Chapter 3 - Philosophical Analysis as Cognitive Psychology: The Case of Empty Concepts

Abstract

This chapter starts by saying that the Classical philosophical view of concepts as having necessary and sufficient defining conditions has fallen on hard times, supposedly both in philosophy and psychology. However, it argues that both its character and its motivation have been misunderstood. Classical View is committed to claim the conceptual connections that underlie an agent's competence to make modal judgments about what would satisfy the concept in actual and counterfactual circumstances, and related facts about what an agent finds intelligible. The chapter focuses on ascriptions of concepts of existent phenomena—plants, animals, artifacts, which permit an ordinary existential construal of those ascriptions, and a consequent misleading reliance on actual phenomena in identifying the concept. The chapter argues that empty concepts of nonexistent things force one to a purely intentional construal, and to a consideration of concepts proper, and the need of classical analyses. Analyses seem to be needed, despite their not being as readily available as many philosophers and psychologists might have hoped.