By putting the question "what? ",Socrate (470-399 front. J.-C.) seek to awake the men of his time in their learning how to know what they say.
Since, this gesture remains related to philosophy. To philosophize, it is to criticize the use which one makes of the language, and this for three reasons. The first is given to us byPlato (428-348 front. J.-C.).
The language is often misleading, underlines it.
Because there is a magic of the words. This one feeds near our desire to make speak any thing by confusing the words and the things, as the children do it.
It is also maintained by the plays seduction which cross the human relations. In the field of the policy, such plays can be particularly serious. Thus, at the time ofPlato, the sophists * were extremely made teach the art of speaking about all and nothing with brilliance, in order to be made elect in the assemblies. Their art consisted in flattering crowd while returning the image to him until it waits, and this in order to handle it while making him speak their language. During the XXe century, totalitarianisms of which ceased seizing the collective conscience by diverting the direction of the words by propaganda. In what concerns us, we often believe to speak our own language without us to see that we speak a language full with commonplaces and sentences done everything which speaks each other all alone, by conformism and idleness.
Also it is important to criticize the language.
Because many dramas could have been avoided, if one had been more vigilant with the words.

Guillaume d' Occam and the general information

Following Plato,Guillaume of 0ccam. (1300-1349) and the nominalists * of the Middle Ages criticized the language for a second reason: this one is T rompor because of his general information. Unceasingly we use these last to indicate the things.
But what does that cover with the Juste?
When we say "the men are this " or "the man is that ", who are the men and who is the man?
Don't we draw from the general information of our particular experiments?
With the Middle Ages, the nominalists worked out a whole theory of the language in order to show that the general information is built. More close to us, they are the empirists * asHume (1711-1776) who supported the same thesis.

Lastly, there is a third reason to criticize the language. Like that was often known as: "the keep silent letter and the spirit vivify. "Which takes all literally is at the same time without intelligence and humour Which is on the contrary able to see the second degree which hides behind the things is not only intelligent but generous. This capacity is what one calls poetry, i.e. art to make go beyond the images and from the words by the images like by the words. Our life in is often private. From where the side limited, without humour, even violent of our relations. Also it is important to give from poetry in our lives while criticizing the language, in order not to take the things with the letter.
To the XVIIe century,Spinoza (1632-1677) devotes its Treaty théologico-policy to show that if one could teach with the fundamentalist monks the difference between the letter and the spirit, their fanatic violence disappears.