The theory of closure is also a theory of language. Language Lawson argues is not a description of the world but a way of holding the world that enables us to intervene. He takes issue with the view which was dominant in much of twentieth century western philosophy that language refers to things or objects in the world. Instead arguing that through language we hold the world as things. In doing so he inverts the traditional relationship between the literal and the metaphorical, making language centrally metaphorical and what we understand to be literal as derivative.