Īccording to the defenders of SPM, this is essentially the orthodox methodology of analytic philosophy, and it has been assumed to be adequate for the solution of philosophical problems by a significant number of both practicing and prominent philosophers throughout the recent history of philosophy. (5) The method of reflective equilibrium is the particular method by which intuitions can be used to confirm/disconfirm analysanda. (4) Intuition allows us to reliably access knowledge about concepts. (3) Whether or not a proposed analysandum is adequate with respect to a given case can be determined by the use of a priori intuition, with a priori intuition being a distinct, reliable and fallible non-sensory mental faculty. (2) The adequacy of any analysandum can be tested against concrete and/or imagined cases. sets of necessary and sufficient conditions) of analysanda. (1) Conceptual analyses take the form of proposed definitions (i.e. This methodological account of philosophy can be more completely characterized as follows: Conceptual analyses take the form of specifications of the content of a pre-theoretical concept (the analysans) through the articulation of a set of necessary and sufficient conditions (the analysandum or analysanda), and here we find the locus of the connection between the concepts of necessary and sufficient conditions and philosophical methodology. For the purposes at hand, this account of the methods of philosophy will be referred to as the standard philosophical method (SPM). In fact, according to a significant number of philosophers, such conceptual analysis is the only method of philosophy.
The central account of the methods of contemporary analytic philosophy is predicated on the claim that philosophical methodology is intuition-driven conceptual analysis that aims to determine true sets of necessary and sufficient conditions.
Now why, specifically, are the concepts of necessary and sufficient conditions, so understood, of such central significance in contemporary analytic philosophy? Conceptual Analysis and Necessary and Sufficient Conditions For example, it turns out that being a bachelor and being an unmarried male are jointly necessary and sufficient conditions for one another. Sets of jointly necessary and sufficient conditions are, then, just definitions regimented as sentences of this sort. This concept is just the idea that the truth values of p and q are always the same, and the notion of logical equivalence has the following truth conditions: Truth table for logical equivalence A Where S( p, q) means “ p is a sufficient condition for q” and N( q, p) means “ q is a necessary condition for p”, p \rightarrow q means “if p, then q,” and p \equiv q means “ p and q are logically equivalent,” the following two definitions are supposed to represent these two important ideas: a statement of the form “if p, then q”) as the following canonical account makes clear. In terms of both propositional and first-order logic the concepts of necessary and sufficient conditions are intimately related to the concept of the conditional (i.e. It is, then, obviously and deeply important to philosophy that we have an adequate logical grasp of these concepts. That these concepts are vital to philosophy is beyond question, and it is primarily because the orthodox account of the methodology of analytic philosophy involves the contention that philosophy aims to yield accurate specifications of sets of necessary and sufficient conditions, such as the claim that all bachelors are unmarried men. For example, being an unmarried male is a necessary condition for being a bachelor and being a bachelor is a sufficient condition for being an unmarried male. The concepts of necessary and sufficient conditions play central and vital roles in analytic philosophy.
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