grammatical form of questions, and in many cases it is very hard to distinguish them from real ones, but a close scrutiny of the words which occur in the question, and of the way in which they are combined shows that they violate the rules of logical grammar and therefore make no sense at all. I have tried to make this clear in my first lecture already, and we now see the importance of our former result from a different angle.
In the examples given above the analysis would have to elucidate the proper meaning in which the words “physical process” and “mental process” are supposed to be used in the first problem; and in the second problem the investigation would have to turn around the meaning of the word “consciousness;” and in both cases there would be two possibilities: either some meaning could be found for those words and their particular combination, so that the question would make perfectly good sense; in this case it would immediately be seen that the question would assume a harmless nature, that it would lose its great “philosophical” interest and would become an ordinary scientific problem, which would in principle surely be solved by the methods of observation and experiment. Or it will turn out that no meaningful interpretation of the words and their combination can be discovered; in this case the question has disappeared and what is left is nothing but a series of words put together in some confusing way by some confused mind.
Metaphysics disappears, not because metaphysical problems were insoluble, as most of the old empiristic schools believed, but because there are no such problems. Where there are no questions, there can be no answers; it would be absurd to look for a solution where there is no problem. Most of the older empiricists, it is true, denied the possibility of metaphysics with the same emphasis as we do, but, as I said before, not quite without a feeling of regret, because in their minds this meant a limitation of human knowledge, and consequently their attitude could justly be called skeptical (I may mention the names of Sextus Empiricus and of David Hume here).
But our new empiricism is in no way skeptical; on the contrary, it denies that there is in principle any limit to human knowledge; the existing limits are not of an essential, philosophical nature, but only accidental ones. They are only practical, technical, and may some time be overcome.
