Conceptual Analysis

Conceptual analysis is the philosophical method of clarifying a concept by specifying its necessary and sufficient conditions — the conditions that any instance must satisfy, and that together are enough to establish membership in the concept's extension. The method dominated twentieth-century analytic philosophy: analyses of knowledge, causation, justice, personal identity, and meaning were pursued by seeking conditions that captured intuitive judgments about cases. The Gettier problem is the most famous demonstration of the method's difficulty — a three-page paper destroyed the received analysis of knowledge by exhibiting cases where all proposed conditions were met but the target concept was intuitively absent. Whether this shows that conceptual analysis is an inadequate method or that the analysis was simply incomplete is itself a contested question in epistemology and metaphysics. The method's defenders argue that paradigm shifts in analysis are normal progress; its critics argue that the perpetual generation of counterexamples to proposed conditions suggests that many concepts resist the method in principle.