The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophical Methods

Christopher Daly

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137344557
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Theory
• Index: Economics

This Handbook contains twenty-six original and substantive papers examining a wide selection of philosophical methods. Drawing upon an international range of leading contributors, it will help shape future debates about how philosophy should be done. The papers will be of particular interest to researchers and high-level undergraduates.

Part I

Philosophical Inquiry: Problems and Prospects

1

A Priori Analysis and the Methodological A Posteriori

David Braddon-Mitchell

Conceptual analysis is generally taken to be an a priori and analytic kind of thing, both in practice and in theory. But if we examine illuminating philosophical work that tries to give something like analyses of concepts, it seems to be full of a posteriori components. Whether it’s work on the concept of evil¹ or the nature of innateness, or of the gene or of time, interesting work seems to depend on rich a posteriori inputs. No philosopher, certainly not the present writer, is unaware of the burden on us as intellectual generalists to know a lot outside the technical core of our expertise.

So what to make of this? Is conceptual analysis not an a priori matter? Is conceptual analysis impossible, depending on an outdated philosophical notion of the concept? Is conceptual analysis uninteresting, and are these fruitful analytical investigations in fact doing something else?

This chapter will defend the idea that the relatively recent revival of a priori conceptual analysis is importantly right. But its rightness is not one that directly produces interesting and fruitful first-order analyses. Instead its main goal is the defense of a thesis in metasemantics: that the normative authority of our concepts stems from something that might plausibly be called a priori – our idealized judgments about our dispositions to respond in circumstances to claims about what falls under concepts. But those who defend conceptual analysis rarely engage in first-order analysis, except of ‘toy’ concepts. And there is a reason for this. Fruitful analysis of substantive topics is methodologically a posteriori in part. The ‘pure’ conceptual truths are heavily conditional, and don’t say much, of course, about how the actual world is. Things which look like conceptual analyses of the traditional kind almost always have this a posteriori component. Perhaps in the (bad) old days of linguistic philosophy this component was suppressed. Though perhaps one of the lessons of the conceptual analysis revival is that we may realize that in philosophical work in which the a posteriori is rightly emphasized, the a priori components have now been rendered tacit.

This chapter will proceed in five sections. I’ll start by outlining a contemporary account of analysis, and how it is supposed to overcome the ills that are generally thought to have killed off the older tradition of conceptual analysis. I’ll then proceed to consider, in three subsequent sections, three different ways in which – even taking on board the lessons of the new conceptual analysis – getting fruitful results seems to depend on a posteriori information, – about for example how things are at the time the concept is being analyzed, how they will be or may plausibly become, and where the concept has come from. I argue of each case that while, methodologically, they show that informative accounts of concepts will depend on a posteriori matters, there is an a priori core that governs how to use this information, and that this core is in some sense the concept as instantiated in an individual. I’ll finish with some remarks about the different theoretical roles of the a priori conception of analysis, and the practical business of saying interesting things about (often social or lexical) concepts.

1 The conceptual analysis revival in theory

At its most caricatured, analysis can look like an application of the so-called classical theory of concepts.² Here the idea is that the analyst thinks hard about the concept, and determines what the necessary and sufficient conditions are for something’s falling under the concept. So reflection on the concept of a bachelor tells us that it’s enough, and required, to be male and unmarried. Or that one possesses knowledge (and can only possess it) when one has a true justified belief. Of course counterexamples might arise – they do in both these clichéd cases – but then further reflection is thought to extract the details of our knowledge, and additional clauses (and exceptions for the Pope in one case, perhaps, and who knows what in the other).

No one believes this. Well, more cautiously, very few people believe this. But many do believe a more sophisticated version.³ This is a version where it’s not that we search through our heads to find a hidden set of necessary and sufficient conditions inscribed within. Rather we have a massively complicated set of dispositions to regard things as falling under concepts, or to behave as though they do. What then goes on in the armchair is considering what one’s judgment would be in many circumstances, or how one would behave in many circumstances. What would I say if the watery stuff of my acquaintance was H₂O but the watery substance of the acquaintance of some being far away in the universe was quite a different chemical? How would I react if I learned that although I was right to believe it was 12pm, and justified in virtue of massively reliable clock saying so, in fact that clock had stopped at 12am last night? My friend Jane describes herself as a bachelor. Does it seem like a metaphor to me, or do I think it to be literally true?

In this version our knowledge of necessary and sufficient conditions (or just sufficient ones when there is vagueness or indeterminate cases) is taken to be tacit; it is revealed only in our dispositions to respond to cases. Thus is solved the so-called paradox of analysis.⁴ This involves the following worry: if analysis reveals only what things mean, how can it be informative, for if it is correct it merely says what you mean. But by hypothesis you must know what it means if you are deploying the concept, so the analysis will reveal only what you already know.

The ‘tacit knowledge’ story can also explain why an analysis can be an Herculean effort: for you may need to consider many, many cases, and then devote considerable effort to coming up with an account that integrates all of the results of the reflection on cases, and which makes predictions which are verified by consideration of further cases. It’s correct because it reveals what was going on all along and that one tacitly knew, and it’s informative because the only way to come to explicitly know the content of one’s concepts is to go through a very intellectually demanding process.

The addition of the resources of some variant on two-dimensionalism completes the picture. It explains how analysis does not reveal the necessary and sufficient conditions for the actual nature or essence of thing that falls under a concept. Meaning alone reveals only what, in a context, can settle what those conditions are. So it’s necessary (and sufficient) for something to be water that it be H₂O. But that’s a not a direct truth about the concept, but rather about the substance. What the concept <water> – henceforth I’ll use angle brackets to indicate it is a concept I’m writing about – is specified by is something like ‘substances of the same basic nature as the watery stuff or our acquaintance’. This, in a context, settles the necessary conditions for something’s being water. So water in our context picks out H₂O, and necessarily so. In another context someone who shared the same concept might use the word ‘water’ to pick out, necessarily, XYZ. Would their word ‘water’ mean what ours does? Yes and no. Yes it will have the same a priori component (called by Jackson the A-intension and Chalmers the Primary intension) but won’t have the same reference across possible worlds considered as other ways things might be (as opposed to ways they might actually be), thus a different C-intension (Jackson) or Secondary Intension (Chalmers).

Thus is completed an attempt to revise the classical theory of concepts into one which can vindicate analysis as a story about the methodology of philosophy, and render it compatible with the idea that scientific knowledge can reveal the essential nature of things, and that analysis can nevertheless be both a priori, analytic, and informative.

Why is it analytic? It’s analytic on this story because it reveals truths about the content of concepts, about what they mean. It’s a priori because it’s reflection on cases alone which reveals these meanings. There’s no a posteriori element in one aspect of meaning. The world indeed determines the essential natures of the things that we think about, as in the water case, but that’s not part of the primary meaning of our concept. There is no need for the internal a posteriori either: it’s not that we appeal to the cognitive sciences to find out what’s going on in our heads. The content is just what best rationalizes our judgments about cases; it’s not just defeasible evidence for an underlying substantial list.⁵

2 A priori but methodologically a posteriori?

The intent of this chapter is to argue that, even if the brief sketch of analysis above is correct, substantial analysis will still have a posteriori components, and ones which might be beyond the scope of philosophers. I’ll argue, though, that all of this is compatible with the theoretical truth of a priori and analytic analysis. There’s something important about the nature of meaning revealed in that theoretical story. But it is perhaps not enough to vindicate the first-order practice of analysis as it is often done: because what we want is often to get beyond the very thin nature of concepts as revealed by such analysis.

I’ll discuss this in three sections that are divided up, more or less arbitrarily, in terms of the rough temporal location of the a posteriori information we want: synchronic (roughly contemporaneous with the analysis), future, and historical. The synchronic information is about the analyses others would deliver and which might be revealed in so-called empirical philosophy. The future information is about not just what one’s judgments about cases is from the armchair, but what one would judge in concrete circumstances. The historical information is information about why one currently has the dispositions one in fact has.

The caricature of conceptual analysis that haunts its practitioners is the image of an aged and self-satisfied philosopher in a very deep armchair, contentedly pontificating on the nature of what he (for said caricature is always of a man) is pleased to call ‘our concepts’ based on what ‘we would say’ or ‘we would think’. A very natural question to ask of such an imagined interlocutor is ‘exactly who is this we of whom you speak?’ And, in fairness, it’s often a good question to ask of real-life philosophers.

The thought behind the question is that even if the analyst is following the method as well as can be hoped, in the end the only data possessed is of a single person’s dispositions to respond to various cases. This surely underdetermines analysis of any interesting sort, as the results you get from the analytical process are likely to vary from person to person, and quite likely along divides of culture, age, gender, geography, and so on.

The response is usually that we need some more data. At its simplest it’s the call for some experimental philosophy – some basic survey work which reveals the dispositions of much larger sets of people than just one analyst, and sometimes (though less often than one might hope) more kinds of people than philosophy or psychology undergraduates.⁶

This response disguises the fact that the complaint is one which might be made about two very different kinds of analysis done for very different reasons, though it is likely true that we’ll need this sort of data for both reasons.

The first of these is that you might think you are analyzing not so much token representations in someone’s head but rather the concepts that we all have access to in virtue of being cognitive agents in a language community. This might very roughly correspond to so-called lexical concepts: the concepts that correspond to words in a natural language. Not everyone who uses these words is proficient in these concepts, and that lack of proficiency might not be obvious, so we cannot trust the data from any particular analyst to tell us about ‘our’ concepts. The second of these is that you might need a posteriori data even to figure out the individual concepts located in the heads of individual speakers.

3 Empirical philosophy and public concepts

So on with the first of these reasons. Sometimes this reason is expressed as the worry that what we are analysing is the concept that ‘the folk’ – as we might collectively call the community at large – possess, and philosophers in particular are likely to be bad at guessing what that might be, being as they are captive to various complicated theories that corrupt their conceptual innocence. There is at least some data that suggests this is not really true, or at least not as often true as we (should I say ‘I’ in this context?) might have thought. In ‘The Folk Probably do Think What you Think They Think’,⁷ Dunaway, Edmonds and Manley show that in a series of tests where they ask philosophers to guess how the folk would analyze various concepts and compare this will some more widespread survey work, philosophers generally get it right. And this is even when the philosophers themselves subscribe to very different analyses. The upshot is that various allegedly surprising discoveries of experimental philosophy in which it is claimed that counterintuitively (for philosophers) the folk believe a certain analysis contrary to the opinions of philosophers are not discoveries at all. In fact philosophers knew this all along; it’s just that they weren’t engaged in the business of saying what the folk think: they were doing something else. Just what that something else is perhaps rather regrettably methodologically under-described. Perhaps it’s saying something about the concepts they, the philosophers, think with (rather than merely possess). Perhaps they are making recommendations for what concept...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction and Historical Overview
• Part I  Philosophical Inquiry: Problems and Prospects
• Part II  Philosophical Explanation and Methodology in Metaphysics
• Part III  Intuition, Psychology, and Experimental Philosophy
• Part IV  Method, Mind, and Epistemology
• Part V  Metaethics and Normativity
• Index