Which Comes First: Concept or the Application?

Dedicated to those who think a dichotomy exists between analytic, or conceptual, statements ("Bachelors are unmarried men.") and synthetic, or empirical, statements ("That dog is brown.):

As traditionally understood, analytic truths are linguistic stipulations, and therefore have no factual commitments, whereas synthetic truths do have factual commitments, and so are not merely stipulative. Neither of these descriptions characterizes conceptual truths as [Ludwig] Wittgenstein understands them. For Wittgenstein, a conceptual (or, as he would say, “grammatical”) proposition is indeed stipulative, and so in a certain sense lacks factual content; so it would be misleading to call it “synthetic.” 

 Is 252 = 625 a fact of experience? You’d like to say: “No.”—Why isn’t it?—“Because, by the rules, it can’t be otherwise.”—And why so?—Because that is the meaning of the rules. Because that is the procedure on which we build all judging.... Following a rule is a human activity. [Wittgenstein citation omitted.]

But it would also be misleading to call a conceptual truth "analytic"; for while such a truth lacks factual content, it does not lack factual commitments, because for Wittgenstein the ability to apply a concept correctly is part of what it means to possess that concept in the first place. [Citations to Wittgenstein and Ayn Rand. omitted] We don’t first have a concept and then see if we can apply it to concrete reality[;] rather, the ability to apply it to concrete reality is part of having the concept. Likewise, for Wittgenstein, one cannot employ a concept, or any proposition containing that concept, without being committed to the truth of various factual propositions that apply that concept to reality. For example, although “bachelors are unmarried men” is a grammatical proposition that holds in virtue of a linguistic stipulation, one cannot assert that proposition without employing the concept “bachelor,” and one cannot count as employing that concept unless one has a reasonably reliable capacity to distinguish bachelors from non-bachelors in the real world. Otherwise “bachelors are unmarried men” is just meaningless sounds, or dead marks on a page, not something that can serve as the content of a judgment. For Wittgenstein, “what must be added to the dead signs in order to make a live proposition” is not “something immaterial, with properties different from all mere signs”; rather, “if we had to name anything which is the life of the sign, we should have to say that it was its use.” [Wittgenstein cite omitted. Emphasis added.]

--Roderick T. Long, "Anti-Psychologism in Economics: Wittgenstein and Mises"