1 Metaphysics and Conceptual Analysis Experimental Philosophy's Place under the Sun Uriah Kriegel Introduction What is the rationale for the methodological innovations of experimental philosophy? Th is paper starts from the contention that common answers to this question are implausible ( section 1 ). It then develops a framework within which experimental philosophy fulfi lls a specifi c function in an otherwise traditionalist picture of philosophical inquiry. Th e framework rests on two principal ideas. Th e fi rst is Frank Jackson's claim that conceptual analysis is unavoidable in "serious metaphysics" ( section 2 ). Th e second is that the psychological structure of concepts is extremely intricate, much more so than early practitioners of conceptual analysis had realized ( section 3 ). Th is intricacy has implications for the activity of analyzing concepts: while the central, coarser, more prominent contours of a concept may be identifi ed from the armchair, the fi ner details of the concept's structure require experimental methods to detect ( section 4 ). 1. Th e obscure rationale of experimental philosophy In this section, I raise a question regarding the rationale for experimental philosophy ( section 1.1 ) and argue that the most natural takes on what that rationale is do not withstand scrutiny ( section 1.2 ). 9781474278621_pi-236.indd 7 2/17/2017 11:44:43 AM 8 Uriah Kriegel 8 9 1.1 Knobe and Gettier Perhaps the bestknown experimental philosophy study is Knobe ( 2003 ). Knobe presented seventyeight random subjects (nonphilosophers spending time in a Manhattan park) with one of two vignettes. Th e fi rst involved a person's awareness of her actions' negative side eff ect ("harm condition"): Th e vicepresident of a company went to the chairman of the board and said, "We are thinking of starting a new program. It will help us increase profi ts, but it will also harm the environment." Th e chairman of the board answered, "I don't care at all about harming the environment. I just want to make as much profi t as I can. Let's start the new program." Th ey started the new program. Sure enough, the environment was harmed. Th e second involved a person's awareness of her action's positive side eff ect ("help condition"): Th e vicepresident of a company went to the chairman of the board and said, "We are thinking of starting a new program. It will help us increase profi ts, and it will also help the environment." Th e chairman of the board answered, "I don't care at all about helping the environment. I just want to make as much profi t as I can. Let's start the new program." Th ey started the new program. Sure enough, the environment was helped. Th e crucial results were: 83 percent of respondents said that the chairman harmed the environment intentionally while only 23 percent said that the chairman helped the environment intentionally. Th is is the socalled Knobe Eff ect. It demonstrates, according to Knobe, a normative element in our folk concept of intentional action. Th is paper is motivated by two observations. Th e fi rst is that by far most philosophers share the majoritarian intuition in both of Knobe's cases, so that Knobe could have just written a traditional conceptual analysis paper. He could have just presented his two scenarios to the reader and entreat the reader to pass a verdict on them; that verdict would have supported the idea of a normative aspect in our concept of intentional action just as much as the nonphilosophers' verdict. Indeed, I would surmise that among Knobe's article's fi rst seventyeight readers, a greater proportion shared the majoritarian intuitions than among Knobe's seventyeight parkgoers. Th ere are various possible reasons for this (more on that later), but one suspects that many parkgoers who off ered the 9781474278621_pi-236.indd 8 2/17/2017 11:44:44 AM Metaphysics and Conceptual Analysis 9 9 minority verdicts did so because they did not fully understand the scenarios (or the task of reporting an intuitive verdict on them). 1 Such "performance errors" were probably avoided by Knobe's fi rst seventyeight philosopherreaders. Th e second observation is that once Gettier had devised his wellknown thoughtexperimental scenarios (Gettier 1963 ), he could have presented them to his undergraduates or some other nonphilosopher subjects. But it is not immediately obvious what intellectual benefi t this would have brought to epistemology; I daresay the history of epistemology would look virtually no diff erent. Th e results Gettier would have obtained would have probably been just noisier versions of the results he did in fact obtain among his philosophical readership. Th ese two observations raise the question: how much of the signifi cance of Knobe's (unquestionably important) article is really due to Knobe's decision to incorporate an experimental part in it? Since philosophers tend to share the lay intuitions on his cases, it is not immediately clear what extra epistemic weight was obtained from consulting the nonphilosophers. So the question presents itself: what was the point of the experimental part of Knobe's paper? And we may generalize: what is the point of experimental philosophy? Approaches to this question can be placed on a spectrum from more infl ationary to more defl ationary answers. On the defl ationary end are positions that take experimental philosophy (henceforth, xphi) to have no point. On the infl ationary extreme are positions that tout xphi as the only future of philosophy and the end of traditional armchair philosophy. Here I will propose a more moderate answer, though one that leans in the defl ationary direction. It may be summarized, very roughly, as follows: Rationale: Th ere is a rationale for experimental philosophy, but it is one that (i) gives it limited importance and (ii) nestles it in a very traditional conception of the philosophical project. I start, in the next subsection, by considering a number of "natural" answers to the question of the rationale for xphi. I argue that by and large they do not withstand scrutiny. To restrict the domain of possibilities to something manageable, I focus on views that take xphi to be specially pertinent to our understanding of concepts, indeed as claiming to replace armchair conceptual analysis by a more modern, more empirically sophisticated investigation of how folk concepts behave. Not everybody agrees that this is essential to what xphi is about (Knobe forthcoming ), much less that it exhausts what xphi has to contribute (Rose & Danks 2013 ). But since I cannot hope for a completely exhaustive consideration of potential approaches to the "point" of xphi, and since my own view of the 9781474278621_pi-236.indd 9 2/17/2017 11:44:44 AM 10 Uriah Kriegel 10 11 relevance of xphi to metaphysics goes through concepts, I focus here on views that tie xphi to conceptual analysis. 1.2 Failed rationales One rationale oft en off ered for the "experimentalization" of conceptual analysis is that concepts are psychologically real entities, and so whatever else we do, we must study them "empirically" (Knobe, personal communication). Th e immediate question is what it means to say that an inquiry is "empirical." Th e topic is vast, of course, but two central symptoms of empirical research are observation and testing. At a minimum, then, given that concepts are psychologically real entities, we should (i) observe their causal eff ects (in practice, intuitions and intuitionreports regarding their extensions) and (ii) test hypotheses about their intensions in a way that produces confi rmation or disconfi rmation (and ultimately verifi cation or falsifi cation). 2 Th is, it might be suggested, is what the "experimentalization" of conceptual analysis brings to the table. I want to argue that Gettier's traditionalist paper did not vary signifi cantly from Knobe's xphi paper along these dimensions. I speculate that Knobe formed his hypothesis about the concept intentional action simply by noticing his own intuitions about cases such as the one he ultimately presented to his subjects. We may think of this "noticing" as a kind of observation- perhaps introspective observation in a suitably loose sense. In any case, Gettier must have proceeded to his own hypothesis formation through a similar procedure of "observing" his intuitions about cases such as the ones he ultimately presented to the reader. So there is no real diff erence between Knobe and Gettier as far as the role of observation is concerned. One might think that the real diff erence pertains to testing: Knobe ran his thoughtexperimental scenarios by seventyeight subjects before reporting on them to the community of inquiry, whereas Gettier skipped that step. However, the real intellectual test of both papers, accounting for the impact they have had on epistemology and philosophy of action, was in the encounter with the readership . It is because the readers shared immediately Gettier's intuitions that his paper was so infl uential. Had it been met with mixed or uncertain intuitions, it would be less infl uential. To that extent, Gettier's hypothesis withstood a crucial test of convergence with others' intuitions. 3 More interestingly, I would surmise that Knobe's paper's real infl uence is also due to his readers' reactions rather than his subjects'. Suppose the intuitions reported by Knobe's parkside subjects were the opposite of what they actually were, with 80odd percent saying that the chairman intentionally helped the environment in the help condition and only 9781474278621_pi-236.indd 10 2/17/2017 11:44:44 AM Metaphysics and Conceptual Analysis 11 11 20odd percent saying that he intentionally harmed the environment in the harm condition. I speculate that most readers of the ensuing article would be inclined to suspect that something went wrong in the experimental design, the subjects' understanding of the task, the statistical analysis, or some other nonsubstantive aspect of the study. Th ey would not conclude- not purely on the basis of the reported results, at any rate- that the folk concept of intentional action is wildly diff erent from what they thought it was. Th us the deeper reason for the Knobe Eff ect's survival and fl ourishing on the marketplace of ideas is not that Knobe consulted seventyeight faculties of intuition rather than one, but that the intuitions he consulted converged with his readership's. To that extent, the hypotheses of both papers are equally "empirically tested." 4 A second potential rationale for experimentalization might be that it purges inquiry from reliance on such dubious epistemic sources as intuition and introspection and replaces them with a much more respectable methodology. However, xphi as such appears to rely on intuition and (broadly introspective) noticingofintuition just as much as traditional conceptual analysis. Knobe's study does not ostensibly rely on his own intuition and introspection, but it does rely on his random subjects producing intuitions in response to his scenario and noticing the intuitions they produced. Moreover, to repeat, the study's intellectual impact is due primarily to his readership's intuition and introspection. And in any case, it is doubtful that Knobe's own intuition played no role in the inquiry. At the very least, it played a role in the context of discovery , even if not in the context of justifi cation (to use Reichenbarch's old distinction). Th e reason Knobe ran the experiment he did, with the scenarios he did, rather than another experiment with another pair of scenarios, is presumably that he realized, using his own intuition, the interesting eff ect he later appealed to seventyeight random faculties of intuition to reproduce. Th ose subjects' intuitions are relevant to the context of justifi cation, but his own intuition was relevant to the context of discovery. A third potential rationale for experimentalization might be the risk of divergence between philosophers and nonphilosophers. Although in Knobe's original study the two groups' intuitions converged, in other cases they may not. Indeed, Starmans and Friedman ( 2012 ) have argued that the folk attribute knowledge in Gettier cases! Where such divergence occurs, we should want to know about it , and arguably, it is xphi's task to expose where this happens. Moreover, it would be reasonable to suggest that wherever such divergence occurs, xphi discovers what the folk concept really is, as opposed to what the philosophers' concept is, or what the philosophers have made the folk concept out to be. 9781474278621_pi-236.indd 11 2/17/2017 11:44:44 AM 12 Uriah Kriegel 12 13 Th is rationale is more plausible than those considered thus far. But if this were the only rationale for experimentalization, the overall impact of the latter would be limited- perhaps minuscule. For one thing, divergence between intuitions reported in surveys and philosophers' intuitions is quite limited (Dunaway, Edmonds, & Manley, 2013 ); Starmans and Friedman's claims about folk reactions to Gettier cases, for example, have come under forceful critique (Nagel, San Juan, & Mar, 2013 ). More deeply, where such divergence in intuitionreports does occur, there is an open question as to what lesson we should extract from it. As noted, folk intuitions about Knobe's two cases are just noisier versions of philosophers' intuitions, and one natural explanation of this is that nonphilosophers' results involve more performance errors. As Jackson ( 2008 ) puts it, Gettier cases are just hard to process immediately, and the most philosophically interesting reactions to them are the considered responses. On this line of thought, divergence between nonphilosophers and philosophers may simply refl ect the performance/ competence distinction. 5 Where this is the right explanation of the diagnosis, the xphi results are actually less instructive than the philosophers' armchair intuitions. Now, there are certainly other possible explanations for divergences of this sort, ones that give a more central role to the xphi results. Th us, one alternative explanation of a given divergence might be that philosophers' intuitions lie downstream of their substantive philosophical commitments- whereas the layperson's intuitions are presumably "purer," lying upstream of theory. 6 In all likelihood, sometimes the philosopherfavoring explanation of the divergence will be the right one and sometimes the philosopherdisfavoring explanation will be. But given that divergence is anyway a relatively rare aff air, if xphi's signifi cance was exhausted by the cases in which divergence occurs and is best explained in a philosopherdisfavoring way, it would be very limited indeed. 7 * * * A fourth potential rationale for experimentalization is the following. It might be suggested that even if armchair results refl ect more than just the philosopher's concept of intentional action, or knowledge, it may still refl ect only a comparatively small group's concept- a group of very specifi c socioeconomic or ethnic or cultural profi le, say. Consider Machery et al.'s ( 2004 ) claim that Kripkean intuitions undergirding causal theories of reference are not shared by East Asians, or for that matter Machery et al.'s (forthcoming) claims that Gettier intuitions are stable across cultures. Th e fact that we cannot know in advance of experimental research whether such robust intuitions as were elicited by Kripke and Gettier will extend to other cultures demonstrates the value of xphi. 9781474278621_pi-236.indd 12 2/17/2017 11:44:44 AM Metaphysics and Conceptual Analysis 13 13 My response is twofold. First, even if we accept such claims at face value- and many do not (Systma & Livengood 2011 )- this would at most justify the crosscultural (or more generally the variability) component of xphi research; it leaves untouched more "modest" conceptual-analysis claims, such as that Western civilization's concept of reference involves a causal dimension and that Western civilization's concept of knowledge requires more than Justifi ed True Belief. Experimentalization has not yet been shown to be needed for the assessment of such claims. More crucially, crosscultural research of this kind involves a principled diffi culty concerning the perfect match between translations. Th e diffi culty may be summarized as follows: if concepts individuate sensitively to their conceptual role, then in all likelihood nonEnglish words used to translate "refers" into such languages as Cantonese, where Kripke intuitions are claimed not to be sustained, do not express the same concept that "refers" does. Accordingly, the relevant crosscultural studies do not reveal a diff erence in the concept of reference ; they only reveal that other cultures fi nd it more useful to work with a closely associated concept than with the concept of reference. Let me expand on this a little. Anyone who has engaged in translation work knows that the operative task is to fi nd the closest word in the translation language to the word in the original language; there is typically no expectation, nor hope, of fi nding a word whose entire web of connotations- its full conceptual role, as philosophers would put it- is strictly identical to that of the original word. 8 For anyone who thinks that concepts individuate sensitively to their conceptual role, this means that the translating word and the translated word do not express a perfectly identical concept but only the two closest concepts the translator could pinpoint. Th us, while it is unquestionable that the best French translation of "S knows that p " is "S sais que p ," it is highly unlikely that the concepts expressed by "knows" and "sais" are identical; for example, the fact that the verb "connaitre" in French is also best translated as "to know" means that some of the conceptual work performed by "knows" is not likewise shouldered by "sais." Th e conceptual roles are thus diff erent, which plausibly entails that the concepts themselves are diff erent. So any study that claimed to look into French speakers' concept of knowledge would be missing out on the fact that "the concept of knowledge," that is, the concept expressed by the English word "knowledge," is probably not the concept expressed by the French "savoir." And if this sort of conceptual daylight opens when we move from English to French, presumably the conceptual distance when moving from English to Cantonese is even starker. If so, the aforementioned studies do not quite reveal the intuitions that subjects in other cultures 9781474278621_pi-236.indd 13 2/17/2017 11:44:44 AM 14 Uriah Kriegel 14 15 have regarding the concepts of reference and knowledge , that is, the concepts expressed by the English words "reference" and "knowledge"; what they suggest, rather, is that subjects in the relevant cultures work in semantic and epistemic contexts with slightly diff erent concepts than we do. It is epistemically possible , of course, that (i) the concept expressed by the best translation of "knows" in some language is strictly identical to the concept expressed by "knows" (that is, the concept of knowledge) and (ii) competent speakers of that language will consistently return diff erent verdicts on Gettier cases. Th is is possible, but for any given language the probability that this is what is going on is overwhelmingly smaller than that the two concepts are ever so slightly diff erent. Certainly this is what the canon of translation instructs us to surmise, as Davidson ( 1974 ) has already shown. Suppose I hold up a coff ee mug and exclaim "Look at my new tiger- it's a very nice tiger, and more than all other tigers I've had before it keeps the coff ee inside warm while ensuring my fi ngers don't get burned." In trying to understand me, you face two interpretive options: (a) I believe that I have a new tiger, and take the word "tiger" to express the concept of a tiger; (b) I believe that I have a new coff ee mug, and take "tiger" to express the concept of a coff ee mug. What is striking here is that any remotely competent interpreter would go for interpretation (b). By the same token, when less dramatic divergence from our web of beliefs occurs, it is incumbent on us to start with the presumption that the words used by the other side are not perfect translations of the words we use. Th is is the very meaning of the principle of charity, as a constraint on the competence of an interpreter. In assuming that the words that best translate "refers" in various languages in which Kripke intuitions do not hold up express the exact same concept "refers" expresses, Machery et al. ( 2004 ) eff ectively violate the principle of charity, thus failing to interpret competently their subjects. 9 A further potential rationale for experimentalization might be that experimental studies have shown that intuitions about thoughtexperimental scenarios can vary with truthindependent factors (Swain, Alexander, & Weinberg, 2008 ), such as the font in which vignettes are displayed. Th is is claimed to debunk the very idea of using thought experiments in clarifying the structure of concepts. Th e problem with this proposed rationale is that it would not support Knobe's decision to add an experimental component to his article- it would support Knobe not writing his article at all. For what it suggests is that intuitions about presented vignettes are epistemically worthless. So, the proposed rationale is not really a rationale for experimentalizing the study of concepts via consultation of folk subjects' intuitive reactions to thoughtexperimental scenarios, but for 9781474278621_pi-236.indd 14 2/17/2017 11:44:44 AM Metaphysics and Conceptual Analysis 15 15 abandoning this kind of inquiry altogether. It would dismiss any research using vignettes and surveys in the style of social psychology to understand the structure of folk concepts. Yet the vast majority of xphi research does just that. Th is is explicitly acknowledged by proponents of this rationale (Alexander, Mallon, & Weinberg, 2010 ), who have argued that the "negative program" of xphi (exposing the truthinsensitive aspects of intuition reports) undermines the "positive program" of xphi (empirically discovering the structure of folk concepts). 10 While this may be, the eff ect of the negative program would be to destroy a certain type of inquiry, not to "experimentalize" it. In this paper, however, my concern is to identify a rationale for experimentalization- a rationale, therefore, for xphi's positive program. Knobe's own current view is that xphi is straightup cognitive science that happens to be carried out by people whose salary is paid by philosophy departments (Knobe, forthcoming ). Perhaps; but the signifi cance of this notion should be fully appreciated by proponents of xphi. On this view, experimental philosophy is as much a kind of philosophy as a rubber duck is a kind of duck. It is a historical accident that Stephen Stich was already a respected professional philosopher and stayed in Rutgers's philosophy department, when his interests started to migrate into areas that, at the level of substance, are nonphilosophical, and that he attracted many talented students within Rutgers's philosophy PhD program who went on to obtain positions in various philosophy departments around the United States and to propagate a type of nonphilosophical inquiry within the institutional structure of philosophy. On this picture, then, experimental philosophy has nothing directly to do with philosophy. 11 , 12 I fi nd this line excessively dispiriting; my hunch is that there actually is something about philosophy's project that potentially calls, at some point in its pursuit, for the kind of research performed by xphi. In the remainder of this paper, I explore a kind of contribution that xphi could make (and make in virtue of its experimental dimension) to philosophy proper. Doing so is complicated by the fact that it is far from clear what makes a given piece of inquiry "philosophy proper." Obviously, we cannot take this matter up here. 13 Instead, I will dogmatically adopt, without argument, one specifi c, quite traditional conception of the philosophical project. With this view of the ends of philosophical inquiry in place, I will develop- rather speculatively- a line of thought that secures a place for xphi as a means for the pursuit of those ends. Since I will not argue for the relevant conception of philosophy, my main claim is better thought of as conditional: if we adopt that conception, then we can make sense of the role of experimental methods in philosophy proper. Warning: even 9781474278621_pi-236.indd 15 2/17/2017 11:44:44 AM 16 Uriah Kriegel 16 17 my case for this conditional will be highly speculative, involving many substantive assumptions about the structure of concepts that cannot be defended here. 2. Conceptual analysis and serious metaphysics Th ere is a traditional way of doing philosophy that features centrally a cluster of familiar practices, including careful examination of arguments and objections; clarifi cation and analysis of central concepts; rife appeal to thought experiments and the intuitions they elicit; marked sensitivity to parsimony considerations; a premium on armchair reasoning, and more. But what is the overarching project in the service of which these practices are deployed? Th is is not an easy question, and as promised, here I dogmatically adopt one particular answer to it. It is the answer articulated by Frank Jackson in From Metaphysics to Ethics (Jackson, 1998a ) and further developed by David Chalmers in Constructing the World (Chalmers, 2012 ). Jackson calls the project he articulates "serious metaphysics"; he presents the main idea as follows: Metaphysics is about what there is and what it is like. But it is not concerned with any old shopping list of what there is and what it is like. Metaphysicians seek a comprehensive account of some subjectmatter- the mind, the semantic, or, most ambitiously, everything- in terms of a limited number of more or less basic notions. (Jackson, 1998a : 5) Serious metaphysics has two central features: "it is discriminatory, and it claims completeness" (1998a: 27). At the end of seriousmetaphysical inquiry, if you will, we would have a complete theory of the world, a theory that leaves nothing unaccounted for. But despite leaving nothing unaccounted for, the theory would list only a proper subset of all truths. For example, while it might list "Jimmy is a boson," and perhaps also "No boson is a fermion," it will not list "Jimmy is not a fermion." Likewise, while it might list "Johnny is an electron" and "Electrons are particles with negative charge," it will not also list "Jimmy is a particle with negative charge." Th e reason is that it does not need to list these extra truths to ensure that nothing is left unaccounted for- that the whole truth is captured by it. Let us call "fundamental" the statements our complete theory explicitly lists and "derivative" those it does not- but which are nonetheless true by its lights. And likewise let us call the notions appearing in the fundamental statements "fundamental notions" and those appearing only in derivative statements 9781474278621_pi-236.indd 16 2/17/2017 11:44:44 AM Metaphysics and Conceptual Analysis 17 17 "derivative notions." 14 Th en the above characteristics of serious metaphysics may be stated as follows: Complete: Serious metaphysics attempts to produce a total theory of the world, that is, a theory of everything. Discriminate: Serious metaphysics discriminates between fundamental and derivative statements (and notions). Jackson argues for a third crucial characteristic of serious metaphysics as he views it, what he calls "entry by entailment." Th e idea is that any statement S not listed by a seriousmetaphysical theory T qualifi es as true by T's lights only if S is entailed by T's fundamental statements. In other words: Entail: Th e relationship between fundamental and derivative statements in the total theory of the world is that of entailment. Serious metaphysics is fully characterized by the conjunction of Complete , Discriminate, and Entail . 15 For Jackson ( 1998a : ch.2), conceptual analysis has a crucial role to play in serious metaphysics. Given a complete description of the world in fundamental notions, we may wish to know whether some statement involving other notions is true; but to consider this question, we need an account of the relevant other notion in terms of the fundamental ones. Within the framework of serious metaphysics, we might put this as follows. Given fundamental truths A 1 ,..., A n and a statement S, if S involves only notions already appearing in A 1 ,..., A n , we can always use purely formal means to determine whether S is entailed by A 1 ,..., A n . But if S involves some notions foreign to A 1 ,..., A n , then in most cases there will be no purely formal tests for entailment. 16 We must appeal to a priori bridge principles that connect fundamental and derivative notions. As Chalmers ( 2012 ) shows, such bridge principles need not amount to defi nitions of the derivative notions in terms of the fundamental ones; all they require are analytic oneway conditionals. With such conditionals in place, we can consider whether S is entailed by (or at least consistent with) the conjunction of A 1 ,..., A n plus the relevant analytic conditionals. For example, suppose it is known that in 1900, 50 percent of thirtyyearold Spaniards were male, and that 20 percent of thirtyyearold male Spaniards were unmarried. Th en the statement "In 1900, 10 percent of thirtyyearold Spaniards were bachelors" should be regarded as true. But this statement does not formally follow from the other two, since the notion of a bachelor does not appear in those two. To derive it, we must have in place the conceptual claim that 9781474278621_pi-236.indd 17 2/17/2017 11:44:44 AM 18 Uriah Kriegel 18 19 unmarried adult males are bachelors. It is the mandate of conceptual analysis to supply this extra claim. Without conceptual analysis, we cannot evaluate the truth of any nonfundamental statement that features any term not used in the fundamental statements. Th e starkest illustration of this is with nonfundamental existentials . Presumably, the fundamental truths about the world will not mention policemen and ghosts. Yet, "Th ere are policemen" is among the truths they will entail, whereas "Th ere are ghosts" is not. How can we account for this pattern of entailment? Th e answer is that the fundamental truths guarantee the existence of policemen but not that of ghosts given what it takes for some chunk of the world to qualify as a policeman or a ghost. It is the job of conceptual analysis, now, to tell us what it takes for some chunk of the world to qualify as an N, for any derivative N (i.e., for any notion that does not appear in any fundamental truth). Th us insofar as metaphysics is supposed to tell us, for any putative entity mentioned only in nonfundamental truths, whether it exists or not, there is no way to decide the question without engaging in conceptual analysis. Some putative entities mentioned in nonfundamental truths should be grounded in or reduced to (combinations of) entities mentioned in fundamental truths; some should be eliminated from our picture of the world. Th e choice between reductivism and eliminativism about such nonfundamentals requires doing some conceptual analysis of the notions used to denote them. 17 Philosophers are sometimes challenged by scientists to explain why they routinely conjure up outlandish thought experiments that have nothing to do with what we know empirically of the way the world is- and what they hope to learn from it. Conceptual analysis makes sense of the philosopher's appeal to thought experiments (though there may be other ways to make sense of it). Th e "method of cases," as it is sometimes called, can invoke thought experiments to fl esh out conceivable (read: conceptually possible) scenarios and then consider whether these scenarios intuitively qualify as cases of C, in the sense that the concept of C intuitively applies to them. Traditional conceptual analysts devised thought experiments in their armchair, consulted their own intuitions about those, and shared the results with the community of inquiry through publication. Experimental conceptual analysts devise thought experiments in lab meetings (where the details of presentation of those thought experiments in digestible vignettes are fi xed), consult the intuitive reports of undergraduate students about them, and share their results as traditionalists have. 9781474278621_pi-236.indd 18 2/17/2017 11:44:44 AM Metaphysics and Conceptual Analysis 19 19 From this perspective, one philosophical role of xphi might be in the context of serious metaphysics, in particular the part of serious metaphysics that involves bridging fundamental and derivative truths. Within this framework, a strong rationale for xphi would show why the experimentalization of conceptual analysis is (at least sometimes) inevitable, or recommended, for pursuit of seriousmetaphysical questions- in particular, the question of "reduction or elimination?" for various putative entities cited in nonfundamental truths. In the next section, I take a fi rst step toward showing that conceptual analysis may indeed sometimes call for experimentalization. As promised, my gambit is highly speculative. And in any case, it would provide only one possible rationale for xphi- which may not be the only one. It is also a rationale that would work only for someone with sympathies for Jackson's project of serious metaphysics, which is not for everybody. My own belief is that the aforementioned cluster of philosophical practices cannot be made sense of unless one conceives of philosophy as centrally involving something like what Jackson calls serious metaphysics; conceptions of philosophy that do away with such a project will fi nd that they cannot make sense of why philosophers' workaday looks the way it does. Obviously, I cannot argue for this here. Instead, I adopt Jackson's framework dogmatically, and try to show that it makes room for (occasional) experimentalization of the kind of inquiry revolving around thought experiments and intuitions. 3. Twentyfi rstcentury conceptual analysis Th e original technique of conceptual analysis consisted in producing severally necessary and conjointly suffi cient conditions for an item falling under a concept. A paradigm of this is the analysis of knowledge as (i) justifi ed (ii) true (iii) belief. For a variety of reasons, latterday conceptual analysis oft en relies on a more powerful technique: Ramsifi cation. Th is technique is more powerful in that it subsumes necessaryandsuffi cientconditions as a special case, as we will see below. 3.1 Straightforward Ramsey sentences A simple Ramsey sentence for a concept C is produced by collecting platitudes about items that fall under C, making a long conjunction out of these platitudes, 9781474278621_pi-236.indd 19 2/17/2017 11:44:44 AM 20 Uriah Kriegel 20 21 replacing occurrences of "C" and cognates with a variable, and prefacing the conjunction with an existential quantifi er. Consider for example our concept of the sun. Here are a dozen platitudes of relevance:  Th e sun is extremely hot  Th e sun looks yellow  Th e sun rises in the east  Th e sun sets in the west  Th e sun shines longer in summer than in winter  Basking in the sun makes people happy  Th e sun is more or less spherical  Th e sun is very far from Earth  Th e Earth rotates around the sun  Most or all life on Earth is impossible without the sun  Th e sun is much bigger than the earth  Too much exposure to the sun can cause cancer Th ese statements about the sun are "platitudes" in the sense that they are widely shared among nonexperts. (Note that this does not require they be based on perception or "common sense," though oft en they are.) We construct a simple Ramsey sentence out of this dozen as follows: ( Sun 1 ) Th ere is a (single) x , such that x is extremely hot, x looks yellow, x rises in the east, x sets in the west, x shines longer in summer than in winter, basking in x makes people happy, x is more or less spherical, x is very far from Earth, the Earth rotates around x , most or all life on Earth is impossible without x , x is much bigger than the earth, and too much exposure to x can cause cancer. Th e full Ramsey sentence for the concept Sun would involve many more platitudes than this, but the point is clear: Sun is the concept that picks out that worldly item that satisfi es this kind of Ramsey sentence. It is this concept that is expressed by the publiclanguage name "the sun." 18 Conceptual analysis by Ramsifi cation made an early appearance in the philosophy of mind, where Lewis ( 1966 ) used it to propose a functionalist analysis of pain in terms of pain platitudes. Th is sort of "analytic functionalism" was later contrasted with "psychofunctionalism" (Block 1980), which involved Ramsifying over scientifi c statements enjoying wide consensus among experts but not typically shared by the wider populace. Consider the following dozen statements about the sun: 9781474278621_pi-236.indd 20 2/17/2017 11:44:44 AM Metaphysics and Conceptual Analysis 21 21  Th e sun's energy is produced by fusion reactions at the sun's core  Th e temperature at the sun's core is at least 10,000,000°C  Th e sun's core is mostly made of liquid hydrogen  Th e sun's hydrogen has been fueling it for about 5 billion years  Energy from the sun's core is transferred to the sun's surface, the photosphere, through radiation and convection  Th e sun's photosphere is the part of the sun visible from Earth  Th e sun's photosphere is about 5,000 km deep  Th e sun's diameter is ~1,400,000 km  Th e temperature on the sun's photosphere is ~5,500°C  Th e sun's photosphere is mostly gaseous  Th e temperature on the chromosphere, the sun's lower atmosphere, is ~60,000°C  Temperatures on the corona, the sun's upper atmosphere, are oft en ~1,000,000°C Collecting these and others like them, one may produce the following "scientifi c" Ramsey sentence: ( Sun 2 ) Th ere is a (single) x , such that x 's energy is produced by fusion reactions at x 's core, the temperature at x 's core is at least 10,000,000°C, . . . Late in his career, Lewis (1994) maintained that a proper Ramsey sentence should appeal to both platitudes and scientifi c consensus. A proper Ramsey sentence for Sun , for example, would use both dozens above. Th is sort of twoband Ramsey sentence is very natural in analyzing concepts. In a way, the MerriamWebster defi nition of the sun does just that: Th e luminous celestial body around which the earth and other planets revolve, from which they receive heat and light, which is composed mainly of hydrogen and helium, and which has a mean distance from earth of about 93,000,000 miles (150,000,000 kilometers), a linear diameter of 864,000 miles (1,390,000 kilometers), and a mass 332,000 times greater than earth. Here we are off ered seven central statements about the sun, three broadly platitudinous and four broadly scientifi c. 19 Although a twoband Ramsey sentence of this sort can become quite complicated, the basic structure of a Ramsey sentence can also remain rather simple. Th us, if we think that bachelor simply picks out the property of being both (i) unmarried and (ii) a man, we can formulate an exceptionally short Ramsey sentence with just two platitudes: something like "Th ere is an (attribute of being 9781474278621_pi-236.indd 21 2/17/2017 11:44:44 AM 22 Uriah Kriegel 22 23 an) x , such that every x is unmarried and every x is a man." Th is would be a Ramsifi ed version of the older necessaryandsuffi cientconditions analysis of bachelor . It is in this sense that Ramsifi cation is more powerful a conceptualanalysis technique than defi nition by necessary and suffi cient conditions: concepts that admit of traditional analysis by necessary and suffi cient conditions always admit also of analysis by Ramsifi cation, but some concepts that do not admit of traditional necessaryandsuffi cientconditions analysis may yet succumb to analysis by Ramsifi cation. Th e hope is that the Ramsey technique is powerful enough to accurately capture the structure of all our folk concepts. Th e philosophical program of conceptual analysis by Ramsifi cation is oft en referred to as the Canberra Plan (Price & O'LearyHawthorne, 1996 ), due to its dominance at the Australian National University in Canberra. Th e approach raises a number of immediate diffi culties, however. What happens if more than one entity satisfi es a simple Ramsey sentence (think of jadeite and nephrite, both of which satisfy the platitudes about jade)? What if no entity satisfi es absolutely all of them, but one does satisfy most (think of dolphin before Linnaeus, whose Ramsey sentence presumably included the platitude "Th e dolphin is a fi sh")? How can diff erent individuals share concepts if they associate diff erent platitudes with them? How can concepts corefer before and aft er the establishment of scientifi c consensus regarding central statements? Th ese and other questions make clear that a more sophisticated brand of Ramsey sentence is needed. 3.2 Studies in advanced Ramsifi cation I start by mentioning four principled challenges to conceptual analysis by Ramsifi cation. I call them the Quinean Challenge, the Kripkean Challenge, the Putnamian Challenge, and the Burgean Challenge. I then suggest technical modifi cations of Ramsey sentences intended to address them. Th e Quinean Challenge concerns the rejection of the analytic/ synthetic distinction (Quine, 1951 ). For Quine, when some item a falls under a concept C, there is no dichotomy between truths about a that are constitutive of its falling under C and truths that just happen to hold as well. Statements about things that qualify as C do not divide neatly into those that are nonnegotiable for something's status as a C and those that are negotiable. On the contrary, every conviction about the Cs is in principle revisable. Th us, for each platitude P about the sun, something can qualify as the sun even if it fails to exhibit the property P attributes to the sun. If this is right, then sentences Sun 1 and Sun 2 cannot be used to model our concept of the sun. For the falsehood of any platitude showing up in 9781474278621_pi-236.indd 22 2/17/2017 11:44:44 AM Metaphysics and Conceptual Analysis 23 23 Sun 1 or Sun 2 would render the sentence false, that is, would mean that there is no thing that satisfi es Sun 1 or Sun 2 . Intuitively, however, the sun exists! Furthermore, in sentences such as Sun 1 or Sun 2 all platitudes have equal weight within the Ramsey sentence they make up- which confl icts with the more fl exible Quinean picture of variable revisability. 20 Th e Kripkean Challenge concerns rigid designation and direct reference (Kripke, 1972 ). When you and I look at the sun and converse on the weather, the reason we manage to communicate appears to have nothing to do with the platitudes we each happen to associate with the sun. It is perfectly conceivable that we should share no sun platitudes and still manage to communicate. Th us some concepts do not pick out their referent via a description of its properties. Instead, they pick it out directly . Th ere may be properties of the object in virtue of which it is picked out by the concept, but these need not be properties the concept possessor herself associates with it. Accordingly, such concepts pick out the same thing(s) in (or rather at ) every possible world, regardless of changes in the referent's properties across worlds. Th at is, these concepts are "rigid designators." Th us, what makes it the case that the sun is the referent of our concept Sun is simply the fact that the sun is the main cause of tokenings of Sun . It is because the same object causes tokenings of my sun concept and your sun concept that we manage to communicate, even if we share no beliefs about the sun's properties. Furthermore, our sun concepts pick out the sun at all other possible worlds in which it exists, even in worlds where the sun is so diff erent from the way it is in the actual world that most platitudes concerning it no longer hold. Similar themes animate the Putnamian Challenge, which has to do with an alleged hidden indexical in many concepts (Putnam, 1975 ). According to Putnam, concepts such as water involve a hidden indexical component: they pick out the watery stuff around here , that is, the watery stuff of our acquaintance . Th is too is crucial to communication. As noted, you and I can successfully communicate about the sun even if the platitudes we associate with it have nothing in common. Even if you were a scientist whose tacit beliefs about the sun conformed to Sun 2 and I a layperson in the grip of Sun 1 , we would not be speaking past each other. Indeed, we can associate inconsistent platitudes with the sun and yet manage to communicate. Th is is because we would both be simply referring to the celestial object before our eyes- for Putnam, the object our perceptual experiences refer to indexically. Th e Burgean Challenge concerns the division of linguistic labor (Burge [ 1979 ], though see already Putnam [ 1975 ]). Observe that many in our linguistic (and conceptual!) community are unaware of the statements collected in Sun 2 . 9781474278621_pi-236.indd 23 2/17/2017 11:44:44 AM 24 Uriah Kriegel 24 25 Yet arguably some of them are essential to our shared concept of the sun, as indeed suggested by the MerriamWebster entry. It is a structural feature of many of our concepts, claims Burge, that they involve deference to experts. In using "Sun," I implicitly consent to refer not to whatever satisfi es my core beliefs about the sun but to what also satisfi es certain core beliefs of heliobuff s. Th e same point can be made about concepts . Th e reference of my own C is governed not (only) by the platitudes I associate with Cs, but by the deeper truths that the afi cionados associate with Cs. Interestingly, according to Burge there are also many concepts that involve deference not to experts but to the community at large- as when it is built into my concept sofa that a sofa is in part the kind of thing that others in my community call a sofa (Burge, 1986 ). Not everybody accepts the philosophical claims these challenges are based upon (regarding the analytic/ synthetic distinction, direct reference, hidden indexicals, and the division of linguistic labor). But it is hard to deny that some insight underlies each. Th e question is whether a suffi ciently sophisticated Ramsey sentence can accommodate these insights. I think it can. * * * Start with the Quinean Challenge. It seems intuitively clear that many concepts can successfully refer even if some statements in their associated Ramsey sentences are false. For example, it may turn out that the big celestial body you and I are looking at is not extremely hot. Instead, there is a tiny speck, always just next to the sun, that generates all the heat we ordinarily associate with the sun. Intuitively, this illusion would not undermine our concept's reference to the big celestial body we are looking at. It would not, for example, make it the case that our sun concept really picks out the speck, or has "indeterminate reference" (whatever that means). In other words, the "extremely hot" platitude is negotiable. Likewise for the "rotates" platitude: heliocentrism may turn out to be wrong, and Sun would still refer to the sun. Th e problem is that the above Ramsey sentences make these platitudes nonnegotiable: their falsity ensures reference failure. Fortunately, Lewis ( 1972 : 256) raises and solves this problem in half a sentence. His suggestion is that instead of forming a long conjunction of all platitudes about the sun, we form an even longer disjunction of all conjunctions of most platitudes (see also Jackson, 1998a : 35). Suppose our concept of the sun works in such a way that an object need only satisfy any eight of the dozen sun platitudes in Sun 1 in order to qualify as the sun. Th en we could proceed by fi rst forming every conjunction of (at least) eight among these platitudes, then forming the disjunction of all those conjunctions, and then replacing occurrences of 9781474278621_pi-236.indd 24 2/17/2017 11:44:44 AM Metaphysics and Conceptual Analysis 25 25 "the sun" with a bound variable. We would then obtain a Ramsey sentence agile enough to capture the way our concept of the sun works (in this scenario). More generally, suppose in analyzing concept C we Ramsify over statements that ascribe properties P 1 , ..., P 12 , and any x qualifi es as a C just if it satisfi es eight of these statements. Th en our Ramsey sentence for C would take the form: ( Lws ) Th ere is a (single) x , such that x is P 1 & x P 2 & . . . x is P 8 , or P 2 & x P 3 & . . . x is P 9 , or P 1 & x P 2 & . . . x is P 7 & P 9 , or. . . Call this a Lewis sentence . A Lewis sentence is a species of a Ramsey sentence, but one that can accommodate Quine's claims, including that negotiability comes in degrees. Within a Ramsifi cation framework, this means that some platitudes are more central and some are more marginal. For example, "Th e sun is extremely hot" seems more central to our concept of the sun than "Th e sun is more or less spherical." Presumably, if a relatively marginal platitude turns out to be false, this should not aff ect the concept's tendency to refer successfully as much as if a central platitude does. 21 Th is can be refl ected in the following Lewissentence feature. In Lws above, each platitude appears in equally many disjuncts, and most disjuncts have the same number of conjuncts in it (eight). 22 But we can imagine a Lewis sentence in which some platitudes appear in more disjuncts than others. Th is would refl ect a greater relative nonnegotiability, that is, a lesser relative revisability. Th us, we can model the fact that "Th e sun is extremely hot" is more central to our concept of the sun than "Th e sun is more or less spherical" by making the former show up in more disjuncts than the latter in our Lewis sentence for Sun . Note that a statement that appeared in every disjunct would be completely nonnegotiable (irrevisable), in the sense that its turning out false would guarantee that the concept fails to refer. As noted, Quine's view was that nothing is entirely nonnegotiable in our concept of the sun. What this means is that there is no property ascribed by our concept of the sun such that if nothing instantiates it, then the concept is empty. Th is could be captured by ensuring that no statement appearing in the Lewis sentence for Sun showed up in every disjunct of the sentence. Of course, Quine may be simply wrong about this, perhaps not when it comes to Sun but with respect to some other concept(s). In fact, I would be surprised if none of our concepts involve a nonnegotiable descriptive component. But the Lewis sentence as such can be used to model both types of concept- those that involve nonnegotiable statements and those that do not- and the difference between them can in fact be captured by the formal properties of Lewis sentences. 9781474278621_pi-236.indd 25 2/17/2017 11:44:44 AM 26 Uriah Kriegel 26 27 It is possible to hold that while no individual platitude associated with a concept is nonnegotiable by itself, certain combinations of platitudes are conjointly nonnegotiable. For example, suppose we thought that the fi rst four platitudes in Sun 1 are such that if they all turned out to be false, then the concept would be empty aft er all. Th en although no single platitude should appear as a conjunct in every disjunct of our Lewis sentence for the sun, the disjunction of these four platitudes should appear as a conjunct in every disjunct. Th e point is that Ramsey sentences can be agile enough to capture various potentially quite subtle aspects of the psychological reality of concepts. (We might also think that some concepts are such that a certain platitude associated with them is so central to them that its truth guarantees that the concept refers. Th is could be captured by a Lewis sentence one of whose disjuncts featured a single statement.) In conclusion, we may or may not be impressed by Quine's attack on the analytic/ synthetic distinction, and accordingly may or may not wish to accommodate Quine's relevant ideas in our Ramsey sentences. What I have tried to show here is just that Ramsey sentences have the resources to accommodate the Quinean ideas. In other words, rejection of the analytic/ synthetic distinction would not by itself undermine the project of conceptual analysis by Ramsifi cation. * * * What about the other challenges to conceptual analysis? Kripke, Putnam, and Burge have developed accounts that challenge the analyzability of concepts, by arguing that certain concepts' behavior is not fi xed by their descriptive content (and/ or that certain concepts do not have descriptive content). Th ese raise momentous issues in the philosophy of language that cannot be settled here. What I want to do here is relatively modest: remind that the phenomena Kripke, Putnam, and Burge appeal to in the context of motivating their accounts of concepts can be accommodated within a rich conception of descriptive content, in a way that lends them to analysis by Ramsey sentence. Th e underlying philosophyoflanguage question of whether these phenomena are best accounted for as (a) built into descriptive content, (b) involving nondescriptive content, or (c) somehow contenttranscendent is something we cannot address here with any seriousness. Starting with the Burgean challenge, it may well be that many folk concepts have built into them an element of deference to experts, or to others in one's community. But if so, a full Ramsey sentence could simply incorporate deferential platitudes such as: 9781474278621_pi-236.indd 26 2/17/2017 11:44:44 AM Metaphysics and Conceptual Analysis 27 27  Th e sun has most of the properties the experts' consensus says it does  Th e sun is the object referred to by other community members' use of "the sun" Accordingly, Sun 1 for example could be reformulated as follows: ( Sun 3 ) Th ere is a (single) x , such that x is extremely hot, x looks yellow, x rises in the east, . . . x is much bigger than the earth, too much exposure to x can cause cancer x has most of the properties the experts' consensus days it does , and x is the object referred to by communitymembers' use of "the sun." Th ese kinds of sentence seem to accommodate the Burgean insight. Presumably, if some concepts pick out their referents in virtue of experts' beliefs, it is because that is how these concepts work- they "specify," so to speak, that this is how we are to home in on the right referent or extension. Th us unless I tacitly assented to the deferential platitudes when conversing about the weather with astronomers, we might very well be talking past each other. 23 A similar approach has been applied to the Kripkean Challenge, by various defenders of descriptivist theories of meaning. Nothing in Kripke's arguments rules out, they have claimed, a sort of "causal descriptivism" or "rigid descriptivism" that would accommodate his insights within a descriptivist framework (see Kroon, 1987 ; Lewis, 1994). For example, we can accommodate Kripke's causal claim by adding to our Ramsey sentence for Sun causal platitudes, such as:  Th e sun is the main cause of Sun tokenings As for the rigidity of some concepts, it can be accommodated simply by rigidifying their corresponding Ramsey sentences (Brody, 1977 ; Jackson, 1998b ). Incorporating both rigidifi cation and causal platitudes, we turn Sun 3 into something like this: ( Sun 4 ) Th ere is a (single) x , such that, in the actual world , x is extremely hot, x looks yellow, x rises in the east, . . . too much exposure to x can cause cancer, x has most of the properties the experts' consensus days it does, x is the object referred to by communitymembers' use of "the sun," and x is the main cause of tokenings of Sun . Admittedly, these moves by descriptivists have met with various further challenges (see Brock, 2004 for a particularly strong critique). As noted, we will not address here the underlying philosophyoflanguage question of what the best theory of concepts is. Th e point is only that Ramsey sentences can readily 9781474278621_pi-236.indd 27 2/17/2017 11:44:44 AM 28 Uriah Kriegel 28 29 incorporate the kinds of information that directreference theorists have thought essential to concepts. Similar remarks apply to Putnam's Challenge. If communication can be established with as little as joint perceptual awareness of the same object, as Putnam claims, then we should also add perceptual platitudes such as:  Th e sun is that of which I seem to be perceptually aware when I have my sun experiences  Th e sun is that of which others seem to be aware when they have perceptual experiences subjectively like my sun experiences Sun 4 can be strengthened with platitudes of this sort to accommodate the insight underlying the Putnam Challenge. A word on the commitments incurred by the moves just sketched would not be out of place. On the one hand, I do not wish to commit to the truth of Kripke's, Putnam's, and Burge's underlying claims about concepts' content. Perhaps (some or all) concepts involve no deference, no hidden indexical, no causal, and/ or no rigidifi ed content. I remain offi cially silent on this issue. My point is only that Ramsey sentences can accommodate the kinds of phenomenon Kripke, Putnam, and Burge appeal to in making the case for those claims. 24 Conversely, however, I do not wish to commit to a descriptivist theory of concepts' reference, which insists that our concepts' behavior is fi xed entirely by their descriptive content. Rather, assuming that a concept's descriptive content is what can be analyzed in that concept, I want to highlight just how far the analysis of a concept can go. (More on this in section 4.2 .) It might be objected that it is psychologically unrealistic to expect the folk concept of the sun to incorporate such subtle deferential, causal, and perceptual platitudes. For example, small children with whom we routinely discuss the sun are unlikely to associate Kripke's causal platitude with their concept of the sun. In response, I would personally want to agree that the perceptual and communitydeferential platitudes are much more central to our concept of the sun than any causal and expertdeferential ones. I take it that this is what is shown by the fact that we can communicate about the sun with children who are unlikely to incorporate the latter platitudes into their conception of the sun. Th e current point, to repeat, is that Ramsey sentence can capture the psychological reality of any concepts that do exhibit the kind of features suggested in the Kripkean, Putnamian, and Burgean challenges; it is a separate question which concepts exhibit which of these features. * * * 9781474278621_pi-236.indd 28 2/17/2017 11:44:44 AM Metaphysics and Conceptual Analysis 29 29 A fi nal feature of Ramsey sentences that emerges from the already existing literature pertains to an alleged conditional structure in some of our concepts (Bealer, 1998 ; Hawthorne, 2002 ; Korman, 2006 ). Consider our concept of life. It manages to refer even though it turns out that nothing has the kind of vital forces the vitalists of yore posited. Th ere is a cluster of functions or capacities that appear to distinguish animate from inanimate objects- metabolism, reproduction, homeostasis, and so on- and the concept life refers to whatever exhibits suffi ciently many of these. At the same time, if there were vital forces, these capacities would be rather irrelevant, and life would just refer to whatever has the vital forces. In other words, our concept of life exhibits a certain conditional stratifi cation : if there are vital forces, then life picks out whatever has vital forces, and if there are no vital forces, then life picks out whatever has (suffi ciently many of) the relevant capacities. 25 Within the Ramsifi cation framework, this conditional structure can be captured as follows. In the fi rst place, we formulate a Lewis sentence L 1 on the assumption that there are vital forces. Next, we formulate a Lewis sentence L 2 on the assumption that there are no vital forces. Finally, we construct a "megaLewis sentence" for life , which specifi es that for any x , if x satisfi es L 1 , then x is alive, and alive in virtue of satisfying L 1 , and if x does not satisfy L 1 but does satisfy L 2 , then x is alive, and alive in virtue of satisfying L 2 . Note that every Lewis sentence can be turned into a megaLewis sentence by introducing priority relations among its disjuncts- by imposing, that is, a conditional stratifi cation. Th is device has the potential to handle many cases where more than one entity satisfi es the Lewis sentence. If in the Lewis sentence for some concept C, entity E 1 satisfi es disjunct D 1 but E 2 satisfi es D 2 , it does not yet follow that C has "divided reference." It may be that C works in such a way that if anything satisfi es D 1 , than it is the unique referent of C, but if nothing does, then whatever satisfi ed D 2 is. (Th is can be reiterated indefi nitely, so a whole hierarchy of potential referents is formed.) If so, we can turn C's Lewis sentence into a megaLewis sentence by "conditionally stratifying" it. At the same time, some concepts really do have divided reference, and those would be better modeled by a Lewis rather than a megaLewis sentence. 26 Th e considerable fl exibility of (mega- )Lewis sentences means that it is relatively hard for them to come out false- harder than it is for a simple Ramsey sentence, certainly. Th is will handle many cases in which folk concepts refer successfully even though the folk associate many false platitudes with them. For example, it explains why the preLinnaeus folk concept of a dolphin referred even though the folk associated with it the platitude "Th e dolphin is a fi sh." At 9781474278621_pi-236.indd 29 2/17/2017 11:44:44 AM 30 Uriah Kriegel 30 31 the same time, some concepts really are empty, and when they are, their corresponding (mega- )Lewis sentences should come out false. For example, whatever else is true of the Lewis sentence for ghost , it should involve no disjunct which something in the world satisfi es. In conclusion, many of our concepts may be much more complex and fl exible than traditional conceptual analysts have assumed, but this in itself does not show that concepts cannot be analyzed through Ramsey sentences. It is just that our Ramsey sentences need to be agile enough to capture the fl exible psychological structure of our concepts. Th ey acquire their agility through at least six devices: (1) adding deferential platitudes, (2) adding causal platitudes, (3) adding perceptual platitudes, (4) rigidifying, (5) forsaking simple conjunctions for disjunctionsofconjunctions, and (6) conditional stratifi cation. 27 In all probability, there are in fact other logical properties of Ramsey sentences that capture other psychological properties of the structure of concepts. It might be objected that the envisaged Ramsey sentences are so complex that they could not possibly capture something psychologically real in us. Surely we are not aware of such immense subtlety in our concepts as is suggested by the above picture. However, this complaint seems to suppose that we have considerable fi rstperson awareness of the structure of our concepts. But if this were the case, there would be no need for analysis of concepts. To analyze something is to identify its components and their interrelations. Th is kind of activity is only needed where the components of an item and their interrelations are not already known. From this perspective, discovering the structure of our concepts- analyzing them- is akin to discovering the grammar of one's native tongue. One can master that grammar perfectly without having any explicit knowledge of the rules of that grammar. It is the grammarian's job to make explicit the rules implicit in our grammatical knowledgehow, and it is similarly the conceptual analyst's job to make explicit the structure our concepts already implicitly have. 4. Experimental philosophy as laborintensive conceptual analysis In section 2 , I laid out Jackson's program of serious metaphysics, clarifying the role it assigns to conceptual analysis in linking fundamental and derivative truths and addressing the "reduction or elimination" question about the putative referents of notions that do not appear in the fundamental truths. In section 9781474278621_pi-236.indd 30 2/17/2017 11:44:44 AM Metaphysics and Conceptual Analysis 31 31 3 , I tried to show just how complex serious conceptual analysis is. I now want to show that serious conceptual analysis within serious metaphysics provides a novel rationale for xphi. I present the essentials of the idea in section 4.1 , then defend it against objections in section 4.2 . 4.1 Th e laborintensity rationale for experimentalization A rigidifi ed megaLewis sentence with deferential, causal, and perceptual platitudes, as well as a great variety of other platitudes arranged in an extraordinarily complex logical structure- that is a far cry from "bachelor = def unmarried man." Th e precise structure of such a megaLewis sentence is not readily uncovered from the armchair. While the broad contours of a concept such as Sun , wheel, or game may be detected from the armchair by a suffi ciently inventive and industrious philosopher, obtaining the exhaustive list of relevant platitudes, arranging those into the correct disjunction of conjunctions, and fi guring out whether a conditional stratifi cation and/ or a rigidifi cation are needed is an unmanageable task for a solitary armchairbound conceptual analyst. Th e great majority of concepts, I suspect, are such as to require extraordinarily complex Ramsey sentences to capture. Producing the kind of Ramsey sentence that would refl ect correctly their structure is a sort of laborintensive conceptual analysis . My suggestion is that the rationale for experimentalization is the need for this kind of laborintensive conceptual analysis. Given the complexity of most of our concepts, capturing their psychological structure in full detail would require a multitude of teams of researchers working in parallel to (a) produce hypotheses about aspects of Ramsey sentences, (b) devise the thought experiments that could test those hypotheses, and (c) implement the tests through the familiar socialpsychologystyle questionnaires presented to the right kinds of subject. (It is an open question who the right subject is, given the performance/ competence distinction harped on in section 1 . To my mind, at least, it is doubtful that the average, relatively disengaged undergraduate student is it. More on this later.) Producing hypotheses about aspects of Ramsey sentences that fully capture a concept's psychological structure- step (a) of the procedure- is already laborintensive in the present framework. For every concept, the following decision points arise: (i) does the Ramsey sentence involve causal platitudes?; (ii) does it involve perceptual platitudes?; (iii) does it involve deferential platitudes?; (iv) is the Ramsey sentence rigidifi ed?; (v) is it conditionally stratifi ed? Each of these represents a potential confound that a diff erent series of thought experiments 9781474278621_pi-236.indd 31 2/17/2017 11:44:44 AM 32 Uriah Kriegel 32 33 would have to address. But perhaps the hardest part of the task is (vi) to produce the exhaustive list of platitudes for a concept to begin with and (vii) to structure it into the right disjunctionofconjunctions. Take the aforementioned dozen platitudes regarding the sun, plus a half dozen perceptual, causal, and deferential platitudes. Ideally, to fully investigate what it takes for something to qualify as the sun, we would want to know for each possible combination of these eighteen platitudes whether satisfying it is suffi cient for qualifying as the sun. For each combination, then, we would want to create a(n accessible) vignette that puts in concrete form a scenario in which just that combination of platitudes is satisfi ed. Note now two striking facts: (1) given 18 platitudes, the number of possible combinations of them is 262,143; (2) the real number of platitudes associated with the sun is surely much greater than 18, and probably goes well into the hundreds. And we have not yet addressed the issues of rigidifi cation and conditional stratifi cation! Th us generating the total questionnaire and presenting it just to oneself would already be an excessive amount of work, and in any case the resulting task would be too hard for a single subject (concentration will break down, exhaustion will set it, etc.). Diff erent groups of subjects would probably have to be tested for diff erent fragments of some approximation of the real Ramsey sentence for Sun , with the results synthesized by the theorist. Th e point is that fi guring out the actual, correct, full Ramsey sentence for Sun would probably swallow the entire career of a solitary armchairbound conceptual analyst. What would be needed is rather a considerable team (with considerable resources) working together to produce questionnaires with some effi ciency, then "delegating" the production of intuitions on concrete cases presented in the questionnaires (intuitionharvesting, we may call this) to experimental subjects. Effi ciency in producing a questionnaire would be a matter of a priori elimination of certain combinations of platitudes not worth considering, having hunches (at "pretrial," so to speak) on which platitudes are most central and whose interrelations are most in need of examination, and so on. Effi ciency in the administration of the questionnaire would be a matter of fi nding the right groups of subjects, fi nding lowcost access to such subjects (as in SurveyMonkey), and so on. Th ese are hallmarks of experimental research. * * * On the line of thought I am sketching out, we did not in fact need the experimental part of Knobe's paper on the concept intentional action . Th e Knobe Eff ect is detectable from the armchair, as can be seen from the fact that most readers of Knobe's paper have had the majoritarian intuitions about Knobe's 9781474278621_pi-236.indd 32 2/17/2017 11:44:44 AM Metaphysics and Conceptual Analysis 33 33 vignettes. In contrast, which disjuncts of the Ramsey sentence for Sun feature "Th e sun rises in the East" as a conjunct is something that would be tremendously hard to detect from the armchair. Th e point is that while there may be concepts for which armchairbound conceptual analysis can produce the full Ramsey sentence, most concepts are unlike that and require more laborintensive research. At the same time, even for those a (potentially sometimes substantial) fragment of the Ramsey sentences may be obtainable from the armchair. Indeed, some core features of a Ramsey sentence- its least negotiable platitudes, its shortest disjuncts, whether it is rigidifi ed- are arguably reproducible from the armchair. It is the fi ner details of the Ramsey sentence- its most marginal platitudes, its lengthier disjuncts, the nuances of its logical structure- that are most likely to be elusive from the armchair. 28 Th is may invite the question: why should we bother with experimental conceptual analysis at all? 29 We can see why by appreciating the likely relevance of experimental conceptual analysis for Jackson's serious metaphysics, in particular for the choice between reduction and elimination for various putative nonfundamental entities. On the reasonable assumption that suns are not fundamental entities, are there nonetheless suns in our world as described in terms of its fundamental entities? Th at is, are sun existentials entailed by the fundamental truths? We cannot decide this without a clear grasp of what is involved in there being a sun. Even if we have a full theory of what exists expressed in fundamental notions, we still need to know whether some of what exists qualifi es as a sun. And for this we need an analysis of the concept of a sun. Now, it is perfectly possible that in many cases the question of reduction or elimination can be answered by considering a core fragment of a concept's full Ramsey sentence, one potentially obtainable from the armchair. But presumably, for many concepts answering the question of reduction or elimination will require the full Ramsey sentence, or at least a gigantic fragment of it- one unlikely to be obtainable from the armchair. For example, the fact that we are rather confi dent, without leaving the armchair, that some of what there is qualifi es as a sun, suggests that the armchairobtainable fragment of Sun suffi ces to come down on reduction. Th e fact that we are likewise confi dent that none of what there is qualifi es as miasma suggests that the armchairobtainable fragment of miasma suffi ces to come down on elimination. But some cases appear to elude resolution from the armchair. Given how the world is at the fundamental level, is there such a thing as free will? Here reduction and elimination are both live options, and one antecedently plausible diagnosis- not the only one, by any means, but quite a promising one all the 9781474278621_pi-236.indd 33 2/17/2017 11:44:44 AM 34 Uriah Kriegel 34 35 same- is that the concept of freedom (free action as well as free decision) is so complex that nothing we have uncovered so far suffi ces to resolve the reductionor elimination question. 30 My suggestion, then, is that the need for experimentalization arises as follows. First of all, certain questions of serious metaphysics require conceptual analysis to answer: it is impossible to establish whether certain nonfundamental statements are true, notably existentials invoking notions absent in all fundamental truths, without conceptual analysis of the relevant notions. However, the psychological reality of our concepts is a lot messier than early conceptual analysts had realized. In particular, concepts' structure typically cannot be captured in a simple defi nition with a small number of severally necessary and conjointly suffi cient conditions. Rather, an extraordinarily complex Ramsey sentence is required, requiring laborintensive conceptual analysis to formulate. Crucially, the complexity of the Ramsey sentence oft en exceeds what can be reproduced from the armchair. Sometimes an armchairreproducible fragment of the Ramsey sentence may suffi ce for the reduction/ elimination adjudication, but plausibly, sometimes experimentalization becomes inevitable for settling the question of reduction or elimination. 4.2 Objections and replies It may be objected that the laborintensity rationale for experimentalization does not overcome the problem that arises around the performance/ competence distinction. Th at problem attended other proposed rationales discussed in section 1 , but laborintensive conceptual analysis would face the same problem. In response, I agree that laborintensity by itself does not address the performance/ competence gap. Th at issue must be addressed independently. One way to address it is to designate philosophers as the competent intuiters and run one's surveys with large groups of philosophersubjects. Th is would already be much more effi cient than writing a whole paper about some thought experiments, submitting it to journals, getting it published, and then seeing whether the philosophical community at large tends to converge on the expected intuition(s). Another way to address the performance/ competence gap is through appeal to nonphilosophers who are not entirely naïve either. Early introspectionists such as Wundt and Titchner required subjects to undergo a set number of trials before being considered competent introspectors; a similar device, perhaps more nuanced, could be used to "train up" competent intuiters, that is, subjects enjoying special facility with thought experiments, outlandish scenarios, 9781474278621_pi-236.indd 34 2/17/2017 11:44:44 AM Metaphysics and Conceptual Analysis 35 35 counterfactual reasoning about them, and so on. Perhaps simply raising the stakes for undergraduates, so that they are properly engaged with the question, say by promising them (misleadingly) a nontrivial payment if "they get the right answer," would enhance the quality of results. Coff ee, relaxing atmosphere, the right time of day, a light intellectual warmup before the real questionnaire- all these may enhance quality and do something to address the performance/ competence gap. What matters for our purposes is that these ways of addressing the gap are compatible with the laborintensity rationale for experimentalization. In contrast, the rationale that appealed to a potential discrepancy between philosophers' and folk intuitions to justify experimentalization, for example, seems only to aggravate the challenge presented by the performance/ competence gap. Another objection might be that many of our concepts are simply incoherent- or just include confl icting "streaks"- so that a Ramsey sentence that described them fully would have to be incoherent as well. In this circumstance, it is more natural to think of philosophy's job as not just to expose the structure of our concepts but also to "reform" or "stabilize" them- essentially, to replace them with similar but coherent concepts. If so, exposing incoherencies and internal tensions in our everyday concepts is also part of experimental philosophy's contribution. My response is twofold. First, I am very skeptical of claims that folk concepts are oft en incoherent. Th ere is a sense in which they may have diff erent streaks in tension, but these more likely work together within a complex structure. For example, certain thought experiments may bring out a streak in our concept of life that privileges reference to vital forces, others reference to a cluster of capacities. Th is may superfi cially seem like an incoherence, but upon careful examination may turn out to fi t within a perfectly coherent but conditionally stratifi ed concept. In general, it may well be common that among the platitudes associated with a concept C, we might fi nd both p and ~ p ; but presumably these will be insulated from each other within the overall logical structure of the Lewis sentence for C ( p will be a conjunct in some disjuncts of the Lewis sentence, while ~ p will be a conjunct in other disjuncts). It is very hard to make sense of the idea of an incoherent yet serviceable concept. More plausibly, then, apparently confl icting streaks in a concept cohabit consistently within the concept's complex logical structure. To that extent, demonstrating the incoherence or instability of a concept requires much more than just bringing out apparently confl icting streaks; it also requires falsifying or disconfi rming hypotheses about the concept's structure that would reconcile the apparently confl icting streaks in a complex (mega- )Lewis sentence. 31 9781474278621_pi-236.indd 35 2/17/2017 11:44:44 AM 36 Uriah Kriegel 36 37 Secondly, although some xphi research clearly attempts to demonstrate the incoherence or instability of folk concepts, this research is better thought of as part of xphi's negative program. As noted in section 1 , however, my goal in this paper is only to identify a rationale for xphi's positive program. I readily confess that nothing about the project of serious metaphysics, and the role it assigns to conceptual analysis, rationalizes experimental research within xphi's negative program. A third objection is that while some concepts have the kind of extraordinarily complex structure that can only be fully tackled with experimentalist effi ciency, this is not the case for the kinds of concept philosophers tend to be interested in. Th e concepts knowledge , reference , or proposition , for example, are not going to require a rigidifi ed conditionally stratifi ed enormous disjunction of enormous conjunctions to capture. However, it is actually very possible that a full and accurate capture of knowledge would require quite a complicated Ramsey sentence. One possible diagnosis of the postGettier literature on the analysis of knowledge might be that it has been hampered by excessive allegiance to the hope that a compact number of severally necessary and conjointly suffi cient conditions could fully capture the concept of knowledge. We just need to be more creative: add a fourth condition to JBT (Lehrer & Paxson, 1969 ), replace J with a reliability condition (Goldman, 1967 ), or some such. In a recent paper, Sosa ( 2009 ) appears to off er an eightcondition analysis of "S knows full well that p ." 32 I suspect this more expansive account still grossly underestimates the internal complexity of knowledge . One can only speculate here, but it may well be that the atmosphere of general dissatisfaction with the deliverances of the literature on the analysis of knowledge will not dissipate until a more laborintensive approach to the concept is deliberately taken. It could also turn out, of course, that despite initial appearances, knowledge succumbs to relatively straightforward analysis. Arguably, this turned out to be the case, contra Wittgenstein, with the concept game , which I take to have already been analyzed satisfactorily in terms of four independently necessary and conjointly suffi cient conditions (Suits, 1978 ). In any case, as long as we do not actually possess a satisfactory analysis of some concept philosophers are interested in, as appears to be the case with knowledge , it remains an open possibility that the reason is that we have underestimated the concept's complexity; that would already justify pursuing experimental conceptual analysis alongside armchair conceptual analysis. In any case, I fully recognize that the role I am assigning here to xphi is relatively limited. To that extent, my position is intermediate between 9781474278621_pi-236.indd 36 2/17/2017 11:44:44 AM Metaphysics and Conceptual Analysis 37 37 the revolutionary zeal of some xphi proponents and the dismissive disdain of some xphi opponents. Let me close with fi nal comments on the potential charge, already discussed in section 3 , that the various devices therein used to accommodate Kripkean, Putnamian, and Burgean insights fail to get us beyond the descriptive content of concepts- whereas the whole point of Kripke, Putnam, and Burge was that there is more to a concept's semantic profi le than its descriptive content. Clearly, this is not the place to litigate issues of descriptivism versus direct reference, semantic internalism versus externalism, and so on. As noted, however, even if there is more to a concept than its descriptive content, it is the concept's descriptive component that lends itself to informative analysis. Accordingly, it is in virtue of its descriptive content that the concept plays a role in serious metaphysics. Importantly, if there are concepts that have no descriptive content, and simply refer to whatever causes their tokenings (say), then arguably the question of reduction or elimination does not arise for their putative referents. Since something certainly causes tokenings of C, it is trivial that C has a referent, and therefore that reductivism rather than eliminativism is true of C's referent. 33 Indeed, it is this reasoning that convinced Stich to forsake his original eliminativism about belief and desire (see Jackson, 2009 ; Stich, 1979). Now, if all concepts were of this sort, then conceptual analysis would indeed disappear from serious metaphysics, and reductivism would be the right view about all nonfundamentals. But we already know that this cannot be: some concepts are empty ( phlogiston, miasma, ghost , Escher triangle , etc.). So we know that some concepts refer at least partly via a descriptive content, which unfortunately is not always satisfi ed by something. 34 For such concepts' putative referents, the question of reduction or elimination arises, and conceptual analysis- potentially with an experimental component- is inevitable for deciding the question. 35 Conclusion: A place under the sun A fi nal objection may be that my proposed rationale for experimental philosophy places the latter squarely within a very traditional, conservative conception of philosophy. Th is might not suit the selfconception of xphi practitioners, who tend to paint experimental philosophy in more revolutionary colors. Some of them may well consider Jackson's project downright reactionary. In response, I can only confess that my proposed rationale for xphi embeds it in a very traditional conception of the philosophical project. Th is is by design. 9781474278621_pi-236.indd 37 2/17/2017 11:44:44 AM 38 Uriah Kriegel 38 39 For reasons I cannot go into here (but see Kriegel, 2016 ), I consider the project Jackson articulates as the core project of philosophy. Seeking a total theory of the world in terms of a privileged subset of fundamental notions, and then fi nding the place (if any) of putative nonfundamentals in it- that is the project we fi nd from the Eleatics and Aristotle through Aquinas, Spinoza, and Brentano to Lewis, Sider, and Schaff er. Aristotle designated Th ales as the fi rst philosopher- Th ales, who instructed that everything was water! What makes this a piece of philosophy, however disappointing? Th e answer is that Th ales's thesis "is discriminatory, and it claims completeness." More specifi cally, it cites only water truths in its theory of everything, but claims that nothing in the world is left unaccounted for by these water truths. Th e central thread of the history of philosophy, as I see it, is the search for improvements on Th ales's theory- theories both complete and discriminatory that are just better than Th ales's. Obviously, I have not argued for this here. But from my perspective, the best way to ratify the status of xphi as genuine philosophy (as opposed to cognitive science performed by academics whose tenure home is a philosophy department) is to identify a role for xphi within this traditional project originating with Th ales. And indeed, I have claimed that xphi does have a role within this core project of philosophy, albeit a somewhat limited one: xphi provides supplementation and intensifi cation of methods for pursuing a component of this project (the component pertaining to analysis of concepts), which intensifi cation may sometimes be needed to settle the status of nonfundamentals in the theory. On this view, the methodological innovations of xphi- at least as far as its positive program is concerned- pertain not to intellectual ends , but to the means for pursuing already entrenched ends. In this respect, armchair conceptual analysis and xphi are far from rivals; on the contrary, they complement each other in pursuit of a common goal (Jackson, 2008 , 2011 ). 36 Notes 1 Th is is certainly more plausible than the hypothesis that their concept of intentional action is diff erent from yours and mine and lacks the normative aspect Knobe claims yours and mine have. 2 A concept's extension is the set of worldly items that fall under it; its intension, very roughly and to a very fi rst approximation, is the "general rule" for its application. Th e concept bachelor 's intension is something like "anything that is an unmarried man" and its extension is the collection of bachelors. 9781474278621_pi-236.indd 38 2/17/2017 11:44:45 AM Metaphysics and Conceptual Analysis 39 39 3 It might be objected that for Gettier, writing his paper was not the fi rst step in conducting an empirical test. Whatever testing was involved in Gettier's process, it was over by the time Gettier wrote and published the article. Th e purpose of writing and publishing the article was to let us know that there are counterexamples to JBT- not to check whether there are such. However, from the perspective of the community of inquiry, nothing was established simply by Gettier thinking up scenarios and intuiting about them. It is only because Gettier's scenarios and intuitions were so good , and produced immediate and predictable assent in the community at large, that Gettier could write up his paper with the confi dent purpose of just letting us know something. 4 According to Google Scholar, Gettier's paper has been cited almost 2000 times. Oversimplifying a lot for the sake of drama, one could boldly assert on this basis that Gettier's pool of relevant subjects is in fact considerably larger than Knobe's. 5 Th is point is related to the socalled expertise defense of traditional armchair conceptual analysis (Kauppinen, 2007 ; Williamson, 2011 ). 6 Another is that philosophers usually consider both of Knobe's scenarios, whereas experimental subjects are provided with only one of them. In general, socialpsychology style experiments in which subjects are presented with contrasts yield diff erent results than ones in which subjects are divided into groups each of which is presented with only one side of the theorist's intended contrast. (Th anks to Brent Strickland for pointing this out to me.) 7 More generally, although one can imagine an experimental study revealing to philosopher readers the error of their ways, it is harder to imagine the study doing this solely by laying out folk intuitions that manifestly diff er from philosophers' intuitions. In saying "solely," I want to rule out here cases in which a study involves an ingenious new thought experiment that philosophers had not previously considered, or raises substantive considerations that philosophers had previously failed to appreciate. For those elements do not go to the study's status as experimental and could be integrated into any piece of traditional armchair philosophy. 8 I have personally engaged in translations from French and German to English and from English to Hebrew and can attest that the phenomenology of the nonidentity of translating and translated words is very stark. 9 Th e reasons to adopt a principle of charity in this area are the same as the reasons to adopt the principle of charity in interpretation in general: (a) there are transcendental rationality constraints on the understanding of others (Davidson, 1974 ) and (b) there are evolutionary pressures to weed out incoherent concepts, irrational beliefs, and so on (Dennett, 1987 ). 10 Of course, an alternative reaction to the truthinsensitivity fi ndings is to dismiss instinctual verdicts on thoughtexperimental scenarios and replace them with 9781474278621_pi-236.indd 39 2/17/2017 11:44:45 AM 40 Uriah Kriegel 40 41 considered verdicts in the study of concepts- verdicts formed aft er suitable refl ection, including philosophical refl ection. 11 It may still have something indirectly to do with philosophy, insofar as philosophers can and oft en do appeal to empirical science, including social psychology (of which xphi is a branch), to inform their treatment of traditional philosophical problems. 12 I am assuming here that there is some substantive essence to philosophy. Just as the "institutional theory of art" claims that what makes an object a piece of art is simply the fact that it is in a museum, one could paddle an "institutional theory of philosophy" according to which what makes a bit of inquiry philosophy is that it is performed by people salaried by philosophy departments. I am assuming here that this is false. One counterexample to it is Plato, who was not salaried by any philosophy department, but whose work is philosophical; obviously, there are many others. 13 I develop my take on the matter in Kriegel ( 2016 ). 14 I use "statement" as conveniently ambiguous between proposition and sentence, and "notion" as conveniently ambiguous between concept and word. In either reading, a notion is a constituent of a statement. 15 Essentially the same project is developed in greater detail in David Chalmers's Constructing the World (2012). Chalmers goes beyond Jackson in arguing for the central presupposition of serious metaphysics, namely, that there exists a small group of truths from which all others can be derived. In addition, for Chalmers the relationship between fundamental and derivative truths is that of "scrutability," where " p is scrutable from q " means that the conjunction of q and all a priori truths deductively entail p . 16 Tautologies using derivative notions, such as "Every policeman is a policeman" may still be entailed by the fundamental truths, but nontautological statements with derivative notions will not. 17 Existentials are in some respects the most basic nonfundamental statements requiring conceptual analysis to assess the truth of (given the fundamental truths). For other statements invoking a nonfundamental notion N will typically entail existentials in which the existence of N's referent or extension will be claimed. 18 Observe that the example, which will follow us through much of the paper, concerns the sun and not a sun. Accordingly, I label the concept Sun (uppercase "s") rather than sun (lowercase "s"). 19 In other words, the MerriamWebster Ramsey sentence is as follows: ( Sun MW ) Th ere is a (single) x , such that x is the luminous celestial body, around x revolve the earth and other planets, from x the planets receive heat and light, x is composed mainly of hydrogen and helium, x has a mean distance from earth of about 93,000,000 miles (150,000,000 km), x has a linear diameter of 864,000 miles (1,390,000 km), and x has a mass 332,000 times greater than earth. 9781474278621_pi-236.indd 40 2/17/2017 11:44:45 AM Metaphysics and Conceptual Analysis 41 41 20 Quine's picture of how concepts work thus diff ers from the traditional descriptivist picture along two dimensions. First, in lieu of the dichotomy between fully nonnegotiable and fully negotiable statements about Cs, it off ers a gradient model in which statements about Cs vary in their degree of negotiability (or revisability) along a spectrum. Secondly, in Quine's model there are no fully nonnegotiable statements about Cs- no convictions whose degree of revisability is strictly zero. (One might have proposed that concepts work like dimmer lights: once they are on, they have degrees of brightness, but they can also be completely off , with the diff erence between "on" and "off " being binary and determinate. But in Quine's model there is no "off " mode for negotiability: there are only degrees of brightness in the "on" mode.) 21 At the same time, reference failure may result from suffi ciently many relatively marginal platitudes turning out to be false. Still, it is a measure of a platitude's centrality that its weight is such as to induce reference failure in conspiracy with relatively few other falsifi ed platitudes. Th e falsifi cation of "Th e sun is more or less spherical" would have to be combined with more similar instances than the falsifi cation of "Th e sun is extremely hot" to results in Sun failing to refer (i.e., turning out to be an empty concept). 22 I say "most" because in the case imagined at least eight platitudes needed to be true, which means that some disjuncts have more than eight conjuncts in them. 23 One might also imagine deferential platitudes that defer not to the current experts, but to something like the endofinquiry experts. If there is this kind of deferential dimension in some concepts, it would explain why those concepts can corefer before and aft er scientifi c revolutions. 24 Th e moral I would draw from the discussion of these three challenges is that although diff erent individuals' concepts of the sun may be modeled by diff erent Ramsey sentences, communication between these individuals is nonetheless possible because, and to the extent that, there is suffi cient overlap among the Ramsey sentences that capture their respective concepts. Crucially, diff erent individuals probably share perceptual, causal, and deferential platitudes, and typically also a number of other convictions about the sun. Furthermore, for many concepts, the Kripkean causal platitude and the Putnamian perceptual platitudes are highly central, perhaps even nonnegotiable: they appear in most or all disjuncts of the relevant Lewis sentence. Sun is a case in point. If "Th e sun is that of which I seem to be perceptually aware when I have my sunexperiences" turns out to be false, my concept of sun may well be empty aft er all. If so, this platitude should show up in every disjunct of the Lewis sentence for my sun concept. Plausibly, now, the analogous platitude will appear in every disjunct of the Lewis sentence for my interlocutor's sun concept. Th is kind of core overlap undergirds communication. 25 Hawthorne and BraddonMitchell apply this to the concept consciousness , with the thought that it works a bit like the concept life : if there is a primitive, 9781474278621_pi-236.indd 41 2/17/2017 11:44:45 AM 42 Uriah Kriegel 42 43 irreducible property of consciousness, then consciousness picks out it, but if there is none, then consciousness picks out a cluster of functional feature associated with conscious states. Th is is supposed to show that the conceivability of zombies is perfectly compatible with physicalism about consciousness. 26 As a general rule, it is important to keep in mind that it is not the Ramsifi cation's job to tell us what is intuitive- only to capture whatever psychological structure emerges from what we deem intuitive. I will return to this point in section 4 . 27 It does not follow, however, that every concept's structure is correctly described by a rigidifi ed megaLewis sentence with deferential, causal, and perceptual platitudes. Rigidifi cation, for example, is relevant only to TwinEarthable concepts; concepts such as friend are not TwinEarthable, and therefore do not call for rigidifi cation. Meanwhile, concepts such as bachelor are rather fl at and structureless, and so do not call for the prioritization characterizing megaLewis sentences. Nor do friend , bachelor , or cup call for deferential or perceptual platitudes (there seem to be no recognized friendship experts to whom the lay implicitly defer and no perceptual acquaintance needed to be competent with these concepts). 28 I leave it open whether every fragment of the Ramsey sentence for Sun could in principle be detected from the armchair, though they could not all be, or whether there are fragments so intricate that experimentalization is necessary to uncover them. 29 A traditionalist armchair philosopher might argue that my proposed rationale for experimentalization only underscores the insignifi cance of xphi, as it calls on the latter only for the fi ner, less central details of concepts. Th ere are a priori reasons to suspect that this cannot be quite right. Philosophy of science used to be in the business of telling scientists what they do wrong. Modern philosophy of science has wisely restricted itself to trying to understand why science works the way it does, rather than trying to reform it. One suspects that the same humble approach would suit the "philosophy of philosophy." Clearly, xphi is a fl ourishing research program. So our fi rst priority should be to understand what contributions it makes to research that sustain its fl ourishing. (One could alternatively go for sociological explanations in terms of changing fashions, of course, but this seems rightly thought of as a lastresort explanation.) 30 Another diagnosis is that our empirical knowledge about the world at the fundamental level is insuffi cient to come down on reduction or elimination of free will. Th is second diagnosis does not seem more antecedently plausible. Indeed, it seems to me antecedently less plausible. 31 Note that however many such hypotheses we would falsify, charity would exhort us to seek others before adopting the thesis that the concept is incoherent. 32 Sosa's analysis, if I have understood it correctly, is this: S knows full well that p iff (i) S believes that p , (ii) S's belief that p is true, (iii) S's belief that p is competently 9781474278621_pi-236.indd 42 2/17/2017 11:44:45 AM Metaphysics and Conceptual Analysis 43 43 held, (iv) it is the case that (ii) because it is the case that (iii) (read: S's belief that p is apt), (v) S's decision to make a judgment on whether p is correct (i.e., is the right decision), (vi) S's decision to make a judgment on whether p is competent, (vii) it is the case that (v) because it is the case that (vi) (read: S's belief that p is metaapt), and (viii) it is the case that (iv) because it is the case that (vi). Th is is complicated by the standard of armchair conceptual analysis, but is very "clean" as compared to the kind of metaLewis sentence I suspect our concept of the sun would require. 33 It is a separate question whether the referent is a homogeneous kind or property, on the one hand, or a "wildly disjunctive" one on the other; but either way there will be a cause. 34 When I say a concept refers partly via a description, I mean that the description at least puts constraints on the kinds of thing that are eligible referents of the concept. Th at thesis would always be a lastresort view. 35 Th ere is also the view, of course, that all concepts involve such a descriptive component, or at least that there is a notion of reference that is determined in part by descriptive content (Jackson, 2009 ). 36 Th is work was supported by the French National Research Agency's ANR11000102 PSL* and ANR10LABX0087. 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