Thanks for the clarifications!

Also, I think that the question regarding the nature of conceptual analysis has been a pressing matter for the self-understanding of Philosophy as an academic project. Like, if philosophy operates on the level of studying words and concepts, then how exactly does it differ from other studies like the study of literature, the psychological study of language, the cognitive science, the anthropological study of human populations using language to co-ordinate their practical lives etc. The classical fear of the classical philosopher; "If all these questions can be answered by empirical sciences, then what is left for us Philosophers to do? Or should we just focus on studying the history of philosophy?" But then, I'm not sure if that question is relevant to anyone who isn't personally involved in making decisions concerning the funding of science (or applying for a grant to fund ones own academic projects).

In case someone is interested in my own opinion - you might have guessed it =) Personally I don't believe in strict boundaries between sciences. There are different approaches, and every cognitive project contains a dose of philosophy. So I don't see such a need to define the field or methods of Philosophy as somehow totally different from the other sciences. Actually, I hope that different fields of science could co-operate more, sharing and exchanging ideas, insights and experiences.

Oh well. Maybe I'll finish with a piece of self-reflection, distantly related to the way Matti describes Frege's method. As, sometimes it seems to me that I use some words slightly differently than many of the other Finnish-speaking people I try to communicate with. For example, the simple word "jos", which would translate as "if" in English. When I was a child and a teenager (and a young adult) I deliberately avoided a lot of social interactions, not communicating my deeper thoughts with other people. So maybe that affected the way I use some words, as I didn't adopt their common function in spoken language, but instead developed my own versions or something. I started computer programming when I was 12 years old or something. And a common basic structure in computer code is an expression "IF A THEN X". And sometimes A is true, sometimes it is false, and we just define a logical condition expressing what happens in each case. I've noticed that I tend to use a lot of this kind of structures when I try to make sense of human interactions and social situations. And when I try to communicate my thoughts and feelings, I often use this structure "Well, if it is A then X", and get other people upset, for they hear me stating things like "Erkka wants A, Erkka believes that A is true" or something like that. So maybe it is that in the common spoken Finnish the word "jos X" somehow implies that X is very likely to be true, or that we want X to be true. I really don't know, for I often feel that I'm slightly alien to the common ways of using Finnish language, and there is this clumsy feeling that the way I use words doesn't quite align with the way my fellow Finnish speakers understand the same words. And, using only an arm-chair self-reflection I have no means of knowing if this is just me, or if this is a common feature of all human communication. (One of the reasons why I'm always a little bit reserved towards drawing conclusions based on mere self-reflection, for there lies the risk of claiming that one's own personal experiences somehow are universally true.)