Positive Law and International Law

Abstract

One of the most representative authors of modern analytical philosophy, T. D. Weldon, has pointed out recently how he and his English and American colleagues have come to realize that many of the problems which their predecessors found insuperable arise not from something mysterious or inexplicable in the world around them, but from the peculiarities of the language with which we try to describe the world itself. This Oxford philosopher remarks that many errors in political doctrine and in various branches of philosophy are caused by “carelessness over the implications of language.” This carelessness, he goes on to say, is often due to the mistaken idea that words, and especially the words that normally recur in discussions on matters of political doctrine, have an intrinsic and essential meaning of their own, more or less in the same way as children have parents.