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Conceptual analysis as armchair psychology: in defense of methodological naturalism

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Abstract

Three proponents of the Canberra Plan, namely Jackson, Pettit, and Smith, have developed a collective functionalist program—Canberra Functionalism—spanning from philosophical psychology to ethics. They argue that conceptual analysis is an indispensible tool for research on cognitive processes since it reveals that there are some folk concepts, like belief and desire, whose functional roles must be preserved rather than eliminated by future scientific explanations. Some naturalists have recently challenged this indispensability argument, though the point of that challenge has been blunted by a mutual conflation of metaphysical and methodological strands of naturalism. I argue that the naturalist’s challenge to the indispensability argument, like naturalism itself, ought to be reformulated as a strictly methodological thesis. So understood, the challenge succeeds by showing (1) that we cannot know a priori on the basis of conceptual analysis of folk platitudes that something must occupy the functional roles specified for beliefs and desires, and (2) that proponents of Canberra Functionalism sometimes tacitly concede this point by treating substantive psychological theories as the deliverances of a priori platitudes analysis.

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Notes

  1. FP will also stand for “folk psychology.”

  2. Or, alternatively, have their references fixed by the theories in which we find them (see Jackson and Pettit 1990, p. 37).

  3. The generic label “naturalism” in this dispute is a bit misleading since the Canberra Planners take their method to be naturalistic, too. Indeed the Canberra Plan is sometimes called “naturalistic analysis” (see Braddon-Mitchell and Nola 2009). For the sake of consistency, however, I will continue to follow JPS’s lead in using the term “philosophical naturalism” to pick out their opposition, a non-CF form of naturalism that is the source of the particular objection to CA that I consider in this paper.

  4. According to Jackson & Pettit (1990, p. 53–4, n24), the naturalist position under consideration informs the approach of Devitt (1984), and Sterelney and Devitt convinced them of the need to address it.

  5. The source of the quotation is an article authored by Jackson and Pettit (“In Defence of Folk Psychology”, Philosophical Studies 5, 1990) and not Smith. But it has since been reprinted in the collective volume, Mind, Morality, and Explanation (2004), where they explicitly declare their commitment to a collective projective. For that reason I will continue to treat the argument presented in Jackson and Pettit (1990) as a part of JPS’s collective defense of the Canberra Plan.

  6. This is evident from the growing body of philosophical literature concerned with the application of data from psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience to disputes in philosophical psychology. Recent scientifically informed philosophical work on moral motivation is an excellent example (e.g., Kennett 2002; Kennett and Fine 2009; Schroeder et al. 2010).

  7. Of course one could try to show that each of these ideas preserves the structure of higher-level FP concepts but that is quite clearly a difficult empirical project the success of which we cannot just take for granted.

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Correspondence to Daniel F. Hartner.

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Hartner, D.F. Conceptual analysis as armchair psychology: in defense of methodological naturalism. Philos Stud 165, 921–937 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9981-9

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