Primary Study: Informal Paraphrase, Footnotes

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[*] Logical positivists may object that the assertion that there is language is and should be analytic (or meaningless). But this objection cannot be sustained. The attempt to find a criterion which will exclude some grammatical English sentences as meaningless (or analytic) without excluding too many, and without being arbitrary, has always failed. Indeed, is it not so, that one brings out the concepts of "analytic" and "meaningless" arbitrarily, to cover up embarrassing problems? Existence claims, that is, descriptive assertions of the form `There is ________', are unavoidable in cognition. And it is not plausible that any grammatical natural-language statement is true independently of all experiential or contingent considerations. Nor can an arbitrary, unsubstantiated condemnation of some grammatical statements in the natural language as meaningless be respected. And a retreat to artificial languages cannot evade the questions at issue above.