 There is clearly continuity between Collingwood’s account of the nature of philosophical distinctions, as developed in An Essay on Philosophical Method and his later claim in An Essay on Metaphysics that the role of presuppositional analysis is to undo the conceptual knots in which unsystematic thinking gets tangled. His attempt to disambiguate the different senses of causation in An Essay on Metaphysics seems to be engaging in a task akin to what in An Essay on Philosophical Method he described as the distinguishing of concepts that coincide in their instances. Yet a major issue of contention in Collingwood scholarship concerns whether Collingwood’s later work, beginning with An Essay on Metaphysics, historicized his earlier conception of the role of philosophical analysis. This is because An Essay on Metaphysics contains a fundamental ambiguity. On the one hand it presents presuppositional analysis as the task of regressing from propositional answers to questions and from questions to presuppositions. This is a logical task aimed at putting order in our thoughts and getting rid of conceptual confusions. On the other hand, it presents presuppositions as historical beliefs thereby suggesting that the goal of presuppositional analysis is not so much to get rid of conceptual confusion as to describe what certain people believed in different periods of time. Metaphysics, Collingwood says