Wittgenstein on Philosophy, Objectivity, and Meaning, 2019
What is the relation between meaning and use? Wittgenstein says that 'the meaning of a word is it... more What is the relation between meaning and use? Wittgenstein says that 'the meaning of a word is its use in the language' (PI §43). 1 He makes a parallel claim about the sense of a proposition: 'the use of a proposition-that is its sense' (BT 80). But what sort of illumination are we supposed to derive from those ideas? Consider a particular expression: the word 'red', for instance. Part of Wittgenstein's point is that the word 'red' means what it does because we use it in the way we do. But the significance of that point depends on how we understand the notion of use. We can distinguish between a reductionist and an anti-reductionist view. The anti-reductionist thinks of the use of a word in a wholly quietist or pleonastic way. On this view, all we can say about how use determines meaning is this: the word 'red' means red because we use it to mean red; the words 'add 2 each time' mean add two each time because they 'are used by us to mean that two is to be added each time' (Stroud 2012, p. 27); and so on. As Barry Stroud puts it, a description of the use of an expression that 'suffices to fix its meaning' must itself 'employ the idea of meaning' (2012, p. 27). That is the view that Stroud both endorses and attributes to Wittgenstein. 2 For the reductionist, by contrast, the point of the idea that meaning is use is to explain linguistic meaning in more basic terms. She agrees that we use the word 'red' to mean red. But she thinks we can spell out what is involved in using the word 'red' to mean red in a way that does not employ semantic concepts: in terms, for instance, of people's dispositions to produce and respond to sounds or symbols containing 'red' in specified observable circumstances. That is a view that many readers have ascribed to Wittgenstein. According to Michael Dummett, for instance, when Wittgenstein describes the use of language, what is described is the complex of activities with which the utterances of sentences are interwoven; and. .. the description does not invoke psychological or semantic concepts, but is couched entirely in terms of what is open to outward view (Dummett 1978, p. 446). Paul Horwich agrees: Wittgenstein's 'examples of the meaning-constituting uses of words', he writes, 'are never couched in semantic or intentional terms' (Horwich 2012, p. 112). My own view is that Wittgenstein is an anti-reductionist about meaning and intentional content. And I think Wittgenstein is right; facts about meaning and content cannot be constructed from or reduced to facts about use characterized in wholly non-semantic, non-intentional terms. But Wittgenstein does not adopt the most flat-footed, uncompromisingly anti-reductionist position on these matters. For, though he insists that meaning cannot be explained or accounted for in other terms, he does think that there are interesting and non-pleonastic things to say about what it takes for an expression to be used with a particular meaning, including things about the relation between a word's meaning what it does and facts about its use, characterized in non-semantic terms. That strand in his thinking emerges in many passages. I will give two examples. Wittgenstein writes: Let us consider very simple rules. Let the expression be a figure, say this one: |-| and one follows the rule by drawing a straight sequence of such figures (perhaps as an ornament).
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