Today's study of philosophy in the analytic tradition—of language, mind, knowledge and value—is beholden to a history and tradition that is characterized by its respect for argument and, at its best, a striving for clarity. Although its concerns and methodology go back to antiquity, today's practice in various subdisciplines has—whether we realize it or not—been sculpted by the advances in classical logic of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by Mill, Frege and Russell and its embrace by subsequent philosophers of language hoping to account for the semantics of natural language expressions.

In his summary of fin de siècle philosophy of language and mind, Tyler Burge outlines two traditions that evolved from postpositivist philosophy. The first, deriving from Frege and taking science, logic, or mathematics as the source of inspiration for linguistic and philosophical investigation, “distrusted intuition and championed theory.” Frege's contribution to mathematical logic, Burge recounts, reached its apex in the mid- to late twentieth century with attempts to provide an account of the truth conditions, logical form, and compositional structure of natural language. Metaphysics in the analytic tradition, rejected by positivists as meaningless, was resurrected by Quine as ontological questions were recast in terms of the theoretical advantages of admitting candidates as the objects of bound variables in a formal language. Eventually, topics in domains Quine thought to be recalcitrant from a scientific point of view—for example, mind and meaning—would be embraced by his adherents who sought to broaden his naturalist program. In the last third of the twentieth century, philosophy of mind replaced philosophy of language as the predominant field and conceptual analysis was in many quarters nudged aside as philosophers refocused their inquiries on the nature of the “phenomenon itself,” as opposed to the natural language expressions that served, so they alleged, imperfectly to identify it. “Naturalism” became the cri de coeur of philosophers in several subdisciplines. Conundrums brought to center stage in the seventeenth century about the nature of the mental and of knowledge were rewritten in a new key to suit the emerging computer paradigm and its prominent role in cognitive psychology.