 That development was one instance of the widespread use of views about language in debunking conventional views about law in the 20th century. Perhaps this development resulted not so much from the influence of Bentham’s own writings, as from pursuit of the same search that he undertook, for ways of identifying the elements of law that suit empiricist philosophical sensibilities. The energetic 20th-century school of ‘Scandinavian legal realism’ viewed legal terms like ‘right’ as ‘lacking semantic reference’ and ‘denoting nothing’. So they considered statements asserting the existence of rights, duties, and other legal relations to be incapable of being true or false (Olivecrona 1971, 246, 255, 261). They variously explained the use of such statements as attempts to perform magical incantations, or as tools for taking advantage of the psychological conditioning that leads officials and citizens to act in one way or another when they hear such statements (see the outline of Scandinavian realism in Olivecrona 1971, 174–182, and see Ross 1956; see also section 5.1 of the entry on  naturalism in legal philosophy).