Doing Conceptual Analysis

Lecture 2
What are concepts and why do they
matter?

28/2/23

Dr Janosch Prinz
What are concepts (not)? Theories
• Concepts are not the same as terms/words

• Concepts give meaning to terms/words

• Theories of concepts have developed in the West over the past 2500 years.
They typically contain some version of the following claims:

1. abstract words like “justice” make sense and are important

2. if a word makes sense, we should be able to give a definition of it
3. if a word makes sense and is important, it should refer to something real

• Plato’s Theory of Forms (in The Republic) - concepts as essences in their own
world, of which we have only a hazy recollection
What are concepts (not)? Theories II
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s early “picture theory” of concepts
• Developed in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921)

• concepts are…
• pictures of the world

• they make sense to us if they seek to describe the world

• but they are only true if we can verify their correspondence to the world

• Otherwise, these concepts are mystical – we should not waste our time studying them
 What are concepts (not)? Theories III

•Concepts are….
•not eternal essences in their own world (Plato)
•not verifiable pictures of the world (early Wittgenstein)
•not just about defining terms, but about giving practical orientation

•Instead, concepts are….

•parts of language games, related in complicated and crisscrossing ways
•constellations of the ideas, beliefs, and actions which are subject to change over time

• Our insight follows Wittgenstein’s later approach in his Philosophical Investigations (1953)
Questions?
Why do we study concepts?

• Not just to name things but for practical purposes, to know what to do/say

• To gain historical understanding the meaning of speech-acts

• These goals sometimes come together in academic writing

• In Arts and Culture, we mostly study concepts, the meaning of which is not settled

• E.g. we have millions of pages of scholarship on “democracy”, and far fewer on the
concept of “table”
Why do we study concepts? What do concepts do for us?
One could – in a simplified way – distinguish three dimensions of the
value of concepts:

• The ontological dimension

• The epistemological dimension
• The ethical/moral/political dimension

Activity: Talk with your neighbor about how to apply these three
dimensions to concepts? Draw on your knowledge from Apollo and
Dionysus of these three dimensions.
What do concepts do for us?
One could – in a simplified way – distinguish three dimensions of the value of concepts:
• The ontological dimension: a guide to/definition of what exists
• The epistemological dimension: a (neutral) tool for how to acquire knowledge
• The ethical/moral/political dimension: a tool for deciding how should I/we live (well)?

This distinction is stylized, in practice these dimensions typically overlap. When we

disagree about the meaning of concepts, the distinction often breaks down.

How can we make sense of such disagreements about the meaning of concepts?
Analysing Concepts
• Our course is called ‘Doing Conceptual Analysis, so now that we have talked about concepts, what
does analysis refer to?

• Analysis is a concept, the meaning of which is also not entirely settled.

• But there is some agreement that analysis has to with rigorous investigation which provides
additional insights. These insights can be won by e.g. making visible distinctive elements of a concept,
showing connections, applying a set of investigate steps (a method or approach), applying logical
argumentation

• As Arts and Culture is an interdisciplinary Bachelor programme, we seek to provide you with tools for
descriptive analysis as well as normative analysis (I will return to them later)

• No matter which meaning of, or approach to, analysis we take, we assume a theory or theories of
concepts in our analysis
Concepts and Conceptions
• Often we do not analyze a concept in a universal way, but rather we zoom in on rivaling
understandings of the same concepts in a particular society or period

• In other words, there is some (limited) agreement about the boundaries of a concept but
disagreement about which understanding of it is the ‘best’ (for a particular context, for particular
purposes etc.)

• In other words, we often focus on different conceptions of a concept.

• A conception “organizes the cluster of beliefs, values, and activity [in a concept constellation],
showing which are most important, and how they are related to one another.” (Gaus, 2000, p. 36)

• Between the proponents of conceptions, there is some shared ambition to affect the use of socially
meaningful concepts (rather than an essential core of a concept shared by all conceptions)

• Example you will tackle in the coming weeks:

• Conceptions of democracy: Greek, liberal or totalitarian conception of democracy
Concepts: Essentially Contested
• The study of political concepts has been focused on those concepts, whose meaning we cannot seem to
settle on
• A key development for understanding what kinds of concepts are at the center of such struggles over
meaning was the introduction of the idea of “essentially contested concepts” (W. B. Gallie, 1956)

• Conflicts over the meaning of conceptions/concepts look not like impartial scholarly discussions but rather
like political disputes

• Gallie offered a list of seven features that make concepts essentially contested
• (I) their evaluative character,
• (II) internal complexity,
• (III) diverse describability,
• (IV) openness to new interpretations,
• (V) reciprocal recognition of their disputed character among contending parties,
• (VI) an original exemplar of the concept in question that anchors conceptual meaning,
• (VII) continuous competition over who is the “true inheritor to the original exemplar and is developing it in
the best way” (Gaus, 2000, p. 31)
Social Justice as an Essentially Contested Concept
Socialist social justice Liberal social justice

Scope Collective individualist

Focus Overall distribution of goods in a Distribution between individuals

society (in transactions)

Valence Ideal picture of human living Form of accounting

How to analyze conceptions/concepts then?
We can distinguish two traditions in the study of concepts
1) Descriptive approaches
•seek to map concept use and the changes of meaning of concepts/change of conceptions
•tracing the meaning historically or stipulating the meaning based on charting conventional uses
•Examples: conceptual history / ordinary language philosophy

2) Normative approaches
•trace what a certain concept should mean in view of the demands of rationality and our commitments
•intervene in struggles over meaning, seek to affect concept use
•Examples: political philosophy or political discourse

We will get to know both of these approaches in this course!

Questions?