ABSTRACT
Outlines four themes which recur throughout the book. First, the importance of pictures in philosophy, in particular the picture of concepts as quasi-objects. Second, the relation between concepts and words, and two different accounts we might give of that relation. One account implies that all the uses of a word like ‘hope’ express one and the same concept, which is a singular something underlying those uses. The other implies that there are only uses of ‘hope’, and that ‘the concept of hope’ is just a way of referring, in the vaguest terms, to the pattern of use. The concept is not something additional which explains the pattern. Third, the assumption that individual words are the basic units of meaning, and that the grammar of a sentence has no effect on the meaning of its constituent words. Fourth, the claim that ‘there are no such things as concepts’, and what it means. If concepts are supposed to be abstract objects or mental images; if they have components, boundaries and structures; if they’re the building blocks of theory and the constituents of thought… if that’s what concepts are supposed to be, then there are indeed no such things.
