Descriptive Psychology as Conceptual Analysis

What is descriptive psychology and what (if anything) makes it philosophically relevant? Various conceptions of descriptive psychology were circulating at the end of 19th century in the works of Lotze, Dilthey and Brentano. Recently, Johannes Brandl argued that these historical conceptions are fraught with difficulties and defended another conception, according to which descriptive psychology is a tool to “remove linguistic obstacles that interfere with our ability to acquire or use psychological knowledge” (Brandl 2021, 8). I agree. But how can it do that? In this paper, I offer the following answer: descriptive psychology can remove linguistic obstacles to psychological knowledge because it is a matter of conceptual analysis; its point is to yield a conceptual framework for investigations into the human mind, thereby being of key importance for philosophy of mind. I contrast this characterization with others, arguing that it has at least two crucial advantages: first, the notion of conceptual analysis captures the fact that propositions of descriptive psychology do not commit us to positing the existence of anything (in fact, they stay true even if nothing exists in the world); next, it allows for a further characterization of the outputs of descriptive psychology in terms of various kinds of conceptual analysis—namely: decomposition, quasi-analysis, paraphrase and conceptual mapping.