| Analysis | Resolving a complex proposition or concept into simpler ones to gain better understanding of the original proposition or concept; analysis comes from a Greek word meaning to "unloosen" or "untie."
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| Analytic philosophy | The predominant twentieth-century philosophical tradition in English-speaking countries; analytic philosophy has its roots in British empiricism and holds that analysis is the proper method of philosophy.
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| Antirepresentationalism | A philosophy that denies that the mind or language contains or is a representation of reality.
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| Behaviorism | The methodological principle in psychology according to which meaningful psychological inquiry confines itself to psychological phenomenon that can be behaviorally defined; the theory in philosophy that when we talk about a person's mental states, we are referring in fact to the person's disposition to behave in certain ways.
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| Bertrand Russell | Held that analysis is the key to metaphysical truth. He sought connection between "hard" data given in sensory experience and supposedly external physical objects.
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| C.S. Peirce | Stated that "in order to ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what practical consequences might conceivably result by necessity from the truth of that conception, and the sum of these consequences will constitute the entire meaning of the conception."
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| Dualism | Two-ism; the doctrine that existing things belong to one or another but not both of two distinct categories of things, usually deemed to be physical and nonphysical or spiritual.
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| Foundationalism | The doctrine that a belief qualifies as knowledge only if it logically follows from propositions that are incorrigible (incapable of being false if you believe that they are true).
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| Functionalism | The doctrine that what a thing is must be understood and analyzed not by what it is made of but by its function; for example, anything that functions as a mousetrap is a mousetrap, regardless of what it is made of or how it looks or is assembled.
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| Gottlob Frege | A German mathematician and founder of modern mathematical logic, undertook to establish logicism independently of Russell. He is often said to have been the founder of analytic philosophy.
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| Idealism | The doctrine that only what is mental (thought, consciousness, perception) exists and that so-called physical manifestations of things are manifestations of mind or thought.
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| Identity theory | The theory that mental states and events are brain states and events.
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| Incorrigible | The property of a proposition that cannot be false if you believe it to be true.
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| Instrumentalism | A theory held by John Dewey, among others, that ideas, judgments, and propositions are not merely true or false; rather, they are tools to understand experience and solve problems.
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| Interactionist dualism | The theory that the physical body and the nonphysical mind interact with each other.
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| John Dewey | An instrumentalist who claimed thinking is not a search for "truth" but, rather, is aimed at solving practical problems. He thought of metaphysics as escapism.
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| Language game | The context in which an utterance is made, what determines the purposes served by the utterance and hence its meaning; Wittgenstein believed that philosophical problems are due to ignoring the "game" in which certain concepts are used.
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| Logical atomism | The metaphysical theory that the world does not consist of things but of facts, that is, things having certain properties and standing in certain relationships to one another. The ultimate facts are atomic in that they are logically independent of one another and are unresolvable into simpler facts; likewise, an empirically correct description of the world will consist ultimately of logically independent and unanalyzable atomic propositions that correspond to the atomic facts.
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| Logical positivism | The philosophy of the Vienna Circle, according to which any purported statement of fact, if not a verbal truism, is meaningless unless certain conceivable observations would serve to conform or deny it.
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| Logicism | The thesis that the concepts of mathematics can be defined in terms of concepts of logic, and that all mathematical truths can be proved from principles of formal logic.
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| Ludwig Wittgenstein | Derived a metaphysics of logical atomism from a consideration of the relationship of language and the world. He advanced the picture theory of meaning, then later rejected it.
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| Naturalized epistemology | The view that the important epistemological problems are those that can be resolved by psychological investigation of the processes involved in acquiring and revising beliefs.
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| Phenomenalism | The theory that we only know phenomena; in analytic philosophy, the theory that propositions referring to physical objects can, in principle, be expressed in propositions referring only to sense-data.
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| Philosophy of mind | That area of analytic philosophy concerned with the nature of consciousness, mental states, the mind, and the proper analysis of everyday psychological vocabulary.
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| Pragmatic theory of truth | in Dewey's and William James's philosophies, a theory of justification, according to which (roughly) a belief may be accepted as true if it "works"; in Peirce's philosophy, a species of correspondence theory.
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| Pragmatism | Philosophies that hold that the meaning of concepts lies in the difference they make to conduct and that the function of thought is to guide action.
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| Private language | In the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, a language that can be understood by only a single individual.
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| Realism | The theory that the real world is independent of the mind.
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| Representationalism | The doctrine that true beliefs are accurate representations of the state of affairs they are about.
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| Sense-data | That which you are immediately aware of in sensory experience; the contents of awareness.
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| Straightforward reductivist physicalism | The theory that all true propositions can, in principle, be expressed in the language of physics.
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| Theoretical posits | Entities whose existence we hypothesize to explain our sensory experience.
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| Verifiability criterion (theory) of meaning | The dictum that a sentence must express something verifiable if it is to express an empirically meaningful statement.
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| Vienna Circle | A group of philosophers and scientists centered at the University of Vienna in the 1920s and 1930s who espoused logical positivism.
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| William James | Said that "the whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite differences it will make to you and me, at definite instants of our life, if this world-formula or that world-formula be the true one."
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2002 McGraw-Hill Higher Education