Two remarks from Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations might serve to highlight the efforts that have been central to my work:

An important source of philosophical prejudice is the idea that we can have direct insight into the meanings of individual words (‘meaning’, ‘thought’, ‘I’, ‘know’, ‘reason’) by considering them in isolation. This goes with the idea that each word has a literal meaning (or possibly two, or some other determinate number) which in turn determines the contribution it makes to any utterance containing the word. On this conception, our understanding of things said is based on our understanding of the ingredients of an utterance. The meaning grows outwards from the centre.

This conception tempts us to disregard the variety of things words may be used to say. A vicious dialectic is at play here: since we credit ourselves with direct insight into the meanings of words and utterances, we see no need to bring the variety of uses to mind – and since we fail to consider the variety, our faith in this alleged ‘direct insight’ goes unchallenged. This leads to a form of apriorism which is prevalent within contemporary analytic philosophy (and which is actually present in much of the Western philosophical tradition). One manifestation of this is the inclination to impose ready-made categories onto words and phenomena; a second is the inclination to privilege certain kinds of sayings at the cost of others which are either considered unimportant or simply neglected; a third is the inclination to assume that the meanings of words are fixed by identifying them with objects, states or processes which are regarded as their referents.

My approach to philosophical problems is what has often been dubbed ‘therapeutic’. I do not wish to quarrel with this label provided it is understood in the right spirit.