Philosophical analysis.

It is common for philosophers to offer philosophical accounts or analyses, as they are sometimes called, of knowledge, autonomy, representation, (moral) goodness, reference, and even modesty.1 These philosophical analyses raise deep questions. What is it that is being analyzed (i.e. what sorts of things are the objects of analysis)? What sort of thing is the analysis itself (a proposition? sentence?)? Under what conditions is an analysis correct? How can a correct analysis be informative? How, if at all, does the production of philosophical analyses differ from what scientists do? The purpose of the present paper is to provide answers to these questions. The traditional answers to the first and last of these questions are that concepts are the objects of philosophical analysis and that philosophical analyses differ from the results of scientific investigation in being conceptual analyses. Like many philosophers I am suspicious of the notions of concept and conceptual analysis as traditionally understood. Though the critique of these notions is beyond the scope of the present work, the answers I shall give to the questions raised above shall not invoke concepts (understood as things distinct from properties).2 I count it as a virtue of my account that it is able to provide answers to the questions raised above without an appeal to concepts. And to the extent that it has been felt that concepts are needed to answer these questions, the present account weakens the case for positing concepts. Before addressing these questions, however, we shall make the simplifying assumption that analyses are given in a “canonical form”. In particular, we shall assume that they are stated as universally quantified biconditionals. An analysis of voluntary action, for example, will be given in the following canonical form: