ABSTRACT
As we have seen, earlier philosophers had tried to give a common measure of discourse. Each suggested a different way of describing things – a way in which we must speak of things if we are to say what they really are. But then they spoke of their measures themselves as things (air, or numbers, or atoms, and so on); and we must give some account of them – perhaps the only true account we can give of anything. This was not bringing the answer any nearer – the answer to the question about the relation of discourse and reality. Nobody ever used any of these measures, except in the case of the mathematics of the Pythagoreans. Their use of mathematics in astronomy owed nothing to the view that all discourse is mathematics; neither did it show anything about a common world. In fact, the more this mathematics was developed, the harder it became to see how it was related to ordinary speech.
