Alexander Bryan Johnson, an American philosopher and semanticist, was born in Gosport, England, of Dutch-Jewish ancestry. He immigrated to the United States in 1801 and settled in Utica, New York, where he achieved wealth and prominence as a banker. His main interests were intellectual, primarily in theory of knowledge and the problem of linguistic meaning. He published works on the politics of his day, on economics and banking, and moralistic tales for the young, as well as a series of philosophical works.

Language and Nature

Johnson's preoccupation with language derived from his view that "our misapprehension of the nature of language has occasioned a greater waste of time, effort, and genius than all the other mistakes and delusions with which humanity has been afflicted" (A Treatise on Language, p. 300; except where otherwise noted, page references are to the 1959 edition of this work). He...