The Problem of Necessary and Sufficient Conditions and Conceptual Analysis (original) (raw)

Concepts Unbound : A Norm-Based Account of the Justification of Conceptual Analyses

2011

In this thesis, I argue that philosophical methodology is lead astray by focusing on intuitions. The supposition that philosophers rely on intuitions for defending and attacking theories-conceptual analyses in particular-has no methodological significance. Accordingly, I reject the requirement that conceptual analyses have to support and stand in support from intuitions. I articulate and defend a handful of norms in its place. Most conspicuously, I defend norms that I claim have a purely rational and pragmatic grip on conceptual-analytic practice. The norms are conditions on being a good analysis. The resulting notion of a good analysis cannot be equivocated with the notion of an analysis that expresses a conceptual truth. First and most deserving, I owe my supervisor Anders Strand a huge thanks. Although our marathon sessions have left me dizzy, they have improved the contents of this thesis beyond my grasp. Thanks to all my peer students at IFIKKs masterlesesal for being there to share the joys and perils of writing a Master Thesis, for interesting discussions, and for making the long hours enjoyable. Special thanks to Ingrid Evans for proofreading ; and to Eirik Aadland for comments on chapters 1 and 3. Thanks to my family for supporting me at all times. Last but not least, a major thanks to Ellen for her love, support and food. vi Acknowledgments Contents vii Contents ABSTRACT .

Philosophical Analysis: The Concept Grounding View

Philosophical analysis was the central preoccupation of 20th-century analytic philosophy. In the contemporary methodological debate, however, it faces a number of pressing external and internal challenges. While external challenges, like those from experimental philosophy or semantic externalism, have been extensively discussed, internal challenges to philosophical analysis have received much less attention. One especially vexing internal challenge is that the success conditions of philosophical analysis are deeply unclear. According to the standard textbook view, a philosophical analysis aims at a strict biconditional that captures the necessary and sufficient conditions for membership in the relevant category. The textbook view arguably identifies a necessary condition on successful philosophical analyses, but understood as a sufficient condition it is untenable, as I will argue in this paper. To this end, I first uncover eight conditions of adequacy on successful philosophical analyses, some of which have rarely been spelled out in detail. As we shall see, even sophisticated alternatives to the textbook view fail to accommodate some of these conditions. I then propose the concept grounding view as a more promising account of philosophical analysis. According to this view, successful philosophical analyses require necessary biconditionals that are constrained by grounding relations among the concepts involved. Apart from providing a satisfactory account of philosophical analysis in its own right, the concept grounding view is also able to meet the challenge that the success conditions of philosophical analysis are problematically unclear.

Philosophical and Conceptual Analysis

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2016

This article examines the main lines of contemporary thinking about analysis in philosophy. It first considers G. E. Moore’s statement of the paradox of analysis. It then reviews a number of accounts of analysis that address the paradox of analysis, including the account offered by Ernest Sosa 1983 and others by Felicia Ackerman (1981, 1986, 1991); the latter gives an account of analysis on which properties are the objects of analysis. It also discusses Jeffrey C. King’s (1998, 2007) accounts of philosophical analysis, before turning to views of analysis that are not aimed at addressing the paradox of analysis, including those associated with David Lewis, Frank Jackson, and David Chalmers. In particular, it comments on Lewis’s argument that conceptual analysis is simply a means for picking out the physical state that occupies a certain role, where formulating what that role is constitutes a conceptual analysis of the relevant notion.

Analysis, Concepts, and Intuitions

Analytic Philosophy, 2014

A dozen or so years ago, most analytic philosophers would have found the following picture self-evident: Much, though by no means all philosophy involves the generation of ingenious cases about which philosophers have relatively strong and consistent intuitions; such intuitions are a significant source of evidence for philosophical analysis. Of late this picture has come under attack. Some say 'intuition' is nothing more than a pompous word for 'belief', and that our beliefs are notsimply because they are our beliefs-a source of philosophical evidence. Some observe that intuitions are supposed to have various hallmarksintuitions are supposed to have a particular phenomenology or issue simply from insight into conceptual structure; they complain that they are unaware of any such phenomenology and dubious about conceptual structure. Some say that since intuitions vary with the culture of their possessors, their usefulness as evidential fodder is compromised or worse. In what follows, I will defend a version of the picture most of us used to find self-evident. That picture, I think, reflects something important about philosophy and one of the reasons it is worthwhile doing it. My plan is this. I first say what I take intuitions to be. I then say something about the idea that philosophical analysis involves (but is not exhausted by) conceptual analysis. I think there is something to this idea-something, I hasten to add, that even a Quinean could endorse. I will point out how intuitions, understood in the way I propose to understand them, obviously provide evidence for conceptual, and thus philosophical, analysis. I then compare 2 © Mark Richard 2013. Do not distribute or reproduce without permission. the view I sketch with that of Herman Cappelen, who is no friend of the idea that philosophy needs intuitions. 1 There is, I think, not all that much distance between the view I outline here (and the views of many others who think that intuitions are philosophical evidence) and Cappelen's view. Some of the difference between Cappelen and the advocates of intuition is merely verbal. There may, however, be at least one substantive difference between Cappelen and me, one that has to do with what we can reasonably expect philosophical analysis to deliver. I say that philosophical analysis is (in part) conceptual analysis. But I do not say that it reveals conceptual truths in a very meaty sense of 'conceptual truth'. There are, as I see it, no analyticities; nothing-well, nothing of philosophical interest-is a priori. For awhile, the idea that philosophy's project was (in part) to discover the analytic and the a priori was on the wane. But of late it has enjoyed something of a resurgence. In the last section of this discussion, I address a recent attempt to resuscitate (at least part of) the tradition that sees analytic and a priori truth at the center of the philosophical enterprise, an attempt due to David Chalmers. 2 There I try most directly to show that responses that Chalmers makes to Quine are unsuccessful in showing that there is a viable notion of analyticity or a priori truth. In the course of this, I also sketch a broadly Quinean view of individual learning and belief revision that I hope coheres with and reinforces the account of concepts that the first part of the paper suggests.

The Limits of Conceptual Analysis

Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 2004

Argues that conceptual analysis is committed to an implausible type of epistemic foundationalism.

The Methodology of Analytic Philosophy: Conceptual Analysis

Pending, 2024

In this essay I defend intuitions and conceptual analysis as being crucial to a social scientific analytic linguistic philosophy. This essay recognizes a distinction between worldview intuitions and linguistic intuitions as beliefs that motivate conceptual analyses. I argue that since a theory cannot be constructed solely out of unbiased and neutral worldview intuitions, the analytic philosopher must provide a theory with hypotheses and examples that provide reasons to believe that a given worldview is true. An analytic theory mediates between 'worldview intuitions' (e.g., about theism, naturalism, possible-worlds realism) and 'linguistic intuitions' (i.e., involving the use of particular concepts and sentences). Six key kinds of concepts are postulated. The intuitions of Williamson (2007), Cappelen (2012), and Deutsch (2015) about methodology are critiqued. While it is agreed with experimental philosophers that intuitions are not typically neutral, nor always reliable, this fact doesn’t prevent the legitimate use of intuitions as data for constructing and evaluating philosophical theories.

Philosophical Conceptual Analysis as an Experimental Method

Meaning, Frames and Conceptual Representation. Düsseldorf: Düsseldorf University Press., 2015

Philosophical conceptual analysis is an experimental method. Focusing on this helps to justify it from the skepticism of experimental philosophers who follow Weinberg, Nichols & Stich (2001). To explore the experimental aspect of philosophical conceptual analysis, I consider a simpler instance of the same activity: everyday linguistic interpretation. I argue that this, too, is experimental in nature. And in both conceptual analysis and linguistic interpretation, the intuitions considered problematic by experimental philosophers are necessary but epistemically irrelevant. They are like variables introduced into mathematical proofs which drop out before the solution. Or better, they are like the hypotheses that drive science, which do not themselves need to be true. In other words, it does not matter whether or not intuitions are accurate as descriptions of the natural kinds that undergird philosophical concepts; the aims of conceptual analysis can still be met.

A New Framework for Conceptualism

Noûs, 2011

A satisfactory theory of perception must meet a variety of metaphysical and epistemological demands. What is wanted is a view that simultaneously accounts for, among other things, the epistemic significance of experience, the nature and status of illusion and hallucination, the possibility of unmediated perceptual contact with the world, the “richness” of experience, and the source of perceptual concepts. It has been argued that experience must be conceptual in order to secure the justificatory role of perceptual states; at the same time, it has been thought that such states cannot be conceptual given their phenomenological and explanatory features. Our aim is to introduce and defend a new framework for conceptualism that, by marking ontological and epistemic differences between sensory awareness and perceptual experience, promises to resolve this dispute while accounting for all of the above phenomena. In §1, we clarify the conceptualist thesis at issue. In §2, we present and motiv...