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  • Analysis, Schmanalysis
  • Stephen Petersen

A widely held view in current philosophical theory says to be wary of conceptual analysis and its quest for analyticity. The major source of this suspicion traces back to reasons W. V. Quine gave 50 years ago in 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism' -namely concerns about reliance on notions of meaning and synonymy that are unclear. Since that time, there have been new sources of suspicion. In the philosophy of mind, for example, debates over consciousness have some philosophers doubting whether conceptual analysis can furnish as hefty a metaphysical conclusion as the denial of physicalism (Block and Stalnaker, 1999; Chalmers, 1996).1 And in epistemology, Stephen Stich and others worry that conceptual analysis of epistemic norms can only end up endorsing local intuitions about good thinking — intuitions that depend arbitrarily on the culture in which they were formed.2

Philosophical practice, on the other hand, apparently has (let's face it) philosophers doing something like conceptual analysis for a living.3 [End Page 289] We wish to learn more about important things like justice, truth, and freedom, but it seems the only way toward finding out what these are is by paying at least some careful attention to our own concepts of these things. The resulting tension between theory and practice is a bit uncomfortable.

Part of the problem is that no one seems sure what 'conceptual analysis' is, or what it is for a sentence to be an 'analyticity.' In this paper I argue for a surprising theory of conceptual analysis, according to which it is a process of forming intentions for using our words. The argument relies on an old, but illuminating, philosophical trick -and so I turn first to a discussion of that trick.

I The trick

You might already have a guess, from the title of this paper, about which trick I mean; perhaps the most famous instance is in Saul Kripke's Naming and Necessity. In the beginning of Lecture III, Kripke wishes to dismiss the theory of identity according to which it is a relation between names in English. He gives away the term 'identity' to those who buy this theory, and invents the term 'schmidentity' for the relation of interest to him (the one that holds 'only between an object and itself'). He then argues that his opponents' relation is a less interesting one than that for which he uses 'schmidentity,' since it fails to solve any of the problems it was meant to solve, and is less intuitive to boot. He concludes that his opponents' account of identity 'should be dropped, and identity should just be taken to be the relation between a thing and itself.' Kripke says of this trick that it 'can be used for a number of philosophical problems,' and adds in a footnote that 'I hope to elaborate on the utility of this device of imagining a hypothetical language elsewhere' (Kripke, 1972, 108). He does later elaborate some on this trick the next time he employs it, in his 1977 paper. His discussion underestimates the applicability of the trick, however; similar tricks have been applied much more widely than in the specific circumstances he proposes.4 It is the most general version of the trick that I now examine. [End Page 290]

1. The recipe

Here, then, is a recipe for running the general version of the trick. Suppose that Aya and Bernardo disagree over the denotation of a term t. Presumably this is because Aya and Bernardo have different background theories of some sort about that to which t refers.5 So let's say more precisely that Aya thinks t should be used to denote what it implicitly would as used in theory Ta, while Bernardo thinks it should denote as in the incompatible theory Tb. The theories (and their attendant implications for t) overlap enough to be competitors for the term.

Here is how Aya would pull the trick I want to examine:

  1. 1. She agrees for the sake of argument to use t as in Bernardo's theory Tb.

  2. 2. She invents a new term t' that she stipulates is to be used as according to her preferred...

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