Alexander Bryan Johnson

Alexander Bryan Johnson (May 29, 1786 – September 9, 1867) was an American philosopher and banker.

Of Netherlandic and Jewish ancestry, he was born in Gosport, Hampshire, England, United Kingdom and at age 16 he emigrated to the United States, and settled at Utica, where he was a banker for many years. He was admitted to the bar, but never practised.

He married Abigail Louisa Smith Adams (1798-1836), daughter of Charles Adams (1770-1800) and Sally Smith, niece of William Stephens Smith, and granddaughter of John Adams and Abigail Adams. She died of uterine cancer.

His son, Alexander Smith Johnson, was born in Utica in 1817, served as a judge, and died in Nassau, Bahamas in 1878.

From his youth he had given all his leisure to the study of problems in intellectual philosophy, and especially of the relations between knowledge and language. He attempted to show the ultimate meaning of words, apart from their meaning as related to each other in ordinary definition, and thus to ascertain the nature of human knowledge as it exists independent of the words in which it is expressed.

His 1836 work, A Treatise on Language, was little recognised in his own time, and this remained the case for nearly a century after his death. It can now be seen to have anticipated the thrust of logical positivism, at least in arguing that misunderstandings of how language operates bedevil philosophical questions, and theories of modern linguistics.

He wrote several works on financial and political topics.

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