Abstract

It is not a paper on linguistic analysis (the analysis of word-usages). For I completely reject the claim of certain language analysts that the source of philosophical difficulties is to be found in the misuse of language. No doubt some people talk nonsense, but I claim (a) that there does not exist a logical or language-analytical method of detecting philosophical nonsense (which, by the way, does not stop short of the ranks of logicians, language analysts and semanticists); (b) that the belief that such a method exists -- the belief more especially that philosophical nonsense can be unmasked as due to what Russell might have called 'type-mistakes' and what nowadays are sometimes called 'category-mistakes' -- is the aftermath of a philosophy of language which has since turned out to be baseless.