If, then, philosophy—in the sense in which we talk of ‘philosophy’ as contrasted with ‘a’, ‘my’, ‘your’, ‘the American’, or ‘communist’ philosophy—is conceptual analysis, what is its value? Primarily, to discover certain important features which no other study can discover, namely, the necessary characteristics of anything, the characteristics in virtue of which it is what it is and is what it is called. How important this discovery will be depends on how important the things it studies are. The analysis of concluding, deducing, inferring, and assuming is, no doubt, more important than that of muttering, mumbling, whispering, and groaning, just as counting the stars in the heavens is, no doubt, more important than counting the sands on the sea shore. It is not surprising that more effort has been spent on investigating the beautiful and the sublime than on investigating the dainty and the dumpy. On the other hand, since philosophy investigates only necessary characteristics, it cannot tell us what things are good or right or known or voluntary or reckless, but only what it is to be any of these.

Philosophy is chiefly valued by some either for its therapeutic powers—for curing “the bumps that the understanding has got by running its head up against the limits of language”—or for its crux-disentangling capacity—for “showing the fly the way out of the flybottle.” One may, for example, embark on an analysis of emotion—and hence of grief, pity, and fear—in order to understand the distinction between tear-shedding and weeping or between cackling and chuckling at a joke. It is no doubt when we are baffled by the mysteriousness of time, torn between free will and determinism, or puzzled by probability that we begin to philosophize. It is also true that many of our beliefs in areas where investigation and experiment cannot prove them right or wrong are due to conceptual assumptions or inferences, as when we believe in fatalism because we confuse logical necessity with physical inevitability, or when we are persuaded either to materialism or to spiritualism by conceptual arguments about the nature of mind and matter.

Others value philosophy as an ancillary to their own primary interests—as when it shows the psychologist that his experiments into the nature of thought are vitiated by his mistaken conceptual assumption that thinking is a specific kind of, perhaps inner, activity like talking or gazing at images, or when it shows the jurisprudent that his doctrine of negligence confuses it with recklessness, or when it shows the educationalist that indulging a pupil’s wants is not necessarily catering to his needs.

(Alan R. White, “Conceptual Analysis,” chap. 5 in The Owl of Minerva: Philosophers on Philosophy, ed. Charles J. Bontempo and S. Jack Odell [New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1975], 103-17, at 116-7 [italics in original])