It is exceedingly difficult to make this point clear as long as one adheres to ordinary language, because ordinary language is rooted in a certain feeling about logic, a certain feeling that our primeval ancestors had, and as long as you keep to ordinary language you find it very difficult to get away from the bias which is imposed upon you by language.
My some times mischievous friend Richard Grandy once said, in connection with some other occasion on which I was talking, that to represent my remarks, it would be necessary to introduce a new form of speech act, or a new operator, which was to be called the operator of quessertion. It is to be read as “It is perhaps possible that someone might assert that ...”, and is to be symbolized “?⊢”; possibly it might even be iterable.
But I doubt if any of the other tasks which I would like to see the philosophers fulfill will be enough to satisfy some people who raise this objection. They want philosophy to be grand, to yield one important, nonempirical information which will help one to solve either the world's problems or one's personal problems, or both. To them I feel inclined to reply in the end: “You are crying for the moon; philosophy has never really fulfilled this task, though it may sometimes have appeared to do so (and the practical consequences of its appearing to do so have not always been very agreeable). It is no more sensible to complain that philosophy is no longer capable of solving practical problems than it is to complain that the study of the stars no longer enables one to predict the course of world events.”
Many of the great philosophers’ questions can be interpreted as requests for a conceptual analysis (not necessarily in full with the greatest precision). No doubt the great philosophers themselves did not recognize the possibility of this kind of interpretation (how could they have?), but the link between contemporary discussion and their work is sufficiently close to pro vide some justification for the continued use of the term “philosophy.” Moreover, it seems to me that many of the questions and puzzles raised by the great philosophers are capable of really clear and detailed and rigorous treatment after reinterpretation of this kind. If I have to choose between reinterpretation and continued mystification, I choose reinterpretation.
I wrote it because I knew that I needed to attack that preconception in order to get so much as a hearing for the thought that there is no change in the meaning of 'good' between the word as it appears in ‘good roots’ and as it appears in ‘good dispositions of the human will’.
Analytic philosophers have always struggled with themselves and each other, their tradition, its origins and ideas. No feature of analytic philosophy has gone unchallenged by other analytic philosophers.
Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published as Volume II, No. 2 of the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science? This was a series of publications started by positivists. Many positivists and former members were on the editorial board. This irony reveals the extent to which they themselves were engaged in and sympathetic to overturning their own philosophical paradigm.