Work · Analytic Philosophy
From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defence of Conceptual Analysis
John Locke Lectures of 1995: conceptual analysis tells us where in the physical world to locate colour, mind and value.
Introduction
Jackson gave the John Locke Lectures at Oxford in 1995 and published them in 1998. He defends conceptual analysis against doubts inspired by Quine: anyone who claims that everything is physical must show how facts about colour, belief or value are entailed by the physical facts – the “location problem” – and that requires knowing what our concepts of these things are, which is the job of conceptual analysis, done by consulting intuitions about possible cases. Jackson combines this with a two-dimensional semantics that distinguishes a priori from a posteriori necessity. Chapters on colour, folk psychology and ethics apply the method; in ethics he defends “moral functionalism”. The approach is often called the Canberra Plan.
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