Ian Dearden. Do Philosophers Talk Nonsense?

Carl Humphries

Ian Dearden. Do Philosophers Talk Nonsense?
An Inquiry into the Possibility of Illusions of Meaning

Article

18/2 - Fall 2013, pages 269-278

Date of online publication: 20 mars 2014

Date of publication: 20 mars 2014

Abstract

In his newly reissued and revised book, the philosopher Ian Dearden at- tempts a critical inquiry into a philosophical position he calls “nonsensi- calism,” which he takes to correspond to the view “that it is possible to be mistaken in thinking one means anything by what one says” (9).1 He holds that an unexamined assumption to this effect is implicit in a large swathe of philosophical work dating from a period stretching throughout most of the 20th century (and to some degree extending to the present day), thanks to the widespread tendency of philosophers to accuse each other of talk- ing nonsense. This is, according to the author of the book, most visible in the earlier and later philosophical writings of Wittgenstein, in logical pos- itivism, and in representatives of the Oxford-based “ordinary language” philosophy movement, as well as in the writings of many of those subse- quently writing under the influence of these. Dearden coins a special term to refer to the sort of error that philosophers are accusing each other of having committed: he calls such cases of error “illusions of meaning.”

Cite this article

Humphries, Carl. "Ian Dearden. Do Philosophers Talk Nonsense? An Inquiry into the Possibility of Illusions of Meaning." Forum Philosophicum 18, no. 2 (2013): 269–78. doi:10.35765/forphil.2013.1802.16.

Bibliography

Dearden, Ian. Do Philosophers Talk Nonsense? An Inquiry into the Possibility of Illusions of Meaning. Revised Edition. London: Rellet Press, 2013. First published 2005.

Diamond, Cora. “What Nonsense Might Be.” In The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind, Representation and Mind, 95–114. Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press / A Bradford Book, 1991 106. Reprinted from Philosophy 56, no. 215 (1981): 5–22. doi:10.1017/S0031819100049743.

Hertzberg, Lars. “The Sense is Where You Find It.” In Wittgenstein in America, edited by Timothy G. McCarthy and Sean C. Stidd, 90–103. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001.

Rhees, Rush. “Wittgenstein’s Builders—Recapitulation.” In Wittgenstein and the Possibility of Discourse, edited by Dewi Zephaniah Phillips, 178–197. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

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