Abstract
Conceptual analysis as traditionally understood can be improved by allowing the use of a certain kind of empirical investigation. The conceptual analysis in which the kind of empirical investigation in question is used can be called “empirical conceptual analysis”. In the present inquiry, I provide a systematic exposition of empirical conceptual analysis, so understood, considering what exactly empirical conceptual analysis is, the different kinds of empirical conceptual analysis, and the main application of the method within philosophy. It can be defined as a method that consists in drawing a conclusion about the semantic application conditions of a predicate on the basis of observation of the manifestations of semantic intuitions. The different kinds of empirical conceptual analysis are distinguished according to the way the manifestations of semantic intuitions are observed. The main application of the method is solving conceptual disputes – situations in which different competent speakers of a language disagree about the semantic application conditions of a predicate from that language, and their disagreement is caused by the fact that they have different semantic intuitions about that predicate.
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Notes
An extensive debate about the analysis of the concept of knowledge was sparked by Gettier (1963), who described two possible cases that can be used as counterexamples to the “traditional” definition of knowledge, according to which knowledge is justified true belief. This debate is often given as an example of the way conceptual analysis can be used in philosophy.
If the term “conceptual analysis” is considered in the meaning it has in everyday discourse, it just means “analysis of concepts”. However, in analytic philosophy it also has a technical meaning, introduced by Grice (1958), in which conceptual analysis is not every analysis of concepts, but a special kind of analysis of concepts, which is closely related to, though not the same as linguistic analysis. In the present paper, I consider the term in this technical meaning. Conceptual analysis in the technical meaning considers concepts from the viewpoint of the definitional theory of concepts. Thus, I will not take into account approaches that investigate concepts from the viewpoint of other theories, such as the prototype theory, exemplar theory, or theory-theory.
The term “semantic application” was introduced in Valchev (2018), but philosophers had long before that considered the distinction between application based on meaning, and application based on pragmatic considerations. It might be said that the whole of Grice’s “Logic and Conversation” (1989) is concentrated on this distinction. More recently, the distinction was a subject of philosophical investigation, for example, in Glock (2011).
I have argued elsewhere that in order for a given change in the traditional concept of conceptual analysis to constitute an improvement of this concept, it is necessary and sufficient that it satisfies two conditions: 1) Utility Condition – the new concept of conceptual analysis has more potential for solving philosophical problems or defending philosophical theses than the old one; 2) Proximity Condition – a possible world where the expression “conceptual analysis” expresses only the old concept is near in relation to this expression a possible world where the expression expresses only the new concept (Valchev, 2018). I have also argued that the two changes listed here satisfy both the utility, and the proximity condition (Valchev, 2018).
Note that I am not using “armchair conceptual analysis” as a synonym of “traditional conceptual analysis”. Traditional conceptual analysis is improved by adopting the two changes, and this improved version is then divided into armchair conceptual analysis, and empirical conceptual analysis. The terms “armchair” and “empirical” will be further clarified in what follows.
Some authors believe that semantic internalism is false, and thus advocate “semantic externalism”. Semantic externalism has its roots in the writings of Kripke and Putnam (Kripke, 1980; Putnam, 1975), who argued against the theories of meaning that were popular amongst analytic philosophers at that time – most prominently, the “descriptivist” theories, put forward by Frege and Russell (see Frege, 1982; Russell, 1905). Generally speaking, semantic externalists believe that an object falls under a concept that a predicate expresses, if and only if it is of the same kind as the object that the predicate was first used to refer to. If this is true, then in order to investigate the meaning of a predicate, one needs to investigate the object that the predicate was first used to refer to. As far as this would be an investigation into linguistic meaning, it might, in a sense, be said to be a kind of “linguistic analysis”, but it would not be “conceptual analysis” as defined here. Thus, conceptual analysis can be criticized from the viewpoint of semantic externalism, and such a criticism is indeed raised – for example, by Haslanger (2012, 304). The usual response by the proponents of conceptual analysis is adopting epistemic two-dimensionalism (for a detailed exposition of the relationship between conceptual analysis, and epistemic two-dimensionalism see Kipper, 2012). It is worth noting that many proponents of semantic externalism would actually agree that the practice I refer to when using the term ‘conceptual analysis’ has a place in philosophy, but would disagree with the way this practice is described or conceptualized here. Thus, Williamson agrees that the debate in epistemology that was sparked by Gettier (1963) is philosophically significant, but does not agree that the participants in this debate aim to reach the correct analysis of the concept of knowledge, or that we apply the predicate “knows” on the basis of intuitions. (Williamson, 2007, Chapter 6). In his view, the method used in the debate in question is “deduction”. A similar position is also held by Cappelen (2012, Chapter 10). I will not discuss these metaphilosophical questions in detail, but I will make a brief comment about the burden of proof. Cappelen suggests that Williamson’s critique of conceptual truth, and accordingly, of conceptual analysis is widely accepted amongst philosophers, and thus the burden of proof lies on the shoulders of the proponents of conceptual analysis (Cappelen, 2012, 211). The results from a metaphilosophical survey conducted by Bourget and Chalmers amongst professional philosophers (Bourget & Chalmers, 2014), however, make this suggestion seem highly dubious, since nearly 65% of the participants in the study gave a positive answer to the question “Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no?”, whereas only 27% answered in the negative. It can be assumed that the acceptance of this distinction is positively correlated with acceptance of the existence of analytic statements, and the concept of an analytic statement is roughly the same as that of a conceptual truth.
I ascribe to the expression “purely mental process” a philosophically specific meaning, in which, a purely mental process is a process that does not involve usage of the senses. The concept of a purely mental process is similar to that of an a priori process, but the two differ with respect to memory. Reasoning on the basis of recollections of past experience does not involve usage of the senses, and is therefore a purely mental process, but it is not an a priori process. If a philosopher of biology is investigating the concept of organism by reading relevant empirical literature, the investigation is not a purely mental process, because reading involves usage of the eyes, but if the philosopher is reasoning on the basis of recollections of what they have previously read, no senses are involved, and therefore the conducted investigation is a purely mental process – though an empirically informed one. When working on a paper or a book, philosophers usually read some relevant literature, and therefore the work that goes into writing a philosophical paper or book usually contains a part that does not consist in a purely mental process. However, in most cases there is also a part that does consist in such a process. It must also be noted that if an empirical investigation is defined as an investigation that is not done from the armchair, and an armchair investigation is defined as a purely mental process, then the resulting concept of empirical investigation, and accordingly, the concept of empirical conceptual analysis are rather broad. Towards the end of the present section I introduce the narrower concept of “scientific conceptual analysis”.
Such cognitive biases have been identified, and ways of avoiding them have been suggested – see, for example, Wright (2010).
It can be noted that someone may investigate their own semantic intuitions by observing their manifestations. For example, I might have been using the predicate “intuition” unreflectingly up to now, that is, without being aware of what my semantic intuitions about it are, and I might investigate these intuitions by looking at the instances in which I have used the predicate in my writings. Thus, if a philosopher is conducting conceptual analysis by investigating their own semantic intuitions, the investigation is not necessarily from the armchair, and therefore armchair conceptual analysis is not the same as conceptual analysis that takes into account only the philosopher’s own semantic intuitions.
In the beginning, I said that empirical conceptual analysis was an improved version of traditional conceptual analysis that incorporates a certain kind of empirical investigation. The kind of empirical investigation in question can be defined as consisting in observing the manifestations of semantic intuitions, i.e. the type of linguistic behavior and the type of brain activity that I delimited above.
I prefer the term “empirical” instead of “experimental” for two reasons. First, some of the ways to observe the manifestations of semantic intuitions can’t properly be called “experiments”. Second, there are thought experiments and “conducting” such an experiment is something done from the armchair.
The distinction Sytsma and Livengood make between a positive, and a negative program is loosely equivalent to the distinction Nadelhoffer and Nahmias (2007) make between “experimental analysis”, and “experimental restrictionism”, the distinction Kauppinen (2007) makes between “optimistic experimentalism”, and “pessimistic experimentalism”, and the distinction Alexander, and Weinberg (2006) make between “the proper foundations view”, and “the restrictionist view”. Some examples of studies within the positive program include Nahmias et al. (2005), and Sytsma (2010), whereas examples of studies within the negative program include Weinberg et al. (2001), and Machery et al. (2004).
It must be noted that the usage of empirical conceptual analysis might be much more prevalent than suggested by the academic literature. Some authors might not mention in their writings that when conducting conceptual analysis, they have taken into account memories of people using the predicate under consideration, opinions of colleagues, etc, and thus have conducted empirical conceptual analysis. On the other hand, if someone has conducted an empirical study, they would surely mention it in their writings. From this point of view, the concept of scientific conceptual analysis seems more important to academic philosophers than the broader concept of empirical conceptual analysis. The concept of empirical conceptual analysis, however, is important from a purely conceptual point of view, since it covers all instances of conceptual analysis that do not fall under the concept of armchair conceptual analysis. If armchair conceptual analysis and scientific conceptual analysis are the only kinds of conceptual analysis that we distinguish, then our classification scheme of kinds of conceptual analysis would not be complete, since there would be instances of conceptual analysis that belong to neither of the kinds we have distinguished.
In fuzzy logic the truth value of a statement is not “true” or “false”, but varies between 0 and 1, where 0 means “completely false”, 1 means “completely true”, and the values between 0 and 1 refer to some “partial” truth (Cintula et al., 2017). The conclusion Strohminger and Nichols reach can be expressed in other ways, as well – for example, by using the original 1-7 Likert scale itself.
Machery suggests using bibliometric, cliometric, and ethnographic methods when studying the concepts of science (Machery, 2014), and such methods can be used when studying other concepts, as well. For an exposition of corpus analysis and its role in philosophy see Bluhm, 2013, 2016. Corpus analysis itself can be conducted in both a qualitative and a quantitative manner (the latter allowing the usage of certain computational methods). For a philosophically-oriented discussion of these two types of corpus analysis, the way they can complement each other, and the way they can be used as an aid to the conceptual analysis that involves interaction with the speakers, see Sytsma et al. (2019).
For the whole analysis see (Bluhm, 2012).
This is not to say that polysemy (the phenomenon in languages of words coming to have over time multiple meanings that are related) does not exist. My point is that it is possible for a linguistic expression to change its meaning over time, which possibility itself makes linguistic meaning relative to time.
Sometimes what is meant by “word” is a certain string of sounds that has a certain meaning. In this sense it is impossible for the same word to have different meanings in different languages – ‘gift’ would simply be a different word in German. In the present text, however, I use “word” to refer to only the string of sounds – without the meaning attached to it.
It can be noted that, generally speaking, specialized languages are intertwined with the language used in everyday speech. For this reason Machery suggests that in philosophy of science depending on the situation, we can investigate the semantic intuitions of both scientists, or laypeople (Machery, 2014, p. 480).
Sytsma and Livengood make a similar point by saying that when a statement about linguistic meaning is made, it is implicitly or explicitly assumed that the vast majority of speakers would agree with it (Sytsma & Livengood, 2011, p. 318). They also argue that one more assumption is made – that “agreement persists if one conditions on membership in theoretically interesting groups” (Sytsma & Livengood, 2011, p. 318) – calling the two assumptions taken together “the uniformity conjecture” (Sytsma & Livengood, 2011, p. 318).
See also Sytsma and Livengood (2012).
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Valchev, H. Empirical Conceptual Analysis: An Exposition. Philosophia 50, 757–776 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-021-00389-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-021-00389-5