Changing concepts, understood as social constructs and facets of linguistic expressions, and likewise the mechanisms of change and the dynamicity of their contents, cannot be adequately analysed without a holistic perspective of a language system on the one hand, and a multi-layered perspective of conversational interaction on the other. I take on board a case study of the concept humanism, in particular in its relation to speciesism, to argue for such a broad perspective when discussing concept revision, including its deliberate and automatic aspects. Section 1 sets out the scene and the objectives, emphasising the importance of metapragmatic concerns. In Sect. 2, I briefly introduce some relevant terms and debates surrounding concepts, lexemes, and their dynamicity. Section 3 moves to the question of the foundations of meaning and points out the importance of addressing it in the context of these debates. Section 4 contains the case study of the concept humanism and the insights it offers for carving out the boundaries of inquiry into the life of a concept, focusing on the importance of broadly understood propositional content and the non-propositional overlay as they are dynamically constructed in discourse—and, as such, on the importance of metapragmatic concerns. Section 5 concludes and reiterates my plea against carving out fields of inquiry based on narrowly understood pursuits.
