According to Cognitive Science You're Doing Philosophy Wrong

[nightbringer]

Or you very well might be according to the book discussed in this article from Common Sense Atheism. Here's a snippet that gives you an idea of the article's general theme:

Consider what may be the central method of 20th century analytic philosophy: conceptual analysis. In its standard form, conceptual analysis assumes the “classical view” of concepts, that a “concept C has definitional structure in that it is composed of simpler concepts that express necessary and sufficient conditions for falling under C.” For example, the concept bachelor has the constituents unmarried and man. Something falls under the concept bachelor if and only if it is an unmarried man.

...The problem is that the brain doesn’t store concepts in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, so philosophers have been using their intuitions to search for something that isn’t there. No wonder philosophers have, for over a century, failed to produce a single non-trivial conceptual analysis.

Does cognitive science really show that we need to fundamentally change our philosophical methodology? Or are things overstated? Thoughts?

[Kenny]

Since I don’t take myself (in the main) to be doing conceptual analysis (and, I would dare say, neither do a great number of other analytic philosophers), I’d say that the criticism doesn’t apply to me (at least not the one I gleaned from the snippet – I haven’t read the article).

[nightbringer]

How would you describe the difference between exploring the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge, and doing a conceptual analysis of knowledge (as an example)? I know that there is a difference I'm just not sure how I'd explain it.

[shunyadragon]

[Leonhard]

[nightbringer]

How would you describe the difference between exploring the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge, and doing a conceptual analysis of knowledge (as an example)? I know that there is a difference I'm just not sure how I'd explain it.

Or to get more to the point, there is a distinction between exploring how reality is, and how we speak about reality. But we can't "get to" reality without speaking about it (or thinking propositionally about it). So I suppose I'm entertaining the doubt that there is really much difference. More of a vague nebulous doubt than a particular argument to consider though (at this stage anyway).

[nightbringer]

Or to get more to the point, there is a distinction between exploring how reality is, and how we speak about reality. But we can't "get to" reality without speaking about it (or thinking propositionally about it). So I suppose I'm entertaining the doubt that there is really much difference. More of a vague nebulous doubt than a particular argument to consider though (at this stage anyway).

Guess there must be a difference because the claim that we can't get to reality would itself be a claim about reality.

Think I'll stop quoting myself now.

[Kenny]

How would you describe the difference between exploring the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge, and doing a conceptual analysis of knowledge (as an example)? I know that there is a difference I'm just not sure how I'd explain it.

Well, first, I’d say that many of the projects in analytic philosophy that involve searching for non-trivial, non-circular sets of necessary and sufficient conditions for various items are misguided projects. The search for such conditions in the case of knowledge is one of the few such projects that I think has borne enough fruit (by way of increasing our insight into the nature of knowledge) to make it worth the effort (though a lot of analytic philosophers would disagree even with that particular assessment on my part).

But, that aside, when I go looking for necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge, I take myself to be asking about when in fact there are cases of knowledge and when there are not. I don’t take myself to be asking about the structure of my concept of knowledge. Granted, in order to engage in this project, I’ll form judgments about whether knowledge is present in various possible scenarios, and the reliability of those judgments will depend on my having an adequate conceptual grasp of what knowledge is, but it doesn’t follow from this that my judgments concerning these scenarios are really judgments about my concept of knowledge, no more than it follows that my perceptual judgment that there is a tree present is really about my perceptions as of there being a tree.

Or to get more to the point, there is a distinction between exploring how reality is, and how we speak about reality. But we can't "get to" reality without speaking about it (or thinking propositionally about it).

I think that even if all of our contact with reality is mediated by way of our concepts, it doesn’t follow that all of our thought and discourse is really about our concepts, no more than it follows from the fact that I’m writing in English that everything I say is really about English.

[Seasanctuary]

I tend to turn these conceptual analysis questions into empirical questions about when people (and which people) either do (or are disposed to) use a term or not. It's not like "knowledge" is something that really exists and we want to discover its nature.

[ENeGMA]

Or you very well might be according to the book discussed in this article from Common Sense Atheism. Here's a snippet that gives you an idea of the article's general theme:



Does cognitive science really show that we need to fundamentally change our philosophical methodology? Or are things overstated? Thoughts?

Cognitive science shows nothing of the sort.

The classical view of concepts, with its binary category membership, cannot explain typicality effects.

But prototype theory can't explain how concepts have necessary and sufficient conditions. So it's true that we have a prototype of the concept "grandmother" (old, white hair, nice, likes Worther's candy, etc.) and that a 45 year old model who happened to be a grandmother would strike us, in all sorts of ways that could be tested, as an atypical example of the concept.

But this does NOTHING to show that the concept "grandmother" is vague, or messy, or doesn't have strictly delineated necessary and sufficient conditions, for of course many (though certainly not all) concepts DO have all of these features: someone is a grandmother if and only if she is the mother of a parent. And anyone who is the mother of a parent is a grandmother.

This is something of a laughable mistake: to think that just because concepts were implemented in the brain via prototypes that prototypes exhausted their nature. It's just a total non-sequitir.

For example, the concept "even number" shows typicality effects: 2 is a better example (according to most people) of an even number than 34. But this tells us nothing about the nature of even numbers.

And then there's the unsubstantiated myth that contemporary analytic philosophy is primarily about conceptual analysis. I don't even know that it's fair to say the Gettier problem is really a problem about conceptual analysis.

I don't know how extensive your background in philosophy is, but let me assure you: this article is complete nonsense, and does nothing to show what it claims to show. It's a complete non-sequitir to infer that because human conceptualization functions via prototypes that concepts don't have necessary and sufficient conditions.

[ENeGMA]

I tend to turn these conceptual analysis questions into empirical questions about when people (and which people) either do (or are disposed to) use a term or not. It's not like "knowledge" is something that really exists and we want to discover its nature.

I think that knowledge is something that exists and we want to discover its nature.

I mean trivially, if knowledge doesn't exist nobody knows anything. That sounds like an awfully tough bullet to bite, it seems to me.

[Seasanctuary]

I think that knowledge is something that exists and we want to discover its nature.

I mean trivially, if knowledge doesn't exist nobody knows anything. That sounds like an awfully tough bullet to bite, it seems to me.

I'm saying the concept 'knowledge' isn't something that exists beyond our own making. We might use it more or less consistently to refer to certain kinds of states, so "John knows his shoelaces are untied" may communicate something true by virtue of facts about John's mind and the rest of the world.

In a similar way, I'm an antirealist about goodness. Yet I will still say there are good things in the world because we conventionally use "good" to refer to certain kinds of facts about the world beyond our conceptualizing.

[Xru]

I'm saying the concept 'knowledge' isn't something that exists beyond our own making. We might use it more or less consistently to refer to certain kinds of states, so "John knows his shoelaces are untied" may communicate something true by virtue of facts about John's mind and the rest of the world.

In a similar way, I'm an antirealist about goodness. Yet I will still say there are good things in the world because we conventionally use "good" to refer to certain kinds of facts about the world beyond our conceptualizing.

I vaguely remember reading about how it might be useful to consider ideas/knowledge as actual objects in a sense. Does this fit in anywhere?

[nightbringer]

Platonism?

[Xru]

Platonism?

I haven't read Philosophy for so long . . . maybe.

I really like this OP . . . hope it grows some legs!