Introduction. The methodical-methodological ambivalence of Analytical Philosophy of Language pervading the three phases of its historical development

Abstract

The name “Analytical Philosophy”, as it is used today, contains an ambivalence of meaning, which, as we shall see, is of paramount importance for the problems to be discussed:

• 1. It was not actually the ‘analytic’ methods of the sciences under study by “Analytical Philosophy” which gave this philosophy its name; but rather its own method of analysis, that methodical revolution in philosophy which is dominating the Anglo-Saxon world of today.3 This ‘analysis’, however, which is considered so revolutionary, is not applied to the objective facts of science, but rather to the sentences of science, i.e. not to things, but to the language that speaks of these things. “Meaning and Truth”, “Meaning and Verification”, “Language, Truth and Logic” — these are typical titles to be found in the literature of Analytical Philosophy; and the distinction between meaningful and meaningless sentences is the characteristic theme of the Logical Positivist’s critique of metaphysics.