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Carnap on concept determination: methodology for philosophy of science

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Abstract

Recent criticisms of intuition from experimental philosophy and elsewhere have helped undermine the authority of traditional conceptual analysis. As the product of more empirically informed philosophical methodology, this result is compelling and philosophically salutary. But the negative critiques rarely suggest a positive alternative. In particular, a normative account of concept determination—how concepts should be characterized—is strikingly absent from such work. Carnap's underappreciated theory of explication provides such a theory. Analyses of complex concepts in empirical sciences illustrates and supports this claim, and counteracts the charge explication is only suitable for highly mathematical, axiomatic contexts. Explication is also defended against the influential criticism it is “philosophically unilluminating”.

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Notes

  1. Following Carnap, ‘exactness’ and ‘precision’ are used interchangeably.

  2. Some philosophically inclined scientists reached similar conclusions. In support of this flexibility, one of the founders of ecology, Alfred Lotka (1925, Ch. 1), argued that concepts that have emerged for everyday communication will likely not correspond to the concepts that best facilitate epistemic inquiry. Due to their ambiguity or vagueness, concepts commonly assumed to describe the world in everyday communication, such as ‘life’ or ‘causality,’ may fare poorly in this regard (Lotka 1925, 16).

  3. Frege, Carnap’s instructor at Jena in the 1910s (Carnap 1963c), shared the view that definitions of logical and mathematical concepts should be judged according to their fruitfulness. Definitions should “extend our knowledge” by “drawing boundary lines that were not previously given at all” (Frege 1980, 100–101).

  4. Note that since explication may be nonconservative, it may introduce inconsistencies into formal systems.

  5. Carnap carefully emphasized that the evolution towards greater precision was typical, not inevitable. For example, he noted that adequate quantitative explicata for some psychological concepts may not exist, so the focus should be finding fruitful comparative or classificatory explicata (Carnap 1950, 14). In these cases, increasing precision can decrease fruitfulness.

  6. Simplicity (criterion [iv]) was subsidiary to the other adequacy criteria for Carnap. He noted that many concepts of well-confirmed and well-developed scientific theories are quite complicated, and suggested simplicity only matters when deciding between explicata of comparable precision, fruitfulness, and similarity to the explicandum. The value of simplicity in explication is therefore secondary and context-dependent, similar to its value in other aspects of science such as inference and explanation (Sober 1988).

  7. Specifically, the components of x(t) are variables that usually represent densities, abundances, or biomasses of species in the community. Components of the equilibrium state x * therefore represent these densities, abundances, or biomasses at equilibrium.

  8. The qualifiers ‘contemporary’ and ‘currently’ are intended to grant that the concept could have such a role in future science. Among extant analyses of causation, Salman (1997) and Dowe’s (2000) account of causal interactions as intersections of world-lines that involve exchange of conserved quantities is one candidate; the causation concept sometimes found in studies of Bayes nets is another (see Spirtes et al. 2001). These accounts offer characterizations of the concept precise enough to make possible, for instance, its empirical detection and even empirical measurement of causal interaction strength.

  9. “Paradigmatic conceptual analyses offer definitions of concepts that are to be tested against potential counterexamples that are identified via thought experiments” (Margolis and Laurence 2008, §2.1).

  10. This assumes that usage patterns for terms of natural language provides reliable information about (but does not necessarily determine) meaning.

  11. “[Philosophers] often immediately start to look for an answer [to questions like ‘What is X?’ where X is some concept] without first examining the tacit assumption that the terms of the question are at least practically clear enough to serve as the basis for an investigation, for an analysis or explication” (Carnap 1950, 4).

  12. Carnap (1950) did not make this argument explicitly.

  13. One potential exception is Jackson (1998, 44), who is “suspicious” about the view that conceptual analysis provides insights about the world. He calls this “immodest” conceptual analysis, and expresses doubts about his earlier use of it in the knowledge argument (Jackson 1986). Jackson (1998) defends instead a “modest” conceptual analysis that attempts to determine the folk theory he assumes underlies concept use in natural language and on which cognitive and linguistic studies bear. But if this is the goal, it is unclear what legitimate role modest conceptual analysis has in metaphysics, as Jackson believes it has. As traditionally understood, metaphysics is concerned with uncovering the fundamental nature of the world, not anthropological theorizing (cf. Jackson 1998, Ch. 3).

  14. Another difficulty specific to Strawson’s grammar analogy will not be pursued here. Strawson assumed an underlying “system” or “structure” exists that governs our concepts and explains how the ordinary language terms referring to them facilitate communication (1963, 513; 1992, Ch. 2). The form of this conceptual system was never made clear. Strawson called it “logical” (1963, 513), however, and suggested conceptual analysis should reveal logical relations between concepts, i.e. necessary and sufficient conditions. Whether there are conceptual relations of this kind is an open question and psychological experiments seem to disconfirm Strawson’s claim (e.g. Rosch and Mervis 1975). Based on evidence that context-sensitive prototypes govern concept use, for instance, Ramsey (1998) argues that the traditional goal of conceptual analysis of finding necessary and sufficient conditions for concepts that are resistant to intuitive counterexamples is misguided.

  15. Recall that the degree of precision appropriate for an explication depends on what a concept represents (see §3). Some concepts studied by philosophers of science, like some psychological concepts, may concern essentially imprecise phenomena. If scientific explanation is indelibly intertwined with an amorphous sense of subjective understanding, highly precise explicata for it may be less fruitful than less precise ones (see Trout 2002).

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Correspondence to James Justus.

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Thanks to John Carpenter, Mark Colyvan, Cory Juhl, Samir Okasha, Mark Sainsbury, Sahotra Sarkar, Joshua Shepherd, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. Audiences at the Sydney University HPS Department and the third annual Sydney–Tilburg conference on philosophy of science provided similarly valuable feedback. This work was generously supported by the Sydney Centre for the Foundations of Science.

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Justus, J. Carnap on concept determination: methodology for philosophy of science. Euro Jnl Phil Sci 2, 161–179 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-011-0027-5

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