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Bulah Landaker
Philosophical analysis is any of various techniques, typically used by philosophers in the analytic tradition, in order to "break down" (i.e. analyze) philosophical issues. Arguably the most prominent of these techniques is the analysis of concepts (known as conceptual analysis).
While analysis is characteristic of the analytic tradition in philosophy, what is to be analyzed (the analysandum) often varies. In their papers, philosophers may focus on different areas. One might analyze linguistic phenomena such as sentences, or psychological phenomena such as sense data. However, arguably the most prominent analyses are written on concepts or propositions and are known as conceptual analysis (Foley 1996).
A.C. Ewing distinguished between two forms of philosophical analysis. The first is "what the persons who make a certain statement usually intend to assert" and the second "the qualities, relations and species of continuants mentioned in the statement". As an illustration he takes the statement "I see a tree", this statement could be analysed in terms what the everyday person intends what they say this or it could be analysed metaphysically by asserting representationalism.[1]
Conceptual analysis consists primarily in breaking down or analyzing concepts into their constituent parts in order to gain knowledge or a better understanding of a particular philosophical issue in which the concept is involved (Beaney 2003). For example, the problem of free will in philosophy involves various key concepts, including the concepts of freedom, moral responsibility, determinism, ability, etc. The method of conceptual analysis tends to approach such a problem by breaking down the key concepts pertaining to the problem and seeing how they interact. Thus, in the long-standing debate on whether free will is compatible with the doctrine of determinism, several philosophers have proposed analyses of the relevant concepts to argue for either compatibilism or incompatibilism.
Further, the analytic method seems to rely on some sort of definitional structure of concepts, so that one can give necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of the concept. For example, the concept "bachelor" is often analyzed as having the concepts "unmarried" and "male" as its components. Thus, the definition or analysis of "bachelor" is thought to be an unmarried male. But one might worry that these so-called necessary and sufficient conditions do not apply in every case. Wittgenstein, for instance, argues that language (e.g., the word 'bachelor') is used for various purposes and in an indefinite number of ways. Wittgenstein's famous thesis states that meaning is determined by use. This means that, in each case, the meaning of 'bachelor' is determined by its use in a context. So if it can be shown that the word means different things across different contexts of use, then cases where its meaning cannot be essentially defined as 'unmarried man' seem to constitute counterexamples to this method of analysis. This is just one example of a critique of the analytic method derived from a critique of definitions. There are several other such critiques (Margolis & Laurence 2006). This criticism is often said to have originated primarily with Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations.
A third critique of the method of analysis derives primarily from psychological critiques of intuition. A key part of the analytic method involves analyzing concepts via "intuition tests". Philosophers tend to motivate various conceptual analyses by appeal to their intuitions about thought experiments. (See DePaul and Ramsey (1998) for a collection of current essays on the controversy over analysis as it relates to intuition and reflective equilibrium.)
Analytic philosophy is a broad, contemporary movement or tradition within Western philosophy and especially anglophone philosophy, focused on analysis.[a][b] Analytic philosophy is characterized by a style of clarity of prose and rigor in arguments, making use of formal logic and mathematics, and, to a lesser degree, the natural sciences.[3][4][c][d][e] It is further characterized by an interest in language and meaning known as the linguistic turn.[8][f][g][h] It has developed several new branches of philosophy and logic, notably philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of science, modern predicate logic and mathematical logic.[12]
The proliferation of analysis in philosophy began around the turn of the 20th century and has been dominant since the latter half of the 20th century.[13][14][15][i] Central figures in its historical development are Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Other important figures in its history include Franz Brentano, the logical positivists (particularly Rudolf Carnap), the ordinary language philosophers, W. V. O. Quine, and Karl Popper. After the decline of logical positivism, Saul Kripke, David Lewis, and others led a revival in metaphysics.
Analytic philosophy is often contrasted with continental philosophy,[j] coined as a catch-all term for other methods, prominent in continental Europe,[k] most notably existentialism, phenomenology, and Hegelianism.[l][m][n] There is widespread influence and debate between the analytic and continental traditions; some philosophers see the differences between the two traditions as being based on institutions, relationships, and ideology rather than anything of significant philosophical substance.[22][23] The distinction has also been drawn as analytic is academic or technical philosophy, while continental is literary philosophy.[o][p]
Analytic philosophy was deeply influenced by what is called Austrian realism in the former state of Austria-Hungary, so much so that Michael Dummett has remarked that analytic philosophy is better characterized as Anglo-Austrian rather than the usual Anglo-American.[28]
University of Vienna philosopher and psychologist Franz Brentano in Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874), through the subsequent influence of the School of Brentano and its members, such as Edmund Husserl and Alexius Meinong, gave to analytic philosophy the problem of intentionality or of aboutness.[29] For Brentano, all mental events have a real, non-mental intentional object which the thinking is directed at or "about".
As a result of his logicist project, Frege developed predicate logic in the Begriffsschrift (English: Concept-script, 1879), which allowed a much greater range of sentences to be parsed into logical form than was possible using the ancient Aristotelian logic.[q] An example of this is the problem of multiple generality.
Neo-Kantianism dominated the late 19th century in German philosophy. Edmund Husserl's 1891 book Philosophie der Arithmetik argued that the concept of the cardinal number derived from psychical acts of grouping objects and counting them.[32]
Frege also proved influential in the philosophy of language and analytic philosophy's interest in meaning.[33] Michael Dummett traces the linguistic turn to Frege's Foundations of Arithmetic and his context principle.[34]
Frege's paper On Sense and Reference (1892) is seminal, containing Frege's puzzles and providing a mediated reference theory. His paper The Thought: A Logical Inquiry (1918) reflects both his anti-idealism or anti-psychologism and his interest in language. In the paper he argues for a platonist account of propositions or thoughts.
British philosophy in the 19th century had seen a revival of logic started by Richard Whately, in reaction to the anti-logical tradition of British empiricism. The major figure of this period is English mathematician George Boole. Other figures include William Hamilton, Augustus de Morgan, William Stanley Jevons, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland author Lewis Carroll,[r] Hugh MacColl, and American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce.[35]
Bertrand Russell, during his early career, was much influenced by Frege. Russell famously discovered the paradox in Basic Law V which undermined Frege's logicist project. However, like Frege, Russell argued that mathematics is reducible to logical fundamentals in The Principles of Mathematics (1903). He also argued for Meinongianism.[38]
Russell sought to resolve various philosophical problems by applying Frege's new logical apparatus, most famously in his theory of definite descriptions in "On Denoting", published in Mind in 1905.[39] Russell here argues against Meinongianism. He argues all names (aside from demonstratives like "this" or "that") are disguised definite descriptions, using this to solve ascriptions of nonexistence. This position came to be called descriptivism.
Additionally, Russell adopted Frege's predicate logic as his primary philosophical method, a method Russell thought could expose the underlying structure of philosophical problems. Logical form would be made clear by syntax. For example, the English word "is" has three distinct meanings which predicate logic can express as follows:
From about 1910 to 1930, analytic philosophers like Frege, Russell, Moore, and Russell's student Ludwig Wittgenstein emphasized creating an ideal language for philosophical analysis, which would be free from the ambiguities of ordinary language that, in their opinion, often made philosophy invalid. During this phase, they sought to understand language (and hence philosophical problems) by using logic to formalize how philosophical statements are made.
Wittgenstein developed a comprehensive system of logical atomism with a picture theory of meaning in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (German: Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung, 1921) sometimes known as simply the Tractatus. He claimed the universe is the totality of actual states of affairs and that these states of affairs can be expressed and mirrored by the language of first-order predicate logic. Thus a picture of the universe can be constructed by expressing facts in the form of atomic propositions and linking them using logical operators.
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