WHAT IS CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS?

This book is designed to give the reader mastery over certain skills and techniques. Half the battle is won if you can get a clear idea of exactly what these skills and techniques are, and what purpose they serve: so we shall have to begin by spending a lot of time over this point. Techniques like being able to solve quadratic equations, doing Latin prose, or translating German into English are difficult to master: but at least we have the advantage of knowing just what it is that we are supposed to be doing, even if we do not always do it very well. These techniques and many others have for a long time been placed under different headings: they are what schools call ‘subjects’—mathematics, Latin, German, and so on. Often we can look up the right answers to questions in these subjects, by referring to a dictionary, or a grammar, or an authoritative textbook. But none of this applies to the techniques outlined in this book. That is partly because they are new techniques: we have only become fully conscious of them in the last twenty or thirty years. But it is chiefly because of the nature of the techniques themselves, and the general purpose which they serve.

What are these techniques like? They are not like ‘subjects’ such as Latin or mathematics, which have clear-cut and well-defined rules, and in which answers are indisputably right or wrong.