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.
Industry Reviews
Nicholas Rescher’s admirable Concept Audits: A Philosophical Method systematizes a three-step natural language strategy for auditing the pretheoretical meanings of concept terms vital to philosophical expression. Rescher reveals the method successfully applied in many chapters in the history of philosophy, starting with Socrates’ elenchus as a prototype concept audit. He then considers the method’s value thematically in approaching a wide range of contemporary philosophical inquiries. Rescher’s book is highly recommended to students and professionals. It will be appreciated as much for what it teaches about the underlying assumptions of some of the past most productive practice of philosophy, as for its clearly articulated and lavishly illustrated program for charting future methodologically self-conscious philosophical advances.
