Penultimate Draft, forthcoming in Metaphilosophy, January 2017. 1 Thinking About a Word – Love for Example Niklas Forsberg Uppsala University & Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies Introduction What is it that we do when we philosophize about a word? How are we to go about as we ask the philosophical question par excellance “what is …?” How can we survey the uses of a word in such a way that we can form a philosophical theory (or account) of it? And given that we are the masters of our language(s), why do we think that the various uses of a word must be conquered philosophically, framed theoretically? It may seem as if these questions can be boiled down to the question: “Can we single out a sense from the manifold uses of a word?” This question may in turn be taken to be possible to translate as “How do we go from various uses of a word to the formation and comprehension of a concept?” Consequently, we have a thousand different theories about words and concepts, ideality and reality, use and meaning, that all give varying answers to the problem. But given that I said “It may seem as if…” I have also implied that this way to approach my initial question (about what it is that we do when we think about a word) is somehow skewed and problematic. One of the core difficulties here is that theorizing about a word – love for example – may force us blot out the word’s diverse and multifaceted surroundings, so that we may attain, distil, or extrapolate (which word is the right one here?) the sense that one’s theory is supposed to be a theory about. And when I say this, I do not only mean that any philosophical account must be context sensitive and flexible enough, so as take all kinds of