In the debate with Ryle which unfolded on the pages of Mind and in the private correspondence Collingwood had tried to defend the claim that there is a distinctive kind of proposition which captures the subject matter of philosophy, but his attempt to capture the distinctive subject matter of philosophical analysis was dismissed by Ryle as being of a piece with a dusty old metaphysics. The drastic change of terminology in An Essay on Metaphysics is at least in part an attempt to defend the claim