Naturalistic Neopragmatism and Conceptual Connections

Abstract Neopragmatists – some of whom might be called ‘global expressivists’ – reject metaphysics and take talk of concepts to be talk of the mastery of contingent linguistic practices that have been shaped by human nature. As a result, it may seem much harder for them to account for the sorts of necessary connections – whether conceptual or metaphysical – defended in so much of contemporary analytic philosophy. In some cases, this is right: the connections are really there, and neopragmatists will have to rise to the challenge of explaining them. But in other cases, it may turn out that the putative necessary connections are illusions that neopragmatist lenses can help one see through. In this paper, I try to reveal the workings behind one illusion and to rise to one challenge. In each case the point is a double one; to shed light on the first-order issue and to illustrate the virtues of neopragmatism as a general approach to philosophical problems. And there is a third point: that in some cases the philosophically interesting conclusion about a set of related concepts will only be that there are some ‘for the most part’ connections between them.