 The unwillingness to be drawn into discussing particular ethical issues that Williams complains of was a reflection of earlier developments. In particular, it was a reflection of the logical positivists’ disdain for “moralising”, a disdain which arose naturally from the emotivist conviction of philosophers such as A.J.Ayer that to utter one’s first-order moral beliefs was to say nothing capable of truth or falsehood, but simply to express one’s attitudes, and hence not a properly philosophical activity at all. More properly philosophical, on emotivist and similar views, was a research-programme that became absolutely dominant during the 1950s and 1960s in Anglophone philosophy, including moral philosophy. This was linguistic analysis in the post-Wittgensteinian style of J.L.Austin, who hoped, starting from an examination of the way we talk (whoever “we” may be: more on that in a minute), to reveal the deep structure of a wide variety of philosophically interesting phenomena: among the most successful applications of Austin’s method were his studies of intention, other minds, and responsibility.