What's an example of how the analysis of language is helpful in philosophy?

Question

Wikipedia says:

Analytic philosophy" can refer to: A general philosophical tradition characterized by an emphasis on clarity and argument (often achieved via modern formal logic and analysis of language) [emphasis mine]

What are some examples of how analyzing language can help solve philosophical problems?

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EDIT: It strikes me that the analysis of language is analogous to a method of proof in math. For example, someone might ask me: "Why is it useful to analyze the group structure of arithmetic?" I could tell them Lagrange's theorem, and how Euler's theorem follows, and even if they didn't understand the first thing about groups, I believe I could convince them that the idea could be useful.

So what's an example of a problem that seemed difficult in philosophy, but the answer was illuminated by the analysis of language?

Answer 1

The most simple example i can think of is the category mistake, a kind of fallacy. A known aphorism is:

Not Seeing the Forest For the Trees

Stanford Encyclopedia:

Most famously, Ryle (1949) introduced the idea of the category mistake as a way of dispelling the confusions he thought to be rampant in the Cartesian theory of the mind, and thus of dissolving many apparent problems in philosophy of mind. According to Ryle, one makes a category mistake when one mistakes the logical type or category of a certain expression (1949, 16-17). Thus, e.g., a foreigner would make a category mistake if he observed the various colleges, libraries, and administrative offices of Oxford, and then asked to be shown the university. The foreigner mistakes the university for another institution like those he has seen, when in fact it is something of another category altogether: “the way in which all that he has already seen is organized” (1949, 16). The category mistake behind the Cartesian theory of mind, on Ryle's view, is based in representing mental concepts such as believing, knowing, aspiring, or detesting as acts or processes (and concluding they must be covert, unobservable acts or processes), when the concepts of believing, knowing, and the like are actually dispositional (1949, 33). Properly noting category distinctions may help alleviate a variety of philosophical problems and perplexities, and the idea of the category mistake was widely wielded (by Ryle and others) with this aim.

Another important advocate of this common fallacy in philosophy is Ludwig Wittenstein, he covers a lot problems of language in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Answer 2

The clearest example, in my opinion, is `on denoting'. There, a logical analysis of the definite description in language is used to offer an account of how we can meaningfully talk about non-existent objects, such as unicorns, without having to commit ourselves to their existence (as abstract object, for example) - see meinong for such a view.

The way Russell did this was to analyse a proposition such as `the present king of France is bald' as, there is an x((x is the king of france and x is bald) and, for any y, (if y is the king of france then y=x)). This then allows us to talk about the present king of france or unicorns without having to commit ourselves to the existence of such things.