Abstract

Many philosophers consciously seek conceptual connections, conceptual necessities, conceptual truths, and conceptual analyses. Philosophers of mind and language dispute whether there is a language of thought; whatever the answer, it is no conceptual truth. Moral and political philosophers and philosophers of art appeal to empirically discovered human cognitive limitations, and so on. This chapter examines a variety of attempts to develop a metaphysical account of analyticity. It also explores epistemological account of analyticity, also with negative results. The overall upshot is that philosophical truths are analytic at most in senses too weak to be of much explanatory value or to justify conceiving contemporary philosophy in terms of a linguistic or conceptual turn. A core of philosophical truths may indeed be modal‐analytic. Some philosophers seek to articulate necessary truths without essential reliance on indexicals; if they succeed, the sentences they produce are modal‐analytic.