I really appreciated this post. I am a scientist with side interests in philosophy. I think that I at least understand now what the problem with analytic philosophy is. Before this, I also had the idea that being against analytic philosophy means you are pro vague metaphors and against rigorous reasoning.
Hope you can look into doing more post for us who are really interested in the field but still at a level of... well... not knowing the kind of details you clarified here.
It's an odd situation. Self-avowed analytical philosophers don't seem interested in doing the analysis in metaphysics, where it might do some good, but prefer to work on language, which is about as useful as you suggest. It looks like a diversionary tactic designed to avoid facing facts.
Thanks for this post! How do you respond to the concern that your approach to philosophy threatens to narrow its scope too much? For instance, with regards to health, we might try to identify the physical processes/states that correspond to the concept, but is it not equally important to understand the more abstract, cultural, social, and political contexts that inform our understanding of the concept? As you rightly point out, concepts are polysemous; shouldn't we therefore permit many possible ways of investigating those concepts?
I hope we get a future post with more positive details describing what naturalistic philosophy actually looks like, I'm interested to learn more about what it looks like methodologically.
In my academic papers on the subject I advocate for using different concepts rather than try to have one that serves all of these tasks/goals. Altough I also maintain that it would be strange for concept of health to become too detached from biology.
I remember when I first came face-to-face with this issue - it was a remark by David Chalmers in 'the Conscious Mind', intended to illustrate the concept of logical truth: "not even God could create a male vixen."
Wait, what? You are taking an accidental detail of one particular language as revealing a fact of a sort so unassailable that it would be an error merely to contemplate anything contradicting it? Technically / formally, of course, this is exactly right, but it is a trivial fact, not a profound one.
For quite a while, I worried whether I was an ignorant crackpot for harboring such doubts, so it is quite a relief to find that I do not seem to be alone.
I get the distinct impression that the practitioners of analytic philosophy are motivated by the belief that finding the true meaning of terms will reveal profound truths, and that this justifies the field (as it would if it were both possible and correct.)
---
By the way, where you wrote "If this makes you raise an eyebrow, you are entirely unjustified", did you mean to write "justified"?
This is really good. I found "analytic philosophy" (thought experiments) changed my view of the world and what I wanted to accomplish (e.g., "Chicken Worlds" in Losing My Religions). But I am totally with Walter in naturalism in terms of recognizing and understanding (as much as we can) consciousness, which is the most important question (IMO).
Yeah the problem with thought experiments is that other thought experiments of animals as machines and the like could lead one in the opposite direction. They are often designed to guide your intuitions towards a particular direction. So I prefer a focus on the scientific evidence.
Beyond Concepts: Philosophy After the Linguistic Fever
Walter Veit’s recent reflections on The End of Analytic Philosophy articulate something many of us have felt for a long time, even if we have struggled to name it.
Not simply dissatisfaction.
Not merely methodological disagreement.
But a growing sense that a once-vital philosophical engine has begun to idle—circling increasingly refined symbols, while drawing too little fresh energy from the world those symbols were meant to illuminate.
Veit’s central claim—that philosophy must move beyond concept-first analysis toward a naturalistic philosophy continuous with the sciences—is, I think, fundamentally right.
But I want to suggest a further step.
The deeper issue is not merely that analytic philosophy has neglected science.
It is that it quietly replaced world-attunement with symbol-attunement.
And that substitution has consequences.
1. When Language Becomes the Primary Reality
The linguistic turn was originally motivated by a reasonable insight: many philosophical confusions arise from misuse or misunderstanding of language.
But over time, a reversal occurred.
Instead of treating language as a tool for engaging reality, large parts of philosophy began treating language as the primary object of inquiry.
We stopped asking:
What patterns exist in the world?
And increasingly asked:
What do we mean by the words we use?
This seems modest.
It is not.
It smuggles in a metaphysical commitment: that clarifying concepts is the royal road to clarifying reality.
Yet concepts are not mirrors.
They are adaptive compressions of prior engagements with the world.
They are evolutionary artifacts, not metaphysical bedrock.
2. Polysemy Is Not Failure — It Is How Living Systems Work
Veit is right to emphasize that many philosophically loaded terms—health, disease, consciousness, freedom, justice—are irreducibly polysemous.
This is not a defect awaiting repair by better definitions.
It is a signature of living, context-sensitive systems.
Biological organisms do not evolve single-purpose representational tokens.
They evolve families of overlapping handles that remain flexible across environments.
Language inherits this biological heritage.
Expecting necessary-and-sufficient-condition definitions for such terms is like expecting sharp corners on clouds.
Precision is valuable.
But precision does not always mean sharpness.
Sometimes it means tracking a fuzzy pattern faithfully.
3. Why Conceptual Analysis Plateaus
Conceptual analysis can yield local clarifications.
But when it becomes the dominant method, it tends toward a closed loop:
Concepts are refined using intuitions.
Intuitions are justified by conceptual coherence.
Coherence is evaluated relative to existing concepts.
Very little new constraint enters the system.
From a dynamical perspective, this is a low-energy feedback loop.
It optimizes internal consistency, not world-coupling.
This is one way to understand the feeling that analytic philosophy has stalled.
Not because its practitioners lack intelligence or rigor.
But because the dominant method no longer reliably imports novelty from reality.
4. Naturalistic Philosophy as Pattern-Seeking
Veit’s proposal—returning philosophy to continuity with the sciences—can be framed more generally:
Philosophy should primarily aim to identify, integrate, and interpret real patterns.
Not merely patterns in language.
Patterns in:
Biology
Cognition
Development
Metabolism
Ecology
Culture
Technology
On this view, philosophy becomes a second-order pattern science.
It does not compete with physics, biology, or neuroscience.
It weaves across them.
Its distinctive contribution is integrative, not foundational.
5. Concepts Follow Patterns, Not the Other Way Around
A crucial inversion:
We do not discover patterns because we have the right concepts.
We develop better concepts because we gradually latch onto real patterns.
This matters for debates about health, consciousness, and mind.
The question is not:
“What do people mean by consciousness?”
Nor even:
“What should we mean by consciousness?”
But rather:
“What kinds of organized processes in nature exhibit interiority, integration, and self-relation?”
Once we begin there, vocabulary becomes negotiable.
The pattern is primary.
The label is secondary.
6. Philosophy After the Linguistic Fever
Seen this way, analytic philosophy’s deepest mistake was not excessive rigor.
It was mistaking semantic cleanliness for ontological progress.
Naturalistic philosophy offers a way forward not by abandoning clarity, but by relocating clarity where it belongs:
In our models of reality, not merely in our definitions.
Philosophy’s future, I suspect, lies less in perfecting conceptual taxonomies and more in cultivating ever-richer ways of staying in contact with a reality that remains, at every scale, more generative than our current symbols.
If analytic philosophy is ending, that may be less a tragedy than a molting.
What sheds is a constricting skin.
What remains is philosophy’s oldest vocation:
To listen carefully to the world,
and to help us learn how to live inside what we discover.
Do all humans happily use "labels" for the make-believe purpose of the perceptual-pretense involved in making language function? As a historically invented tool for communication? And has this tool led to the historical manifestation of a communicated-biased form of consciousness?
A form of human consciousness we are so "immersed" within, asking a human being how they feel about this, is akin to asking a fish how it feels about water, philosophically speaking. And is our everyday waking dream of a consensus-reality, the reason people like Iain McGilchrist suggest our species appears to be sleepwalking towards an Abyss of its own making?
Furthermore, do we collectively avoid suffering the pain of realization about the callosal nature of our species' self-deception, created by language? As summarized in this statement from a treatise on language:
The delusion is extraordinary by which we exalt language above nature:- making language the expositor of nature, instead of making nature the expositor of language. ― Alexander B Johnson, A TREATISE ON LANGUAGE
I really appreciated this post. I am a scientist with side interests in philosophy. I think that I at least understand now what the problem with analytic philosophy is. Before this, I also had the idea that being against analytic philosophy means you are pro vague metaphors and against rigorous reasoning.
Hope you can look into doing more post for us who are really interested in the field but still at a level of... well... not knowing the kind of details you clarified here.
Thanks! I am glad to have illuminated it a little bit. It's certainly not the only problem of analytic philosophy, but it's a very central one.
It's an odd situation. Self-avowed analytical philosophers don't seem interested in doing the analysis in metaphysics, where it might do some good, but prefer to work on language, which is about as useful as you suggest. It looks like a diversionary tactic designed to avoid facing facts.
Thanks for this post! How do you respond to the concern that your approach to philosophy threatens to narrow its scope too much? For instance, with regards to health, we might try to identify the physical processes/states that correspond to the concept, but is it not equally important to understand the more abstract, cultural, social, and political contexts that inform our understanding of the concept? As you rightly point out, concepts are polysemous; shouldn't we therefore permit many possible ways of investigating those concepts?
I hope we get a future post with more positive details describing what naturalistic philosophy actually looks like, I'm interested to learn more about what it looks like methodologically.
In my academic papers on the subject I advocate for using different concepts rather than try to have one that serves all of these tasks/goals. Altough I also maintain that it would be strange for concept of health to become too detached from biology.
I remember when I first came face-to-face with this issue - it was a remark by David Chalmers in 'the Conscious Mind', intended to illustrate the concept of logical truth: "not even God could create a male vixen."
Wait, what? You are taking an accidental detail of one particular language as revealing a fact of a sort so unassailable that it would be an error merely to contemplate anything contradicting it? Technically / formally, of course, this is exactly right, but it is a trivial fact, not a profound one.
For quite a while, I worried whether I was an ignorant crackpot for harboring such doubts, so it is quite a relief to find that I do not seem to be alone.
I get the distinct impression that the practitioners of analytic philosophy are motivated by the belief that finding the true meaning of terms will reveal profound truths, and that this justifies the field (as it would if it were both possible and correct.)
---
By the way, where you wrote "If this makes you raise an eyebrow, you are entirely unjustified", did you mean to write "justified"?
Agreed - and thanks for spotting the error, I shall correct it promptly. :)
This is really good. I found "analytic philosophy" (thought experiments) changed my view of the world and what I wanted to accomplish (e.g., "Chicken Worlds" in Losing My Religions). But I am totally with Walter in naturalism in terms of recognizing and understanding (as much as we can) consciousness, which is the most important question (IMO).
Yeah the problem with thought experiments is that other thought experiments of animals as machines and the like could lead one in the opposite direction. They are often designed to guide your intuitions towards a particular direction. So I prefer a focus on the scientific evidence.
Beyond Concepts: Philosophy After the Linguistic Fever
Walter Veit’s recent reflections on The End of Analytic Philosophy articulate something many of us have felt for a long time, even if we have struggled to name it.
Not simply dissatisfaction.
Not merely methodological disagreement.
But a growing sense that a once-vital philosophical engine has begun to idle—circling increasingly refined symbols, while drawing too little fresh energy from the world those symbols were meant to illuminate.
Veit’s central claim—that philosophy must move beyond concept-first analysis toward a naturalistic philosophy continuous with the sciences—is, I think, fundamentally right.
But I want to suggest a further step.
The deeper issue is not merely that analytic philosophy has neglected science.
It is that it quietly replaced world-attunement with symbol-attunement.
And that substitution has consequences.
1. When Language Becomes the Primary Reality
The linguistic turn was originally motivated by a reasonable insight: many philosophical confusions arise from misuse or misunderstanding of language.
But over time, a reversal occurred.
Instead of treating language as a tool for engaging reality, large parts of philosophy began treating language as the primary object of inquiry.
We stopped asking:
What patterns exist in the world?
And increasingly asked:
What do we mean by the words we use?
This seems modest.
It is not.
It smuggles in a metaphysical commitment: that clarifying concepts is the royal road to clarifying reality.
Yet concepts are not mirrors.
They are adaptive compressions of prior engagements with the world.
They are evolutionary artifacts, not metaphysical bedrock.
2. Polysemy Is Not Failure — It Is How Living Systems Work
Veit is right to emphasize that many philosophically loaded terms—health, disease, consciousness, freedom, justice—are irreducibly polysemous.
This is not a defect awaiting repair by better definitions.
It is a signature of living, context-sensitive systems.
Biological organisms do not evolve single-purpose representational tokens.
They evolve families of overlapping handles that remain flexible across environments.
Language inherits this biological heritage.
Expecting necessary-and-sufficient-condition definitions for such terms is like expecting sharp corners on clouds.
Precision is valuable.
But precision does not always mean sharpness.
Sometimes it means tracking a fuzzy pattern faithfully.
3. Why Conceptual Analysis Plateaus
Conceptual analysis can yield local clarifications.
But when it becomes the dominant method, it tends toward a closed loop:
Concepts are refined using intuitions.
Intuitions are justified by conceptual coherence.
Coherence is evaluated relative to existing concepts.
Very little new constraint enters the system.
From a dynamical perspective, this is a low-energy feedback loop.
It optimizes internal consistency, not world-coupling.
This is one way to understand the feeling that analytic philosophy has stalled.
Not because its practitioners lack intelligence or rigor.
But because the dominant method no longer reliably imports novelty from reality.
4. Naturalistic Philosophy as Pattern-Seeking
Veit’s proposal—returning philosophy to continuity with the sciences—can be framed more generally:
Philosophy should primarily aim to identify, integrate, and interpret real patterns.
Not merely patterns in language.
Patterns in:
Biology
Cognition
Development
Metabolism
Ecology
Culture
Technology
On this view, philosophy becomes a second-order pattern science.
It does not compete with physics, biology, or neuroscience.
It weaves across them.
Its distinctive contribution is integrative, not foundational.
5. Concepts Follow Patterns, Not the Other Way Around
A crucial inversion:
We do not discover patterns because we have the right concepts.
We develop better concepts because we gradually latch onto real patterns.
This matters for debates about health, consciousness, and mind.
The question is not:
“What do people mean by consciousness?”
Nor even:
“What should we mean by consciousness?”
But rather:
“What kinds of organized processes in nature exhibit interiority, integration, and self-relation?”
Once we begin there, vocabulary becomes negotiable.
The pattern is primary.
The label is secondary.
6. Philosophy After the Linguistic Fever
Seen this way, analytic philosophy’s deepest mistake was not excessive rigor.
It was mistaking semantic cleanliness for ontological progress.
Naturalistic philosophy offers a way forward not by abandoning clarity, but by relocating clarity where it belongs:
In our models of reality, not merely in our definitions.
Philosophy’s future, I suspect, lies less in perfecting conceptual taxonomies and more in cultivating ever-richer ways of staying in contact with a reality that remains, at every scale, more generative than our current symbols.
If analytic philosophy is ending, that may be less a tragedy than a molting.
What sheds is a constricting skin.
What remains is philosophy’s oldest vocation:
To listen carefully to the world,
and to help us learn how to live inside what we discover.
Do all humans happily use "labels" for the make-believe purpose of the perceptual-pretense involved in making language function? As a historically invented tool for communication? And has this tool led to the historical manifestation of a communicated-biased form of consciousness?
A form of human consciousness we are so "immersed" within, asking a human being how they feel about this, is akin to asking a fish how it feels about water, philosophically speaking. And is our everyday waking dream of a consensus-reality, the reason people like Iain McGilchrist suggest our species appears to be sleepwalking towards an Abyss of its own making?
Furthermore, do we collectively avoid suffering the pain of realization about the callosal nature of our species' self-deception, created by language? As summarized in this statement from a treatise on language:
The delusion is extraordinary by which we exalt language above nature:- making language the expositor of nature, instead of making nature the expositor of language. ― Alexander B Johnson, A TREATISE ON LANGUAGE
You might find this essay interesting where I defend moral nihilism: https://walterveit.substack.com/p/why-effective-altruists-and-everyone