism. Concepts become neither inert mental contents nor infinitely malleable words, but designed cultural technologies whose consequences emerge through use. The broader bridge is to science and technology studies: conceptual life becomes legible as an ecology of material supports, institutional authority, situated uptake and recursive redesign.
