Misleading Expressions: The Brentano-Ryle Connection

Some linguistic expressions are misleading in the sense that they look as if they are about something while they actually are about something else. In this chapter I argue that Gilbert Ryle’s account of misleading expressions, which is rightly considered a milestone in the history of analytic philosophy, is continuous with Brentano’s critique of language. The chapter has four sections. Section 1 (‘Analysis’) suggests that Ryle and Brentano share a similar notion of analysis as paraphrase of misleading expressions. Section 2 (‘Two Senses of “About”’) spells out the notion of misleading expression by means of the surface-grammar/truth-conditions distinction, which I argue is implicit in their accounts. Section 3 (‘Ficta’) zooms in on a specific class of misleading expressions, namely expressions about ficta. Finally, Sect. 4 (‘A Moral About the Meaning of “Meaning”’) draws the consequences of what precedes for a correct understanding of the notion of meaning.