 As mentioned at the start of the article, the specification of necessary and sufficient conditions has traditionally been part of the philosopher’s business of analysis of terms, concepts and phenomena. Philosophical investigations of knowledge, truth, causality, consciousness, memory, justice, altruism and a host of other matters do not aim at stating evidential or explanatory relations, but rather at identifying and developing conceptual ones (see Jackson 1998 for a detailed account of conceptual analysis, and the supplementary entry on  conceptions of analysis in analytic philosophy  for an overview). But even here, the temptation to look for reasons why or reasons for thinking that is not far away. While conceptual analysis, like dictionary definition, eschews evidential and explanatory conditions, evidential conditions seem to be natural consequences of definition and analysis. That Nellie is an elephant may not be a (or the) reason why she is an animal, any more than that a figure is a square is a reason why it has four sides. But some evidential claims seem to make sense even in such contexts: being an elephant apparently gives a reason for thinking that Nellie is an animal, and a certain figure may be said to have four sides because it is a square, in an evidential sense of “because”.