ABSTRACT
Early twentieth-century philosophy was largely, in Ian Hacking's neat phrase, the heyday of meanings. This is not to say, as Hacking stresses in his book Why does Language matter to Philosophy? [5.22], that the point of the philosophy of this period was to study meaning: the point of studying meaning was to do better philosophy. The general focus of the period was on the words or phrases used in asking or attempting to answer the questions of traditional concern to philosophy, and in particular, how, or even if, these terms were meaningful. Its philosophical conceit was that once meaning was clarified, philosophical truths could easily be distinguished from philosophical confusions. But by the end of the period even this had become unclear; by then, the central question of philosophy was whether there were, in fact, any truths of the kind that philosophers had traditionally supposed themselves to be after. The worry was that once their meaning was clarified, traditional philosophical questions would show themselves to be literally meaningless.
