The recognition in western philosophy that language poses an insurmountable limit to philosophical thinking because there is no absolute way of reducing all expressions to their propositional form. Many of the philosophers who adhere to this position began their careers as analytic philosophy, determined to prove the opposite. The most famous example is Wittgenstein, Ludwig. The extreme form of this position, usually attributed to Derrida, Jacques, though it is a caricature of his thought, is that language is all that there is, meaning that language is our only means of knowing and engaging the world. The influence of this line of thinking was felt outside of philosophy as well. For example, American historian White, Hayden foregrounds the role language plays both in the formation of the historical record and the subsequent construction of historical narrative; Geertz, Clifford makes a similar case for anthropology.