Language is a tool that was evolved for everyday use. In philosophical thinking of all kinds, according to Whitehead, we wrestle with ‘the difficulty of making language express anything beyond the familiarities of daily life … the struggle of novel thought with the obtuseness of language’: one of the problems of philosophy, according to him, was the ‘uncritical trust in the adequacy of language’, for ‘in philosophy linguistic discussion is a tool’ – it is a useful servant – ‘but should never be a master’.
