Question Why are philosophers these days so concerned with fleshing out possible rules for concepts (e.g., Crispin Wright's analysis of intentions)? Do they believe that people actually follow these rules? But how can that be if most (if not all) people can't even say what these rules are precisely? And wouldn't a more plausible answer be found in our being conditioned to behave in certain (imprecise) manners with certain words or phrases, much like, e.g., learning to use our legs to walk? If so, shouldn't this be more a matter of empirical investigation (on the level of science) than this sort of conceptual analysis?

Accepted:
October 19, 2005

Comments

Philosophers have been trying to articulate rules for unobvious things like intentions for quite a while. The more careful accounts don't suppose that those rules are ones that we self-consciously follow. Rather, those rules, insofar as we are supposed to follow them, as ones that we follow implicitly or unconsciously. By analogy, linguistics who work in the area known as syntax postulate quite complicated rules that most of us master by around age five. However, the linguists who suppose this don't have to say that this mastery is one that is conscious, or even could be made conscious if we tried. Similarly, a philosopher might postulate a complicated basis for our behavior without getting hung up on the extent to which that basis is something of which we are consciously aware. Most would say that proceeding in this way still gives us a much more precise handle on the phenomena than a conditioning or associatinist model. Finally, giving a conceptual analysis does not preclude empirical investigation: If I am articulating the scructure of rules that people might be following in an area, that articulation might still be testable. In this way a philosophical analysis can be a kind of "pre-science" rather than purely conceptual. Not all philosophers take this route but many do. Those that do would probably favor a view of philosophy as continuous with science rather than as strictly separated from it.

I'm with Mitch: we could be using rules but they are unconscious so we have trouble identifying them. But it may also be that we don't do it with rules. Thus Thomas Kuhn in his important book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions argued that although scientific research often seems to run as if it was governed by rules, in fact the mechanism is different: scientists have exemplars. (This is the central notion covered by his notorious umbrella term 'paradigm'.) Exemplars are concrete problem solutions in the scientists' speciality, so in form they are different from rules. But they act like rules, because they create what Kuhn called 'perceived similarity relations'. Scientists choose new problems that seem similar to the exemplar problems, they try solutions that seem similar to those that worked in the exemplar, and they judge the success of new solutions by reference to the standards that the exemplar exemplifies. The exemplar mechanism is an interesting alternative to the rule mechanism as a way of explaining rule-like phenomena, including the rule-like structuring of our concepts.

I'm with Mitch and Peter, so far as what they've said goes. But neither of them answered your first question: Why do philosophers go in for this kind of thing in the first place? The answer is that philosophers who do go in for this kind of thing think that, if we could articulate the rules we tacitly follow in using the concept of intention, say, then that would be a way of saying what the concept of intention is, that is, of characterizing that concept. It is a much debated question whether this way of proceeding is best. Jerry Fodor, for example, has been arguing for some time that concepts simply don't have "rules" associated with them in the way Wright's project presumes. See his book Concepts for his most complete presentation of this idea.