Concept auditing is based on an innovative premise for philosophers: when they address an everyday life conception on the order of knowledge, truth, justice, fairness, beauty, or the like and purport to be dealing with what it involves, then they must honor the existing meanings of these terms. And insofar as the prevailing meaning is being contravened, they must explain how and justify why this is being done. They must, in sum, explain how their treatment of a topic relates to our established pre-systematic understanding of the issues involved and relate their deliberations to the prevailing conception of the matter they are proposing to discuss. The aim of a concept audit is to consider to what extent a given philosophical discussion honors this communicative obligation. Concept Audits sets out not only to explain and defend this procedure, but also to consider a host of applications and exemplifications of these ideas. Nicholas Rescher shows how this method of conceptual auditing can function to elucidate and evaluate philosophical theses and doctrine across a wide spectrum of issues, ranging from logic to ethics and metaphysics. Accordingly, he explains and illustrates an instructive innovation in philosophical method. This new study of philosophical methodology presents its method in a clear and convincing way and shows the method at work with respect to a wide spectrum of important philosophical issues.
PREFACE I. METHODOLOGY 1. Introduction: The Concept Auditing Process II. SOME HISTORICAL APPLICATIONS 2. The Socratic Method as an Illustration 3. Neo-Platonic Wholes 4. Descartes and Generalization 5. Spinoza on Things and Ideas 6. Kantian Absolutism in Moral Theory 7. Mill on Desirability 8. Ordinary Language Philosophy on the Nature of Knowing 9. Russell-Gettier on the Analysis of Knowledge 10. Concept Dialectics in Historical Perspective 11. Metaphysical Illusions III. FURTHER ILLUSTRATIVE APPLICATIONS 12. Who Dun It? 13. Existence: To Be or Not to Be 14. Explanatory Regression 15. The Fallacy of Respect Neglect 16. Appearance and Reality 17. On the Truth about Reality 18. Sameness and Change 19. Origination Issues 20. Shaping Ideas 21. Construing Necessitation 22. Conceptual Horizons 23. Language Limits 24. On Certainty 25. Timeless Truth 26. Assessing Acceptability 27. Value Neutrality in Science 28. Personhood and Obligation 29. Control Issues 30. Fairness Problems 31. The Ethics of Delegation 32. Doing unto Others 33. Faux Quantities 34. Luck vs. Fortune 35. The Problem of Progress 36. Issues of Excellence 37. Problems of Perfection IV. CONCLUSION 38. Concluding Observations
