Conceptual Analysis and Philosophical Naturalism

This chapter focuses on a recent revival of conceptual analysis, the philosophical method of discovering necessary and a priori contents by describing conceptual relations. According to some philosophers, contents such as 'Red is a color' are true in virtue of the deep structure of our cognitive system, and assuming that this structure is innate, they are true independently of experience, i.e., they are a priori. I defend an alternative position, according to which relations among concepts, whether innate or acquired, mirror the relations among the real-world properties they refer to, and our conceptual structure is continuously tested and compared with the characteristics of our environment. In such a view, if a description of our conceptual equipment generates true content, those are a posteriori ones.