One of the most striking features of twentieth-century philosophy has been its obsession with language. For the most part, this phenomenon is greeted with hostile incredulity by external observers. Surely, they say, if philosophy is the profound and fundamental discipline which it has purported to be for more than two millennia, it must deal with something more serious than mere words, namely the things they stand for, and ultimately the essence of reality or of the human mind (Gellner 1959 provides an amusing, if unsophisticated, example.)

This reaction is not confined to lay people, but is shared by many philosophers who are far removed from common sense. Indeed, Michael Dummett has claimed that the concern with language is the elusive factor X, long sought for in vain by Anglo-European conferences, which separates the phenomenological tradition on the continent founded by Husserl from Anglophone analytic philosophy, which he traces back to Frege. Dummett defines analytic philosophy as based on the idea that a philosophical understanding of thought can and must be given by an account of language. This contrasts with the philosophy of thought, which retains the idea that philosophy should investigate thought, but claims that this investigation is independent of and antecedent to an understanding of language (1993, chs. 2, 12, 13). According to Dummett, this view informs not just phenomenology, but also recent work within the Anglophone philosophical community; he mentions the Oxford philosophers Gareth Evans and Christopher Peacocke, but John Searle, Thomas Nagel and Colin McGinn also come to mind.