The obscurity of philosophical analyses

Earlier in the year, I made the following remark about the obscurity of some philosophical analyses:

One of the strangest experiences I have reading papers in philosophy is that it is often [unclear] what the author's goals are.

I'll be told they're arguing for some position, but I don't know what the position is about.

I suspect this is because philosophers will want to offer an account of some concept, say, a "desire."

On some implicit level, their argument seems to be an attempt to capture a descriptive account of how people use the word "desire" in the world. Yet their approach seems to be an attempt to grasp what "the concept" of a "desire" is, as though there is some phenomena, "desire," and our goal is to find out what its properties are by a priori / armchair methods.

I find this intensely strange. There are facts about how people use the word "desire." If you want to know what those are, why not do psychology, linguistics, etc.?

If that's not what you want to know, but you want to know what a "desire" is, independent of how people use the word, this is trivially easy: just stipulate what concept you're talking about. For instance, you could think of a "desire" as a goal that is necessarily motivating. You could think of it as a can of peaches. It doesn't matter. Concepts are whatever you want them to be. So what is going on here? Are philosophers offering descriptive accounts of how people use words? Or are they doing some kind of Platonic magic where they're trying to grasp what's real by thinking really hard? And if it's the latter, then how exactly is what they're doing supposed to work? If they think really hard, they'll find out what a "desire" really is? Why that word? Why the word "desire"? How did it earn that label?

So let's say you wanted to know what a "desire" is. How would you even begin this line of inquiry? *If* you want to know what "whatever it is people are referring to when they use the word 'desire'" then this seems like a descriptive enterprise. Better get ready to run some studies, engage in some observational research, or look at databases of transcripts of people talking. If that's *not* what you're doing, then what are you doing? That is, if you want to know what a "desire" is, but this is no way dependent on what ordinary people are referring to, why not just stipulate what concept you're referring to? Problem solved. If that won't work, why not? What are you doing? And what methods are you employing to achieve that goal?

I have this sinking feeling that a lot of contemporary analytic philosophy rests on mistaken and strange notions of the relation between language and reality, and that catastrophic confusions about language and metaphysics have steered generations of thinkers wildly off course.

I mostly have metaethical accounts in mind, but this applies to ethics and philosophy more broadly. Often it's unclear whether some account of knowledge, or normative moral claims, or whatever is intended to describe how ordinary people speak or think, how they could speak or think, how they should speak or think, whether it's partially an account of how they do think, and partially how they should think, and so on. Authors seem mired in offering "accounts," arguing for e.g., motivational internalism or quasi-realism, but it's just not clear what their accounts are accounts of, and nothing in the text makes it clear.

There seems to be a strange lack of specificity about the philosophical objectives of papers. It may seem obvious to the authors of these papers what they are up to, and maybe it is intended to be understood against the backdrop of some shared set of methodologies or assumptions philosophers all appreciate, but if so, it's remained obscure to me since I began studying philosophy. I know this is all a bit vague, so this is less a strong and well-defined objection and more a general observation. I hope in the future to provide some specific examples and highlights from texts to illustrate what I am trying to say.