Abstract
“Conceptual analysis” is a misnomer—it refers, but it does not refer to a method or practice that involves the analysis of concepts. Once this is recognized, many of the main arguments for skepticism about conceptual analysis can be answered, since many of these arguments falsely assume that conceptual analyses target concepts. The present paper defends conceptual analysis from skepticism about its viability and, positively, presents an argument for viewing conceptual analyses as targeting philosophical phenomena, not our concepts of these phenomena.
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Notes
Chief among proclaimed non-skeptics is Frank Jackson (1998), although, as will become clear as the paper proceeds, I do not defend conceptual analysis as Jackson understands it. (See Sect. 3.3 for more on the difference between Jacksonian analysis and conceptual analysis.) Another notable non-skeptic is Brian Weatherson (2003).
Skeptics include Stephen Stich (1988, 1992, 1996), Hilary Kornblith (1998, 2002, 2006, 2014, 2017) David Papineau (1993, 2009, 2014), Michael Devitt (1996, 2014), Michael Tye (1992), Stephen Laurence and Eric Margolis (1999, 2003), Mark Johnston and Sara-Jane Leslie (2012), William Ramsey (1992), Laura Schroeter (2004), Michael Huemer (2015), Andrew Melnyk (2008), Edouard Machery (2009, 2017) and Herman Cappelen (2012, 2018), as well as proponents of “negative program” experimental philosophy, as represented, e.g., by Weinberg et al. (2001) and Machery et al. (2004). This leaves out a large literature in psychology claiming to debunk philosophical conceptual analysis (e.g., Rosch and Mervis 1975), though several of the skeptics in this list are heavily influenced by this literature.
Some of the core examples of conceptual analysis involve using thought-experimental counterexamples against other examples of conceptual analysis. The so-called “method of cases”, as I understand it, is just more conceptual analysis. The method of cases involves testing philosophical theory, conceived as a product of conceptual analysis, against hypothetical cases, also conceived as products of conceptual analysis. If this is not perfectly clear at this stage, it should be once I present several examples of projects of conceptual analysis in Sect. 1.
This emphasis should be unnecessary, since “knowledge” refers to knowledge (itself), not the concept of knowledge. But a main theme of the present paper is that many questions characteristic of analytic philosophy, such as the question of what it is to know, are routinely misinterpreted to concern concepts.
An anonymous referee (this journal) pressed me to say something, as I have in the main text, about how I understand “philosophical phenomena”. Another negative characterization: I intend no contrast between philosophical phenomena and, for example, physical phenomena. Causation is both a physical phenomenon and a philosophical one, for instance. More generally, some of the many phenomena in which philosophers take an interest are straightforwardly physical phenomena.
Timothy Williamson’s (2007) argument for taking philosophical questions at “face value” is another example of this Kornblithian view of the subject matter of philosophy, though Williamson also expresses skepticism about conceptual analysis and the alleged “conceptual turn” in philosophy. Even Stephen Stich (1988, 1992), who is known for strongly skeptical views about analytic philosophy generally, and conceptual analysis especially, seems sympathetic to something like the Kornblithian view. Stich’s version of the Kornblithian view is criticized by Brian Weatherson (2003), who claims (mistakenly, I think) that Stich’s version verges on incoherence.
“Conceptual engineering” and “revisionist analysis” are different labels for roughly the same kind of intellectual activity: the attempt to answer the normative question of which concepts, philosophical and otherwise, we should be using, both in ordinary thought and talk, and in our theorizing. Its roots trace back at least to Carnap (1950) and Quine (1960). For a recent overview and defense of conceptual engineering/revisionism, especially as a method of philosophy, see Cappelen 2018. The essays collected in Haslanger 2012 are also a good starting place, both for understanding the aims of conceptual engineering, and for very interesting examples of revisionist analysis in action.
As an anonymous referee (this journal) points out, however, I will engage in what can be described as “terminological engineering”, since I think many philosophers are wrong about the reference of “conceptual analysis” and that they ought to correct this mistake. Doing so does not require adopting a new label (such as “conceptual analysis without concepts”) but it does require being cognizant, at least, of the misleadingness of “conceptual analysis”.
I have, in these brief descriptions of these projects, characterized them as attempts to analyze things like moral responsibility and causation. Does that stack the deck in favor of the view that they are not projects seeking to analyze concepts instead? I don’t think so, since characterizing the projects in this way is routine. Even methodologists who think that conceptual analysts analyze concepts would accept my descriptions as accurate. They would just insist that “an analysis of moral responsibility” for example, describes an analysis of the concept of moral responsibility.
I say “mostly” because there is also a historical piece of the story that connects current uses of “conceptual analysis” to earlier uses of it and related terms. I say more about this history later, in Sect. 3.2.
I am here contrasting Classicist, Prototype, and Theory-Theory accounts of concepts. Edouard Machery (2009) provides a useful recent review of these different theories of concepts. The theories conflict in the sense that they can’t all be true of some non-disjunctive notion of concept. Perhaps “concept pluralists”, such as Daniel Weiskopf (2009), would insist that there are simply different kinds of concepts, each characterized by the differing accounts of categorization offered by the differing theories. Concept pluralists might, on this basis, resist the inference to the No Theory Objection to conceptual analysis.
Including, e.g., William Ramsey (1992).
This contrast between philosophers’ and psychologists’ understanding of concepts is a theme of Machery (2009), Johnston and Leslie (2012), and Löhr (2018). For an argument that, even as an account of the mental representations that guide categorization, no extant psychological theory of concepts comes close to being correct, see Fodor (1998).
I should note here, however, that some proponents of revisionist philosophy think that much traditional philosophy, including traditional conceptual analysis, is already revisionist and fully normative in its aims and claims. Cappelen (2018) flirts with this idea and Richard (2020) endorses it outright.
I do not mean that conceptual engineers target concepts in particular or exclusively. Many, in fact, would probably follow Cappelen in describing their targets as “representational devices”, understood to include concepts, perhaps, but also linguistic terms and their meanings. I think that most of what I say here about the Revisionism/Engineering Objection applies, even when this nuance is taken into account. The concept-free conceptual analysis I am defending is also “respresentation-free”. That is, conceptual analysts, on my picture, target philosophical phenomena, not concepts, words, or linguistic meanings.
Related motivations for conceptual engineering can be found in Eklund (2015).
Cappelen (2018) claims that, ultimately, his Anti-Descriptive Argument, and his entire book on conceptual engineering, is not really about concepts at all, but instead about the intensions of terms. Naturally, I am sympathetic with the view that, like “conceptual analysis”, “conceptual engineering”, too, might be a misnomer. But suppose that concepts just are the intensions of terms, as some philosophers take them to be. Then, the Anti-Descriptive Argument, and Cappelen’s book as a whole, is about concepts after all.
I do not mean to mislead readers by switching from talk of the denotation of a concept to talk of the denotation of a term. Rather, I mean to be speaking somewhat loosely of the “representational devices” we employ in thinking and speaking of free action. (See note 19 for a related point.) My claim is that Richard equivocates on “determinately denotes”, regardless of whether it’s conceptual or linguistic denotation that is at issue.
See Cappelen 2013 for an argument to this effect.
Why not take “intuition-based philosophy” and similar labels to misnomerically refer to philosophical practices and projects that are not based on intuitions? Because, typically, the users of such labels intend something fairly specific by the term “intuition”. Intuitions are non-inferential judgments, or they are “seemings” or “presentations” of a special phenomenological kind. (See, e.g., Bengson 2015 and Chudnoff 2013.) By contrast, I suspect that the use of “conceptual analysis” is not typically accompanied by specific intentions concerning concepts and their role. “Conceptual analysis” is just a catch-all expression for that kind of philosophy instantiated by the diverse projects listed in Sect. 1. (Cappelen (2018) makes a similar claim about “conceptual engineering”.) Having said that, my view is that methodologists do quite often refer, in claims like “this [demonstrating some argumentative move] is an appeal to an intuition”, to things that are not appeals to intuitions.
A central insight of Brian Weatherson’s (2003) paper on philosophical counterexamples is that there can be good theoretical reasons to deny that apparent counterexamples are genuine, even when everyone strongly intuits that they are genuine. Weatherson goes so far as to argue that Gettier’s counterexamples to the JTB theory might be merely apparent. Although I disagree with him about Gettier’s cases, I could not agree more about the upshot for philosophical methodology, which I take to be that even the strongest, most widespread intuitions about cases can and should sometimes give way to a full analysis with which they conflict. Sally Haslanger (2006) can be read as making this key methodological point as well.
Here, and in my earlier discussion of the Bad Track-Record Objection, I assume that we can make sense of the idea of an analysis, or full analysis, of knowledge, freedom, etc. themselves, and that, relatedly, we can make sense of the idea that these phenomena might possess necessary and sufficient conditions on their instantiation or existence. Knowledge, for example, might be a complex phenomenon, having belief as a simpler part. If so, then knowledge can be described as partially analyzable in terms of belief. A way to understand a “full analysis” of a phenomenon, then, would be to understand it as a “breaking down” or “decomposition” of the phenomenon into its simpler parts. Thanks to an anonymous referee (this journal) for asking me to be clearer about my views about what might be involved in analyzing philosophical phenomena.
Penelope Maddy (2017) thus seems to me quite wide of the interpretive mark when introducing this very passage from Moore by writing that, “Moore and others had recently introduced a revolutionary new vision of philosophical method, the idea that a large part, if not all, of the philosopher’s job is the careful analysis of the content of concepts like ‘cause’, ‘freedom’, and in our case, ‘knowledge’” (60; my emphasis). On the contrary, Moore seems concerned to reject this vision of philosophy and replace it with a vision according to which the philosopher’s job is the careful analysis of causation, freedom, and knowledge themselves—the denotations, as Moore himself would put it, of our terms for these phenomena.
This terminology of “folk intuitions”, “folk platitudes”, “folk theories”, beliefs about “what counts” as an x, and “ordinary conceptions” is all taken from Jackson (1998). In saying that the projects from Sect. 1 do not begin by delineating folk theories of the philosophical phenomena the projects concern, I do not mean to suggest that there are distinct kinds of knowledge, freedom, etc.: the folk kinds versus the philosophical kinds. On the contrary, I simply assume that the philosophers and the folk are speaking of the same phenomena when they use terms such as “knowledge”, “freedom”, etc.
An earlier draft of this paper overlooked this understanding of conceptual analysis. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer (this journal) for reminding me of its relevance.
Boghossian (1997) is thus an important precursor to later, fuller developments of epistemic views of conceptual analysis. Balcerak-Jackson and Balcerak-Jackson (2012) develops and elaborates an epistemic view based on Boghossian’s ideas about epistemic analyticity, and defends epistemic analyticity against Williamson’s (2007) attack on the notion.
Could we choose to use “the Holy Roman Empire” to refer to something that is all of holy, Roman, and an empire? Perhaps so. But that would not make “the Holy Roman Empire was not an empire” false. It would just make it possible to pragmatically convey a falsehood by its means.
Nor need we replace “conceptual analysis” with the older and far less misleading label, “philosophical analysis”, despite what I say in note 30, above. An anonymous reviewer (this journal) finds this puzzling: Why not recommend this replacement, given my overall view? There are at least three reasons. First, it will not work. The use of “conceptual analysis” is entrenched and the label will continue to circulate long after the argument of this paper becomes (fingers crossed!) well known. Second, we typically do not replace misnomers simply because they are misnomers, and, if we did, that could potentially lead to more confusion, not less. For example, some hearers might mistakenly take me to be talking about a different war if I were to try to replace “the Thousand Days’ War” with a new, non-misnomeric label in my speech. Similar confusion could result from insisting on “philosophical analysis” over “conceptual analysis”. Third, the replacement would affect only future talk of the relevant philosophical methodology. But “conceptual analysis” has been in circulation for decades, and we need the correct interpretation of these past uses more than we need a new non-misnomeric label to apply in the future. All that said, I would of course be happy to see individual methodologists making the replacement, so long as they were careful to explain why they were doing so.
An anonymous reviewer (this journal) cites Kornblith (2002), Williamson (2007), and me (2015) as advocates of a “thoroughly material-mode method of philosophical investigation” and questions whether it is necessary to tack on a defense of conceptual analysis to the views of these methodologists, especially given that I agree that philosophy proceeds in a thoroughly material mode and does not take concepts or word meanings as its subject matter. As I say here, and as I elaborate in the next paragraph of the main text, I regard these earlier defenses – my own earlier defense included – of the “resolutely material-mode interpretation of philosophical practice”, as the reviewer also characterizes it, as crucially incomplete.
The anonymous reviewer I mentioned in the previous note also criticizes me for irrelevantly discussing “the pros and cons of conceptual analysis” in “its usual concept-involving understanding”. Why do that, she or he asks, if I regard that usual understanding as having few or no actual instances? But I do not take myself to have been discussing the pros and cons of the usual understanding of conceptual analysis, except to say that it has few or no actual instances and involves a serious misunderstanding of what conceptual analysis involves (a pretty big con). My discussion of pros and cons was intended as a discussion of the pros and cons of conceptual analysis, properly or correctly—even though usually wrongly—understood.
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Acknowledgements
A version of this paper was presented at the Diaphora Workshop on Philosophical Methodology at the University of Barcelona, March 2019. Thanks to the workshop’s organizers, Lisa Vogt and Matheus Valente, and to participants, including Edouard Machery, Esa Díaz-León, Boris Kment, Genoveva Martí, Jennifer Nagel, Manuel Gustavo Isaac, Fabrice Correia, Matthew Tugby, Erica Shuemer, Sven Rosenkranz and Anton Alexandrov, for excellent questions and discussion. Special thanks to Adriano Angelucci, who gave me extensive and extremely useful written comments on an earlier draft, and Herman Cappelen, who read an early draft and made several suggestions for improvements. The published version of the paper is the result of revisions made in light of criticisms from four different anonymous reviewers for Synthese. I thank them for the time and effort they put into their reviews.
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Deutsch, M. Conceptual analysis without concepts. Synthese 198, 11125–11157 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02775-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02775-0