Philosophical Methodology

Kevin Scharp

The Ohio State University

Analytic philosophy goes through phases of being obsessed with its own methodology; it is

currently in the midst of one. It seems that there are at least the following six major kinds of

philosophical methods being practiced at present.1

1. Conceptual Analysis is specifying illuminating apriori (i.e., knowable independently of

experience) or analytic (i.e., true by virtue of their content alone) connections between some

concept and other concepts. Often it is seen as doing even more: specifying the conceptual

constituents of some complex concept. For example, a conceptual analysis of the concept

of bachelor might be that bachelors are unmarried human males. In this case, it seems as

though the concept analyzed is more complex than the concepts used in the analysis.

However, one need not adhere to this basic/complex view of analysis. Conceptual analysis

came in for some blistering attacks in the mid 20th century2, but despite that, it seems to be

still dominant in analytic philosophy, which is so named because of this methodology.3

2. Reductive Explanation is explaining some phenomenon by appeal to a different and

usually better understood kind of phenomena. In reductive explanation, the explanandum

(i.e., the item to be explained) is wholly subsumed under the explanans (i.e., the items in

terms of which it is explained). For example, reductive naturalism is a particularly popular

1 This classification is very rough—the list is not exhaustive and the descriptions are in no way definitive; see
the cited works for more detailed treatments.
2 See Quine (1951, 1960), Putnam (1962, 1971, 1975), and Kripke (1972) for examples.
3 The most influential contemporary defense of conceptual analysis is certainly Jackson (1998); see also Jackson

(2001a, 2001b), Balog (2001), Stich and Weinberg (2001), Stalnaker (2001), and Williamson (2001, 2008). See
also Lewis (1994).
kind of reductive explanation according to which every genuine phenomenon can be

reduced to the phenomena studied by the hard sciences (and often to fundamental physics).

Reductive naturalists hold that all genuine phenomena are, at root, physical phenomena.

This includes consciousness, moral properties, mental states, and so on. There are versions

of reductive explanation that are not naturalistic; for example, reductive phenomenalism

reduces all genuine phenomena to experience.4 The reduction of all genuine phenomena to

the explanans class can be accomplished by translation (e.g., a reductive naturalist might say

that all claims about legitimate phenomena can be translated into the vocabulary of particle

physics), but it need not; a laxer reductive explanation appeals to apriori entailment instead of

translation (e.g., a reductive naturalist of this stripe might claim that all true claims about

legitimate phenomena are entailed apriori by true claims about the nature and behavior of

fundamental particles).5 The former is closely connected to conceptual analysis, while the

latter is less demanding.6

3. Quietism is a method that avoids proposing and defending philosophical theories, and

instead sees philosophical problems as the result of confusions that are often caused by

misunderstanding language. The quietist attempts to rephrase or reformulate common-sense

ideas (or perhaps just remind us of things we already knew) in a way that exposes the

mistake and allows those taken in by the problem to see it as a pseudo-problem.

4 See Carnap (1928), Quine (1951), and Sellars (1963) for more on phenomenalism.
5 Even weaker reductions are familiar as well; e.g., the technical relation of supervenience is sometimes used—I
discuss it in Chapter Three.
6 See the papers in Hohwy and Kallestrup (2008) on reductive explanation; see Chalmers (2010) for much more

on the “apriori entailment” version of reductive explanation. See also Block and Stalnaker (1999), Chalmers
and Jackson (2001), and Gertler (2002) on conceptual analysis and reductive explanation. See the papers in de
Caro and Macarthur (2004) for criticism of reductive naturalism.

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Contemporary quietism is heavily influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein; John McDowell is

probably the best-known contemporary practitioner.7

4. Experimental Philosophy is new on the scene; although it has historical precursors,8 in its

current form it is just a decade or so old. Experimental philosophy eschews the kind of

armchair reflection and intuitions that other philosophical methods, especially conceptual

analysis, take to be essential to doing philosophy. Instead, experimental philosophy

advocates conducting surveys of non-philosophers’ intuitions on issues of current interest in

philosophy. From these results an experimental philosopher constructs a psychological

theory about the source of those intuitions, and that theory is then used to support or attack

various philosophical views that depend on those intuitions. Attitudes toward this new

methodology run the gamut from adoration to distain.9

5. Analytic Pragmatism, like experimental philosophy, is a reaction against conceptual

analysis and reductive explanation, but it seeks a synthesis of the latter two methods with the

insights of Wittgenstein, Wilfrid Sellars, and the classical pragmatists. Instead of

emphasizing the relations between sets of concepts on which conceptual analysis or

reductive explanation focuses, analytic pragmatism looks to relations between how words are

used and the concepts those words express. The goal of an analytic pragmatist project is to

specify relations between the concepts used to describe how some words are used and the

concepts those words express. Although there are plenty of precursors, analytic pragmatism

7 See Wittgenstein (1953), Zangwell (1992), Wright (1992: ch. 6, 1998), McDowell (1994, 2009), Pettit (2004),
Rorty (2007), and Kuusela (2008) for discussion of quietism. Note that the term ‘quietism’ has come to have a
negative connotation in the hands of philosophers like Blackburn (see his 1998); for this reason, one might
prefer the term ‘therapeutic’. However, I intend no such implication.
8 Naess (1938) for example, which bears particular relevance to the topic of this book.
9 See the papers in Knobe and Nicholas (2008) for more on experimental philosophy.

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as a philosophical methodology is new, and its primary expositor and defender is Robert

Brandom.10

6. Methodological Naturalism, as a philosophical method, is dramatically different from

reductive naturalism, which is a kind of reductive explanation.11 Methodological naturalists

emphasize the similarity or continuity between science and philosophy; they suggest that

philosophical problems should be approached by using the methods of the sciences and that

philosophical theories should, like scientific theories, not only offer explanations, but be

empirically testable. Beyond that, there is very little agreement on how to pursue

methodological naturalism. Disputes about scientific methodology and the difficulty of

performing experiments on philosophical topics (e.g., there is no laboratory where one can

study the properties of propositions) cause problems for methodological naturalist projects.12

10 See Brandom (2008) for the presentation of analytic pragmatism. I take the projects in Kripke (1982),
Davidson (2001), Stanley (2005), Kukla and Lance (2008), and Capellen and Hawthorne (2009) to be instances
of analytic pragmatism.
11 The qualifier ‘as a philosophical method’ is meant to distinguish it from the view in philosophy of science,

which sometimes goes under the same name, that one of the criteria for science is that it rejects supernatural
explanations.
12 See Papineau (2007) for an overview of methodological naturalism. See Wilson (2006) and Maddy (2008) for

examples. See also Price (forthcoming) for what he calls subject naturalism, which I take to be very similar.
See the papers in Braddon-Mitchell and Nola (2009) for a discussion of the relation between conceptual
analysis and naturalism.