“The Failure of Analysis and the Nature of Concepts”, Michael Huemer2015 (, ; similar)⁠:

Over the last century, many well-qualified philosophers spent many years attempting to analyze philosophically interesting concepts, such as KNOWLEDGE, FREE WILL, and CAUSATION. Yet no one succeeded in producing a single correct analysis. What went wrong?

I ascribe the aspirations of conceptual analysis to a Lockean theory of concepts that ought to be rejected. I propose an alternative picture of concepts and properties that explains both (1) why linguistic intuitions about cases dominate the evaluation of conceptual analyses; and (2) why most concepts are unanalyzable.

3 tenets of this Lockean theory of concepts are of particular interest here:

  1. Concepts are open to direct introspective examination.

  2. Most concepts are composed of other concepts.

  3. Definitions govern the application of concepts.