tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post115918438037789643..comments2023-10-29T10:32:36.914-04:00Comments on Philosophy, et cetera: Does Conceptual Analysis Have Practical Significance?Richard Y Chappellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-1159400199331662132006-09-27T19:36:00.000-04:002006-09-27T19:36:00.000-04:00Apologies.Apologies.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-1159395341901151332006-09-27T18:15:00.000-04:002006-09-27T18:15:00.000-04:00Matthew:As I understand it, your last line serves ...Matthew:<BR/><BR/>As I understand it, your last line serves to demonstrate Richard’s point. The point is that you have not gone very far towards establishing whether or not your behaviour was reprehensible just by establishing that your behaviour does not fall under the category of “flirtatious” behaviour. There remains the question of whether your non-flirtatious behaviour was of the reprehensible sort or the non-reprehensible sort. Hence your conceptual analysis may not ease tensions with your partner. In fact, it may even exacerbate them: if it turns out that your behaviour was of the reprehensible sort, your wife may be justified in getting mad at you for trying to evade censure with a philosophical quibble!<BR/><BR/>Perhaps some of the puzzlement would disappear if it were clearly true that the reprehensible-non-reprehensible distinction mapped cleanly onto the flirtatious-non-flirtatious distinction. Perhaps it is part of our concept of “flirtation” that it will always be reprehensible to behave flirtatiously and always all right to behave non-flirtatiously (in some sense: clearly one can do an awful lot of bad things without doing any flirting). A possible analogy is the concept of “murder”: there is a lot of moral force behind an accusation of “murder”, because the behaviour in the “murder” category is all bad. On the other hand, this moral force is no longer directed at a person when their behaviour is known to fall outside the “murder” category.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-1159394527863892992006-09-27T18:02:00.000-04:002006-09-27T18:02:00.000-04:00Matthew:As I understand the matter, your last line...Matthew:<BR/><BR/>As I understand the matter, your last line really serves to demonstrate Richard's point. The point is that you have not gone very far to establishing whether or not your action was right simply by demonstrating that your action did not fall under the category of "flirtatious" behaviour. There remains the question of whether or not your action was a good sort of non-flirting or a bad sort of non-flirting. If this is true, your conceptual analysis does not ease tensions between you and your wife. In fact, it may even exacerbate them, if it turns out that your non-flirtatious behaviour was the bad sort, it which case your wife may get even madder at you for trying to evade censure with a philosophical quibble. Or perhaps I am being a bit of a kill-joy here!?<BR/><BR/>Perhaps the puzzlement would disappear if it were true that there is necessarily no such thing as bad non-flirtatious behaviour (in some sense: clearly one can do an awful lot of bad things without doing any flirting). That is, if the conceptual analysis began on the assumption that no non-flirtatious behaviour can be bad (in some sense).Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-1159245380740646672006-09-26T00:36:00.000-04:002006-09-26T00:36:00.000-04:00I'm certainly interested in knowing when certain b...I'm certainly interested in knowing when certain behaviour falls under the concept of 'flirting' and when it does not fall under the concept. One concern brought out in the paper is that there are certain patterns of behaviour that mirror flirtatious behaviour without being agent actually flirting.<BR/><BR/>The point you are missing is that when my wife accusses me of flirting with the sales girl because I engaged in some witty banter I need some objection at hand. I can now protest that I never acted with the intention of raising the flirtee romance to salience in a knowing yet playful way. Lacking that necessary condition I was not engaged in flirting. So she can get mad if she'd like, but she can't accuse me of flirting! ;)Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com