analysans See ANALYSIS, DEFINIENDUM. analysis, the process of breaking up a concept, proposition, linguistic complex, or fact into its simple or ultimate constituents. That on which the analysis is done is called the analysandum, and that which does the analysis is called the analysans. A number of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, including Russell, Moore, and (the early) Wittgenstein, have argued that philosophical analysis is the proper method of philosophy. But the practitioners of analytic philosophy have disagreed about what kind of thing is to be analyzed. For example, Moore tried to analyze sense-data into their constituent parts. Here the analysandum is a complex psychological fact, the having of a sense-datum. More commonly, analytic philosophers have tried to analyze concepts or propositions. This is conceptual analysis. Still others have seen it as their task to give an analysis of various kinds of sentences – e.g., those involving proper names or definite descriptions. This is linguistic analysis. Each of these kinds of analysis faces a version of a puzzle that has come to be called the paradox of analysis. For linguistic analyses, the paradox can be expressed as follows: for an analysis to be adequate, the analysans must be synonymous with the analysandum; e.g., if ‘male sibling’ is to analyze ‘brother’, they must mean the same; but if they are synonymous, then ‘a brother is a male sibling’ is synonymous with ‘a brother is a brother’; but the two sentences do not seem synonymous. Expressed as a dilemma, the paradox is that any proposed analysis would seem to be either inadequate (because the analysans and the analysandum are not synonymous) or uninformative (because they are synonymous). See also ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY , DEFINITION , MATHEMATICAL ANALYSIS , MEANING , PARADOX OF ANALYSIS , RUSSEL. R.Fo.