ABSTRACT
Philosophical tasks have sometimes been separated from other, especially scientific, tasks on the ground that the latter are concerned only with ground-floor facts and the former only with language. It is important to recognize the elusiveness of both terms in the distinction between fact and language. The point is worth emphasizing both as a patent obscurity in the distinction between fact and language, and also as an indication of one important overlap between them. There are two related ways in which such a philosophical interest may be introduced. There are at least three different ways in which the people may think of languages. The strong separation of fact from language is open to decisive objections. It has indeed been argued that such a task is important and typically philosophical, but it may have nothing to do with natural language meaning.
