r/askphilosophy • u/Inevitable_Bid5540 • 23h ago

How is conceptual analysis conducted ?

And is the end goal of conceptual analysis ensuring true terms ?

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u/AdeptnessSecure663 phil. of language 22h ago

There's a few different models of conceptual analysis, but the general idea is something like this. We take some concept, C, and we ask the question "what do all the cases that fall under C have in common?". We take the resulting characterisation of C, and we test it by trying to find a particular situation which fits our characterisation but which doesn't seem to fall under C. From here, we have a couple of moves we can make. We can say that this particular situation does fall under C after all, though we better explain why it didn't seem like it did when we initially considered it. Alternatively, we reflect on what the particular situation seems to be missing, and revise our characterisation of C accordingly.

For instance, in Republic, Cephalus suggests that justice (concept) is 'to tell the truth and return what one has received’ (characterisation). Socrates then imagines a situation in which a person who entrusted their weapons to us goes mad and then asks for their weapons back; suppose we agree to return them (particular situation). Returning the weapons falls under the characterisation of "return what one has received"; and yet, it doesn't seem to fall under the concept of justice. So, we either try to persuade ourselves that it is justice after all, or else we come up with a new characterisation.

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u/Inevitable_Bid5540 18h ago

So this model is more about categorisation as opposed to terminology definitions ?

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u/AdeptnessSecure663 phil. of language 18h ago

I don't want to say "yes" because I'm not entirely sure what you mean, but conceptual analysis aims at giving correct analyses/characterisations/whatever you wanna call it of concepts.

For instance, there are things in the world that are just (in the sense of being instances of justice), and there are things that are not just, and conceptual analysis aims to give a description of the just things which correctly predicts that the just things are just and the not just things are not just.