The Analytical Technique

The single most decisive difference between 20th-century philosophy and earlier

epochs is the central role of logic and language in both the methods and the subject

matter. This new era actually began in 1879, when Gottlob Frege revolutionized the

subject of logic and effectively invented the philosophy of language (Searle 1999,

2070). Consequently, Bertrand Russell's “On denoting” (1905) applied Frege's

methods to the special problems of analysing sentences in ordinary language. Thus

early in the twentieth century, there arose a philosophical movement which aimed to

clarify language and analyze the concepts expressed in it. The movement was given a

variety of designations, including “linguistic analysis”, “logical empiricism” and

“logical positivism”. What was common to thinkers in this movement was their

insistence that the main function of philosophy is analysis. Nevertheless, they

disagreed radically about the nature of analysis, and also on the kind of information

analysis gives us about the world. All the same, they were agreed that insofar as

philosophical problems can be solved, it is through some sort of clarification of

language (see Urmson 1956; Passmore 1968, 201-239, 343-366).

Research Methodology in Philosophy within an Interdisciplinary and Commercialised African Context 99

The analytic movement, with its focus on the nature and function of language, has left its mark on contemporary philosophers, who have considered the definition and use of various words in the contexts in which they appear. Philosophy is not contented to operate with old categories; rather, it recognises the need to throw new life into key words (Parmar 2000). In his celebrated essay, “Politics and the English Language”, George Orwell (1946) observed that “political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.” Yet the need for clarification is not restricted to political language. There is need to clarify language in any field of knowledge before embarking on an assessment of the veracity of its claims. Through its emphasis on definition, the analytical technique focuses on the clarification of basic terms, thereby removing the kind of ambiguity and vagueness that Orwell lamented about, and facilitating precision in reflection and discussion.

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