© 2012 Kyle M. Broom EXPLICATION, SIMILARITY, AND ANALOGY: A DEFENSE AND APPLICATION OF PHILOSOPHICAL METHOD BY KYLE BROOM DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2012 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Gary Ebbs, Chair Professor Robert Cummins Professor Timothy G. McCarthy Professor Steven J. Wagner ABSTRACT With his 1951 publication of “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, W.V.O. Quine launched a series of arguments against the idea that analyticity – “truth in virtue of meaning alone” – could be a philosophically explanatory notion. While his rejection represents a significant philosophical stride in its own right, to which many in the contemporary philosophical scene pay verbal respects, the revolutionary consequences of this insight often go ignored today. Much of current professional philosophy in virtually every sub-discipline carries on as though analyticity were a viable notion, because much of it aims at conceptual analysis – the “discovery” of the meanings of philosophical concepts, such as ‘mind’, ‘truth’, ‘meaning’, ‘person’, and ‘right’. Rejecting analyticity as a viable philosophical notion undermines such efforts insofar as they aim at conceptual analysis. If philosophers give up the notion of analyticity, as they should, they are left with the questions of what goals and methods are viable for the analysis of concepts. One option is to concentrate effort on explication of familiar concepts; explication is an alternative to conceptual analysis in that it does not aim to dig out analytic truths about given concepts. Rather, it identifies what is interesting about a certain vague concept, and generates a new, more rigorous and precise concept to replace the old one. The justification for the replacement, in the most appealing cases, is in the possibilities for understanding that are introduced by the new explication. Examples of explication in my sense are the replacement of ordinary grammatical terms by the operators of first order logic, replacement of ‘game’ with a decision theoretic notion of games in game theory, and replacement of ‘true’ with ‘true-in-L’ in Tarskian ii semantics. Advances of this sort depart consciously in some ways from ordinary usage of the terms they focus on, but in so departing, they develop new possibilities and perspectives for rigorously understanding the world. In the dissertation that follows, I not only recommend explication as a method, I also put it into practice. I develop an explication of the sameness and difference relations that relies solely on the relation of denotation between a predicate and objects of which it is true. Two things are the same with respect to R just in case there is at least one R-predicate that denotes them in common. I used this explication to develop related explications of similarity and analogy. These latter explications, I use to critique the current fashion of research on similarity and analogy in cognitive psychology. These studies have produced an immense body of interesting and promising work in the past several decades; however, much of the research design and data interpretation harbors philosophical errors and so often imports unjustified prejudices from the researchers themselves. My explication offers alternative formulations of the most salient aspects of these research traditions, formulations that avoid the errors of past research and, more importantly, suggest new research questions and possibilities that would not occur under the previous, philosophically muddled paradigm. The project closes with an application of my explication of analogy to a discussion and critique of the philosophical literature on analogical arguments. While philosophers and logicians have developed workable theories for deductive and inductive reasoning, very little work of promise has been done on analogical arguments. My explication of analogy is used to diagnose the problems of past iii attempts by philosophers to develop logics for analogical arguments and suggest, in light of the psychological research on analogy and the use of analogies in scientific thought, that philosophers should focus on analogical arguments as creative, heuristic devices, rather than as truth-preserving inference structures. iv For Ellen and Bill, who gave me a life; and Alexandra, who brought me back to it v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project developed steadily and then remained near completion but unfinished for several years. For both the initial well-supervised and nurtured progress as well as the final push to completion, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my advisor, Gary Ebbs as well as to Steven Wagner. I also wish to thank my other committee members, Robert Cummins and Timothy McCarthy for their ready willingness to help me see the project through after the passage of so long a hiatus. Much of what I have managed to accomplish in the pages that follow has also been made possible by the outstanding graduate students who were active in the department during my time there; the atmosphere of collegiality and mutual philosophical interest gave our work a lived, communal quality I have rarely observed in other graduate programs. I especially wish to thank Daniel Estrada, Todd Kukla, Nathalie Morasch, Brandon Polite and David Rowland. Thanks as well to my partner, Alex, and to my parents, who have encouraged and supported me in this, as in all my endeavors. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1: REJECTING ANALYTICITY, REJECTING ANALYSIS ...........................................1 CHAPTER 2: EXPLICATION .................................................................................................................63 CHAPTER 3: SAMENESS, SIMILARITY, AND COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY ........................95 CHAPTER 4: ANALOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY ..............................................................................143 CHAPTER 5: ANALOGIES IN PHILOSOPHY AND UNCHARTED SPACES: RESPECTIVISM AND STRUCTURE-PREDICATES ...................................................................194 BIBLIOGRAPHY .....................................................................................................................................238 vii CHAPTER 1 REJECTING ANALYTICITY, REJECTING ANALYSIS I. Prolog im Himmel Many philosophers understand themselves to be engaged in something one might (and many of them do) call “conceptual analysis”. This enterprise (were it possible) would involve figuring out the truth about what heady terms, such as ‘mind’, ‘good’, ‘meaning’, ‘fact’, and ‘truth’, refer to.1 Paradigmatically, such solutions would follow from (or themselves be) analytic truths; thus: conceptual analysis. G. E. Moore provides a precise characterization of analysis in this sense (Moore 1942: 663): If you are to “give an analysis” of a given concept which is the analysandum, you must mention, as your analysans, a concept such that (a) nobody can know that the analysandum applies to an object without knowing that the analysans applies to it, (b) nobody can verify that the analysandum applies without verifying that the analysans applies, (c) any expression which expresses the analysandum must be synonymous with any expression which expresses the analysans. Working out an instantiation of this characterization, using the easy and time- honored example, ‘bachelor’, yields the following. The analysandum, or “thing to be analyzed”2, is ‘bachelor’; giving an analysis involves mentioning ‘unmarried man’ as 1 ‘Conceptual analysis’, in the sense I use it here and in what follows, refers specifically to the development of analytically justified philosophical theories through the analysis of concepts. Other philosophical thought, which can legitimately, if more loosely, be called ‘conceptual analysis, attempts to work out consequences of and identify inconstancies in our use of and thinking about various terms of import. This latter sort of enterprise may or may not count as conceptual analysis in my specific sense; whether it does will depend on the nature of the justification offered for such projects. 2 ‘-and-’ is the neuter future passive participial suffix stem in Latin. Thus, ‘Amanda’ – she who is to be loved; ‘Miranda’ – she who is to be admired, and so forth. 1 the analysans, the “analyzing thing”. Suppose an entity in question is W. H. Auden3. ‘Unmarried man’ as the analysans is such that a) nobody can know that Auden is a bachelor without knowing that Auden is an unmarried man; b) nobody can verify that Auden is a bachelor without verifying that Auden is an unmarried man; and c) any expression that expresses ‘bachelor’ is synonymous with any expression that expresses ‘unmarried man’. Other accounts of analysis have been offered, but this one incorporates the various substances of them in that it incorporates appeals both to epistemic (a) and b)) and linguistic (c)) aspects of analysis. Notice, however, that the linguistic criterion is the strongest of the three. It is the strongest, because, unlike a) and b), c) underwrites bidirectional inferences between instances of bachelorhood and unmarried men. Thus, on a) alone, I might, for example, know that Auden is an unmarried man but be unable to infer that he is therefore a bachelor. On a) alone, I can infer from the fact that Auden is a bachelor that he is an unmarried man, but not the other way around. However, according to c) (assuming ‘unmarried man’ denotes a satisfactory analysans for ‘bachelor’),