WHAT IS “FORMAL” ANALYSIS?

There are two main traditions in Western philosophy: a line of dualistic arguments resting on the form–matter dichotomy and the long historical accumulation of ideas related to it, and a line of skeptical arguments resting on an expanding idea of experience and an accumulation of ways to produce and reproduce it. The idea of “formal analysis” has mainly been associated with the former, in which formal analysis is substantially the same thing as imposing the conceptual framework of the analyst. The argument here is that it can be much more fruitfully framed in the latter. Form is not something that one must impose—it can be found. The form of a thing or system is that which holds its parts together. This always devolves into a set of mutual relationships. Such relationships can be observed and characterized and, because they usually involve simple, repeated elements such characterizations commonly take on a schematic or mathematical character.