Concept auditing is based on an innovative premise for philosophers: when they address an everyday life conception on the order of knowledge, truth, justice, fairness, beauty, or the like and purport to be dealing with what it involves, then they must honor the existing meanings of these terms. And insofar as the prevailing meaning is being contravened, they must explain how and justify why this is being done. They must, in sum, explain how their treatment of a topic relates to our established pre-systematic understanding of the issues involved and relate their deliberations to the prevailing conception of the matter they are proposing to discuss. The aim of a concept audit is to consider to what extent a given philosophical discussion honors this communicative obligation.

Concept Auditssets out not only to explain and defend this procedure, but also to consider a host of applications and exemplifications of these ideas. Nicholas Rescher shows how this method of conceptual auditing can function to elucidate and evaluate philosophical theses and doctrine across a wide spectrum of issues, ranging from logic to ethics and metaphysics. Accordingly, he explains and illustrates an instructive innovation in philosophical method. This new study of philosophical methodology presents its method in a clear and convincing way and shows the method at work with respect to a wide spectrum of important philosophical issues.

Nicholas Rescher is professor of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh.

PREFACE

I.METHODOLOGY

1.Introduction: The Concept Auditing Process

II.SOME HISTORICAL APPLICATIONS

2. The Socratic Method as an Illustration

3.Neo-Platonic Wholes

4.Descartes and Generalization

5.Spinoza on Things and Ideas

6.Kantian Absolutism in Moral Theory

7.Mill on Desirability

8.Ordinary Language Philosophy on the Nature of Knowing

9.Russell-Gettier on the Analysis of Knowledge

10.Concept Dialectics in Historical Perspective

11.Metaphysical Illusions

III.FURTHER ILLUSTRATIVE APPLICATIONS

12.Who Dun It?

13.Existence: To Be or Not to Be

14.Explanatory Regression

15.The Fallacy of Respect Neglect

16.Appearance and Reality

17.On the Truth about Reality

18.Sameness and Change

19.Origination Issues

20.Shaping Ideas

21.Construing Necessitation

22.Conceptual Horizons

23.Language Limits

24.On Certainty

25.Timeless Truth

26.Assessing Acceptability

27.Value Neutrality in Science

28.Personhood and Obligation

29.Control Issues

30.Fairness Problems

31.The Ethics of Delegation

32.Doing unto Others

33.Faux Quantities

34.Luck vs. Fortune

35.The Problem of Progress

36.Issues of Excellence

37.Problems of Perfection

IV.CONCLUSION

38.Concluding Observations