Title:
A Game of Counterexamples: Conceptual Analysis as Definitional Revision
Abstract:
Classical concepts are defined by individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions. Broadly understood, conceptual analysis is a method traditionally linked to claims about analyticity, a priori and the role of intuitions as evidence in philosophy. Narrowly understood, conceptual analysis is just the process of finding adequate definitions of target concepts by suggesting tentative definitions and revising them in the light of possible counterexamples. I argue that the narrow version of the method can be studied formally by thinking about it as an epistemic game played by two agents, to be called `Chisholm' and `Gettier'. Whereas the role of Chisholm is to obtain a sequence of definitions that eventually converges to the target definition, the role of Gettier is to prevent this by putting counterexamples to the necessity or the sufficiency of the definitions chosen by Chisholm. I will show that, by conceiving about the method in this way, we get insight into several normative features of conceptual analysis, including the role of positive examples, the asymmetry between counterexamples to necessity and to sufficiency, the irrationality of dogmatically ignoring the evidence and the conditions for the method to succeed.