Your crucial, unstated premise is that concepts with fuzzy application conditions can’t or usually don’t pick out determinate qualities or relations in the world. Because if they actually can pick out such qualities, then those qualities may turn out to be analyzable in terms of others, and conceptual analysts can just take themselves to be analyzing the semantic reference of our concepts rather than the confused jumble of neural events in which those concepts are actually stored.
Furthermore, that premise seems highly non-obvious to me. It impinges upon a ton of different questions. And it falls under the domain of philosophy of language, not cognitive science. So I think your claim that good philosophy just is cognitive science is clearly false.
Regarding your claim that philosophy hasn’t produced any non-trivial conceptual reductions, that’s a pretty controversial view. In particular, I think there are highly successful reductions of the concept of truth—see the SEP article on the deflationary theory of truth. And it’s a lot harder to understand the concept of truth in terms of fuzzy pattern-matching than, say, the concept of socks.
Your crucial, unstated premise is that concepts with fuzzy application conditions can’t or usually don’t pick out determinate qualities or relations in the world. Because if they actually can pick out such qualities, then those qualities may turn out to be analyzable in terms of others, and conceptual analysts can just take themselves to be analyzing the semantic reference of our concepts rather than the confused jumble of neural events in which those concepts are actually stored.
Furthermore, that premise seems highly non-obvious to me. It impinges upon a ton of different questions. And it falls under the domain of philosophy of language, not cognitive science. So I think your claim that good philosophy just is cognitive science is clearly false.
Regarding your claim that philosophy hasn’t produced any non-trivial conceptual reductions, that’s a pretty controversial view. In particular, I think there are highly successful reductions of the concept of truth—see the SEP article on the deflationary theory of truth. And it’s a lot harder to understand the concept of truth in terms of fuzzy pattern-matching than, say, the concept of socks.