Phenomenology, Descriptive Psychology and Conceptual Analysis

Husserl famously argued that Brentano’s descriptive psychology, unlike his own ‘pure’ phenomenology, deals with real mental states of empirical persons. In this paper, I challenge this interpretation. I argue that descriptive psychology does not yield empirical propositions on the mental life of real persons but description-based conceptual truths. This can be shown by highlighting the centrality of conceptual analysis in Brentano’s descriptive psychology. Very roughly, the method of the latter consists in noticing aspects of one’s own mental life in order to acquire the related concept, or concepts. Yet, once this is done, the next step is to derive from there conceptual truths about mental acts—truths which are arrived at by means of conceptual insight. I then distinguish four varieties of conceptual analysis—namely: decomposition, quasi-analysis, paraphrase and conceptual mapping—and argue that propositions yielded by descriptive psychology cover all four of them.