Abstract

It is often said that philosophical analysis is an a priori enterprise. Since it prominently features thought experiments designed to elicit the meaning, or semantic properties, of words in one's own language, it seems to be a purely reflective inquiry, requiring no observational or empirical component. I too have sometimes acquiesced in this sort of view. While arguing that certain phases of epistemology require input from psychology and other cognitive sciences, I have granted that the more 'conceptual' stages of epistemology are strictly philosophical and (hence) non-empirical (Goldman, 1986). In this paper I want to qualify this position. I shall suggest that psychological theories can have a bearing on philosophical analysis; they can support the plausibility or implausibility of specific analyses. To many philosophers, of course, the thesis that empirical cognitive sciences can help shed light on lexical meanings is hardly newsworthy. However, I hope that some of the details of my considerations will be instructive.