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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Philosophy and the Vision of Language (routledge Studies in Twentieth-century Philosophy) ‘Meaning is Use’ in the Tractatus ==================================== It has long been standard to attribute to the later Wittgenstein a “use theory” of meaning, a theory which is supposed to have replaced the “metaphysically realist” meaning-theory of the Tractatus .

Having become skeptical of the Tractatus account of meaning as mirroring between language and the world, so the standard story goes, Wittgenstein replaced it, in the Investigations , with a pragmatic description of intersubjective communicative practice, a description he partially developed through the suggestive but puzzling concepts of “language games” and “forms of life.” I shall argue in this chapter that this interpretation of Wittgenstein’s development is misleading, and that we misunderstand his role in the history of the analytic tradition if we accept it.

For the early Wittgenstein was actually more closely an adherent of the doctrine expressed by the slogan “meaning is use” than was the later Wittgenstein; and an understanding of the central role of this doctrine in the theory of the Tractatus is essential, as well, to understanding Wittgenstein’s decisive critical reaction to it in the Philosophical Investigations .

The central notion of the Tractarian theory of meaning , the notion of “logical form” shared between meaningful propositions and the states of affairs they describe, itself depends on the Tractatus ’ theory of the meaningfulness of signs as arising from their syntactical application according to logical rules of use.

In seeing linguistic criticism as grounded in reflection on the use of expressions, the theory already captures one of the most pervasive themes of the analytic tradition’s consideration of language overall. But after 1929, Wittgenstein would also come to see it also as a characteristic expression of the mythological picture of language as a regular calculus that the “rule-following considerations” of the Philosophical Investigations directly aims to dispel.