#13 Concept Analysis, Friendship and Wittgenstein

A report on my workshop at a philosophy symposium

On the 28th of March, my old secondary school hosted a philosophy symposium. They've done this for the past two years too, and it's always been a lot of fun: they basically just do two rounds of a bunch of workshops all around philosophy. This year, I got to do one of these workshops, meaning I had to do two rounds of 45 minutes for high school students and their parents, in groups of around twenty people - the symposium actually ended up being really popular this year, so every workshop was visited by around 35 people, which was really great. Even though I've spoken for groups before, I had never actually done something so interactive in front of a group. Because I want to pursue teaching in the future, I thought it was a great opportunity to practice.

The first thing I had to do in preparation was think of a subject to talk about, and I started with the things we studied first when I first went to university for philosophy: mainly, they were Plato and concept analysis. I also wanted to talk about something that is intuitivly familiar to most people, so something people have a lot of opinions on and isn't too theoretical, which made me pick the concept of friendship. There actually is a platonic dialogue on friendship called the Lysis, which I did also read, but I wasn't too impressed by. For the last few months we've been doing a lot of analytic philosophy at university where we have been talking a lot about concept analysis as a method for philosophy, which I've been very frustrated by.

The rest of this post will describe how my workshop functioned and how it actually went, followed by some reflection on it. The description is mostly based on my notes that I prepared beforehand. [1] Overall it was a really great experience, which I was very grateful for. :)

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"I chose friendship as the subject of my presentation because it is something almost everyone has experience with. I wanted something accessible, so friendship and Plato's dialogues were quickly chosen. However, lately I have come into contact a lot with theoretical analytical philosophy and, consequently, with structural concept analysis, which I am not a big fan of. I am becoming increasingly convinced of the correctness of Wittgenstein's views, especially in how he criticizes Socrates in his later work. My plan for this symposium is therefore to explain to people what concept analysis is by having them perform such a concept analysis for the concept of friendship, and then to explain why I think this method does not work.

Many books and courses on philosophy begin with Plato's dialogues. In almost all of these dialogues, Socrates seeks to better understand a particular concept or notion, for example, 'virtue' in the Meno or 'knowledge' in the Theaetetus. He wants to know exactly what this concept entails in its essence, without using examples. Within analytical philosophy, or the philosophy practiced in English-speaking countries since the beginning of the twentieth century, this process has been formalized as conceptual analysis: a method in which a concept is defined by means of INJS conditions, or conditions that are all necessary for a particular concept and collectively sufficient to define that concept. If, for example, we establish INJS conditions for the concept of "female teacher," [2] these could be "working in education" and "being a woman." [3]

At this point, people will be asked to conduct a conceptual analysis of "a good friend." If the audience is large, this can be done in groups; otherwise, we will have to do it as a whole class. Establishing very strict and formal INJS conditions is not necessary, but compiling the conditions or characteristics of a good friend as a list seems useful to me. I have also devised a number of in-depth questions: do you have to know someone for a long time to be friends with them? Do you always have to have fun with a friend? Can you be friends with a family member, or with a pet? What is the difference between a friend and a colleague? And between a friend and your romantic partner?

After about fifteen minutes, the concept analysis ends. Once we have done this in groups, I will ask each group to briefly state their definitions. My prediction is that there will be little consensus among people regarding what constitutes a good friend. This is logical, because concept analysis does not work very well, at least in my view. This is acknowledged in literature on Plato's dialogues: they often end in what is called 'Aporia' in Greek: a kind of general state of confusion, the feeling as if you have not made any progress at all. Socrates, too, never receives a definitive answer to his questions.

This experience, the inability of conceptual analysis to reach definitive answers, appears to me to be one baked into the practice. Here in I subscribe greatly to the views of the later Wittgenstein in his Philosophical investigations, where he critisises Socrates greatly: instead of seeing words as referring to concepts that exist independently from humans and can thus be found through rational thinking, Wittgenstein sees the use of words as being constituted by many different linguistic situations. He says of Socrates the following:

“Reading the Socratic dialogues one has the feeling: what a frightful waste of time! What’s the point of these arguments that prove nothing and clarify nothing.” [4]

“I can characterize my standpoint no better than by saying that it is the antithetical standpoint to the one occupied by Socrates in the Platonic dialogues. For if I were asked what knowledge is, I would enumerate instances of knowledge and add the words ‘and similar things’. There is no shared constituent to be discovered in them since none exist.” [5]

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Over all, the workshop was a pretty great success. During the concept analysis, a lot of people found it very difficult to find a definitive and universal definiton of a good friend, saying things like how it all seemed so subjective, and how you could refute basically every attribute you could ascribe to the idea of a good friend. Even people who thought they did find a good definition, started doubting themselves again after being questioned on their views; one difficulty a lot of people ran into was how to give a definition that couldn't also be used for a romantic partner. Afterwards, a lot of people did seem to be convinced that concept analysis wasn't a very productive method, so I guess my project was a succes.

- 𒈗