A Flaw of Analytic Philosophy

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A few weeks ago, I published an essay on Substack titled The End of Analytic Philosophy. In it, I agreed with Liam Kofi Bright that analytic philosophy has perhaps come close to becoming a degenerating research programme, leaving even many of its practitioners with a pessimistic outlook on its future. But the post was not at all meant to be depressing, for I offered a successor paradigm: naturalistic philosophy. A philosophy strongly continuous with, and often collaborative with, the sciences in order to make progress on our field’s most pressing problems.

I was a bit worried about coming out as a ‘non-analytic philosopher’, since most of my peers happily use the label of analytic philosopher for themselves. I was therefore happy to see the overwhelmingly positive reactions that made my essay go somewhat viral on substack and gained me a ton of new subscribers. However, this also brought with it a new bar for my writing, making me go from an experimental week of daily posts to much less frequent posts. Now, I had a good excuse, since I was committed to several deadlines for writing projects I had to finish, but really I was afraid of failing to live up to the new bar I had set for my blog.

This is amusing, really, since blogging is usually seen as a kind of no-holds-barred, free-flowing, let-your-thoughts-spill-out-on-the-page kind of activity. But just like with academic writing, it is easy to set oneself the goal of continually surpassing one’s previous writing, which can admittedly be very valuable - that is unless it completely paralyses one.

Here, I want to follow up on my essay on analytic philosophy by highlighting a central flaw of analytic philosophy. While some of my readers are fellow philosophers or have read enough philosophy to be sufficiently familiar with the methods and goals of analytic philosophy, many are not. To the layperson who has heard of the divide between analytic and continental philosophy, analytic philosophy may simply represent clear and rigorous argumentation, whereas continental philosophy is associated with obscurity, metaphors, and unclear if any arguments. So coming out against analytic philosophy could easily be read as being against clear writing - which is, of course, not what I am against at all.

Reading my previous essay, one might have come away with the conclusion that analytic philosophers do not draw sufficiently on, and have too little familiarity with, what goes on in the sciences. While that is true, it is not sufficient reason to reject analytic philosophy or to distinguish naturalistic philosophy as a third kind of philosophy altogether. More conservatively, one might read this argument as amounting merely to a call for analytic philosophers to learn more about science where it bears on the philosophical questions they are interested in.

But the opposition between naturalistic philosophy and analytic philosophy runs deeper than that. There is a fundamental flaw in one of the central goals and methods of philosophy, namely the analysis of concepts.

With the linguistic turn in the twentieth century, philosophers became less concerned with the world and more concerned with language. How do we use concepts? How do they represent things in the world? How can sentences be true or false? What is the meaning of particular words? Analytic philosophy as a discipline moved away from its origins in natural philosophy that once combined philosophy and science, and became something closer to linguistics… though, surprisingly enough, without actually engaging all that much with linguists. Indeed, one might have expected the linguistic turn to lead to a different merger altogether. A merger between linguistics and philosophy. But there are only a few attempts to really make this happen, such as MIT’s joint Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.

In many areas of analytic philosophy today, the central questions concern how we should define particular terms.

In the philosophy of medicine, for instance, the central debate is about how we should understand terms like ‘health’, ‘disease’, ‘pathology’, and the like. How do analytic philosophers usually approach this problem? They do so by introspecting, by asking themselves about the intuitions they have concerning these concepts, and by trying to come up with a definition that comes as close as possible to providing necessary and sufficient conditions. Commonly, philosophers assert that these intuitions reflect not only how they themselves think about particular terms (examples from other areas of philosophy include consciousness, knowledge, and morality), but more generally how competent language users in our society think about and use these terms.

If this makes you raise an eyebrow, you are entirely justified. If we are interested in what the folk mean when they use a term, why should we consult the intuitions of one particular person, rather than engage in the kind of research lexicographers and linguists are engaged in?

This problem was recognised by some analytic philosophers, and it led to the birth of what is now called experimental philosophy. Rather than taking for granted that some philosophers have privileged insights into how a concept should be understood (a method that has been hopelessly unsuccessful, given that philosophers only rarely agree with one another in the literature, leading to endless debates justified by appeals to intuition) experimental philosophers draw on the tools of experimental psychology to probe the public on how they understand concepts.

A central criticism by analytic philosophers of experimental philosophy has been that its psychological methods are flawed, since ordinary language users themselves poorly understand the proper conditions under which their terms are used. Instead, it is claimed, this requires the expertise of a trained philosopher engaged in introspection. On the face of it, this criticism has some merit. Yet, one would expect analytic philosophers, over time, to at least approximate consensus on the many questions concerning how particular terms should be understood. Largely, the opposite is true, with philosophers continually trading in intuitions.

Another criticism of experimental philosophy has been that it is not really philosophy at all. But this reflects an ambition present from the birth of analytic philosophy: the attempt to draw a sharp boundary between philosophy and the rest of intellectual inquiry. This ambition is precisely one of the reasons analytic philosophy has come close to becoming a degenerating research programme. Instead of distinguishing itself by its goals, philosophy attempted to distinguish itself by its methods. Yet, even here, this ambition failed. Scientists regularly reflect on how their terms should be defined, and even if philosophers think they do so poorly, they often do a better job than the philosophers criticising them. After all, the goal of scientific concepts is not to capture folk intuitions, but to reflect progress in the sciences and aid further progress still - however unintuitive the resulting concepts may be. Consider, for instance, the embarrassing criticisms of Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene for using the term ‘selfish’ incorrectly.

Who cares?

Language continually evolves to help us communicate better with one another and to capture genuine patterns in reality that are worth communicating about. Analytic philosophers, however, often give the mistaken impression that there is some single, true meaning to terms like ‘selfish’ or ‘health’, rather than recognising them as polysemous concepts with multiple meanings that reflect the different purposes for which we use them. Further analysis will not resolve such conflicts. To the dismay of analytic philosophers aiming for a perfectly precise language of clear argumentation, many of our terms are polysemous by design.

Don’t even get me started on the many ways in which terms can be defined differently to serve the interests of particular political ideologies, such as freedom, equality, justice, and so on. To think that conceptual analysis could provide us with the one correct definition of these notions is, unfortunately, a chimera.

Ultimately, analytic philosophy stands at a fateful crossroad between two very different goals. If it takes the path of trying to understand the meanings of terms, it will be absorbed into psychology, linguistics, and lexicography, even if philosophers continue to play useful roles within these fields. If analytic philosophy instead returns to the goal of trying to understand the world and our place within it, there is no alternative to a naturalistic philosophy that sees itself as strongly continuous with the sciences.

On such a naturalistic view, for example, our understanding of ‘health’ should not consist in a mere analysis or even an experimental survey of what medical practitioners mean when they use the term ‘health’, even if this is confusingly how the term ‘naturalism’ is used within the philosophy of medicine. Rather, it involves identifying a real pattern in nature, shared by biological organisms, that can play an important role in theorising within the life sciences. Or so I have argued in my academic contributions to the philosophy of medicine (see some references below).

Obviously, I favour the naturalistic road, but the alternative path leads no less to a view of philosophy that is strongly continuous with science. The artificial separation of philosophy from other parts of inquiry serves no purpose other than to insulate ourselves from the very tools and methods that could help us to make progress on the philosophical questions we care most about.

If you enjoyed reading this post please like, share, and subscribe. It helps a lot to reach a wider audience. I am also interested to read your thoughts in the comments, regardless of whether you agree or disagreee. I try to respond to all.

References

Veit, W. (2022). Health, Agency, and the Evolution of Consciousness. Ph.D. thesis, University of Sydney. https://hdl.handle.net/2123/29836 [Download]

Veit, W. (2025). Health and Disease Concepts Cannot Be Grounded in Social Justice Alone. Croatian Journal of Philosophy. 25(73), 99-119. https://doi.org/10.52685/cjp.25.73.7 [Download]

Veit, W. (2021). Experimental Philosophy of Medicine and the Concepts of Health and Disease. Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-021-09550-3 [Download]

Veit, W. (2021). Biological Normativity: A New Hope for Naturalism? Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy.https://doi.org/10.1007/s11019-020-09993-w [Download]

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