Abstract
This paper does two things. First, it argues for a metaphilosophical view of conceptual analysis questions; in particular, it argues that the facts that settle conceptual-analysis questions are facts about the linguistic intentions of ordinary folk. The second thing this paper does is argue that if this metaphilosophical view is correct, then experimental philosophy (or “x-phi”) is a legitimate methodology to use in trying to answer conceptual-analysis questions.
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Notes
The negative project of x-phi is (roughly) to criticize the use of intuitions in philosophy; see, e.g., Alexander et al. (2010).
It’s still not entirely exhaustive because you might endorse a non-factualist view of type-C questions; i.e., you might claim that type-C questions aren’t settled by facts at all and that they don’t have factual answers.
Of course, different philosophers give slightly different definitions of these terms, so there are actually more than two concepts that can be treated as Humean and libertarian kinds of free will. But we can ignore this complication here.
Of course, if an analysis picks out an incoherent concept, call it C1, then there won’t be any (actual or possible) objects that instantiate C1, and you might think that facts like this could be relevant to whether C1 is identical to the relevant folk concept C, i.e., the one we’re trying to analyze. I will consider this suggestion below, in Sect. 6.5.
Consider the concept green and a Toyota; this seems more gerrymandered than green is; at any rate, it’s more arbitrary and it has a more complicated decompositional structure; but green Toyotas resemble each other more than green things do.
I actually don’t think it’s true that rabbit (or unified, entire rabbit) is more natural than rabbit stage or simples arranged rabbitwise, but that obviously doesn’t matter here.
Even if I stop trying to figure out what ‘C’ means in English and just try to figure out what it means in my own private language, this is still empirical. For, again, we don’t in general have a priori epistemic access to what we mean by our words.
This doesn’t matter here, but we don’t need to endorse the existence of abstract objects to endorse this view of sentences like (O) and (M). For we can endorse a fictionalistic view according to which these sentences are strictly speaking false (because they refer to non-existent objects) but useful fictions. I defend this view in Balaguer (1998) and (2009).
This is related to a widely discussed question, namely, the question of whether philosophers can be thought of as experts in relation to type-C questions. I would hesitate to put it this way; if they’re expert at anything in this connection, it’s knowing how to call up stable, reliable intuitions that accurately reflect their own concepts. Now, I certainly don’t think philosophers are infallible at this, but it’s plausible to suppose that they’re better at it than most people. For other discussions of these issues, see, e.g., Knobe and Nichols (2007) and Kauppinen (2007).
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank David Pitt and Talia Bettcher for commenting on an earlier version of this paper. Also, versions of this paper were read at the University of Arizona and at a conference at the University of San Francisco, and I would like to thank the members of those two audiences. Special thanks go to Michael McKenna, Shaun Nichols, Terry Horgan, Uriah Kriegel, Carolina Sartorio and Manuel Vargas.
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Balaguer, M. Conceptual analysis and x-phi. Synthese 193, 2367–2388 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0848-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0848-4