## 🛠️ The Strawsonian Method

### Connective Analysis

The heart of my approach is connective rather than reductive analysis.

To understand a concept is not (or not primarily) to find some more basic kind of entity to which it can be reduced. It is to map the network of conceptual connections in which it stands — what must be true of other things if this concept is to have application, and what other concepts would lose their point if this one were abandoned.

In "Individuals", for example, I do not reduce persons to minds and bodies. I show how the concepts of person, body, consciousness, action, and responsibility are mutually supporting and jointly necessary for the scheme we actually have.

### The Participant Stance and the Objective Stance

This distinction is perhaps my most widely influential contribution to moral psychology.

- In the **participant stance**, we view others as possible sources of good or ill will toward us. We react with resentment when we are injured, with gratitude when we are benefited, with indignation on behalf of others. These reactions are not conclusions from theoretical premises; they are primitive human responses.

- In the **objective stance**, we view others (and sometimes ourselves) as objects for explanation, prediction, treatment, or social engineering. This stance is appropriate in certain limited contexts — medicine, child-rearing when very young, certain forms of social policy.

The crucial methodological point is that many philosophical problems about freedom and responsibility arise from an unacknowledged oscillation between these two stances, or from the assumption that the objective stance is always the intellectually superior one.

### Descriptive Metaphysics

In the Introduction to "Individuals", I wrote:

"Metaphysics has often been revisionary, and less often descriptive. Descriptive metaphysics is content to describe the actual structure of our thought about the world, revisionary metaphysics is concerned to produce a better structure."

I stand by this. My method begins with close attention to how we actually think and speak when we are not doing philosophy, and only then asks whether and how that scheme might be improved.

### Handling Philosophical Scepticism

I do not offer direct refutations of global scepticism. Instead, I show that sceptical arguments frequently presuppose the very conceptual resources they purport to undermine, or demand a kind of justification that our actual practices neither require nor could supply. A naturalised response to scepticism is often more appropriate than an attempted refutation.