Abstract:
What is the connection between the analysis of words and the analysis of concepts? Kingsbury and McKeown-Green’s chapter, “Jackson’s Armchair: The Only Chair in Town?,” addresses this question, after replying to a number of objections to Jackson’s version of Canberra Plan reductive analysis. Their contention is that Jackson conceives of conceptual analysis almost exclusively as the analysis of lexical items, and that this impoverishes the program. The thought is that how we use words is only a small part of our cognitive and conceptual repertoire. In the central case of belief, for example, the situations in which we will attribute beliefs to others by agreeing that the word ‘belief’ be used of them constitute only a small part of a practice of explaining, predicting, and interacting which we might explain by our possession of the concept of belief. The right kind of analysis, they contend, is done by investigating this richer pattern of thought and behavior. Language may come into play afterward, when we give names for the concepts we fi nd to be structuring our thought. The version of analysis they defend not only has the benefi t of transcending the contingencies of the words we use, it also insulates the debate about our a priori access to our conceptual competence from the debate about whether our semantic competence with words is modularized, and thus not accessible to introspection.