Philosophy 106: Sorts of Analysis (revised)

Contents

Introduction
Three sorts of analysis

Introduction

This article outlines three sorts of conceptual or propositional analysis and refers to an example of each sort.

My use of G1, G2 and G3 refers to my thesis that most of the central concepts in philosophy fall naturally into three groups (see articles Philosophy 103a and Philosophy 103b).

Three sorts of analysis

G1: Semantic analysis

A semantic analysis uses the three concepts of content, form and context. I call this sort of analysis semantic because those three concepts are the three aspects of linguistic meaning (see Philosophy 200). For an example of this sort of analysis, see Philosophy 201.

G2: Property analysis

A property analysis uses the three concepts quality, relation and quantity. These are the three sorts of property of a concrete particular (see Philosophy 2 ). However, a concept that is given a property analysis need not be the concept of a concrete particular. For examples of this sort of analysis (applied to sorts of knowledge) see Philosophy 206, Sections 1, 4 and 9.

G3: Scalar analysis

A scalar analysis uses concepts internal to the three number scales, the valency, ordinal, and cardinal scales. This sort of analysis is best suited to the analysis of values. The reason for this is that the basic forms of value can be seen to be closely similar to the forms of the number scales (see Philosophy 211).