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Have you ever seen a story where the kidnapper allows the hostage to talk with the police, and the hostage says something that tips off the police? The secret isn't so much what he says, it's how he says it. If you know how that trick works, you know all you need to know about the linguistic philosophy. Language smuggles information. We are so accustomed to it that we simply overlook it. But sometimes the smuggled information jars against our actual words, and we call philosophers to correct things.

Let's start with an easy example. "The king killed the bishop." It seems simple enough, but it smuggles plenty of information. First, take the verb. The action is clear, but it's in the past tense. If the killing was happening even as we speak, we would have said instead: "The king is killing the bishop." We changed the verb to different tenses, and the tenses smuggled out the timeframe along with the action. By using a different form of the verb, we smuggled out time information. Let's take another easy one. Who killed who? The sentence mentioned a king, a bishop, and a killing, but who's dead? Well, the verb is in the active voice, and in an active sentence, the subject comes before the verb. So, the king did the killing, and the bishop is dead. Had we said, "The king was killed by the bishop," that verb is in the passive voice, and then the subject would follow the verb. There's more. Did the speaker know this event happened for certain? How sure is he? We can tell because the sentence is in the indicative mood. We might have said, "The king may have killed the bishop." The extra two words would have told us that the speaker isn't certain about whether this happened.
It's not only what we say, it's also how we say it.

Assertions usually have a subject-predicate structure. That means we take some subject and we say something about it. We usually reckon truth by examining whether a sentence's predicate actually applies to the subject in real life. So, we might say, "The tabletop is round." We call that sentence true if the predicate "is round" applies to the tabletop in question. But language crashes with assertions like, "The present king of France is bald." Is he bald or not? Is it true or not? We can't answer, because there is no present king of France. So is the statement meaningless? No, we know what it's trying to say, but we can't decide whether it's true or false. How do we handle this sentence?

We have tripped on smuggled information. By default, in any assertion,

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