I The Tractatus has long been seen as articulating a jointly...

I The Tractatus has long been seen as articulating a jointly semantic and metaphysical “picture” theory of meaning that treats the meaning of a sentence as a function of its specific “logical form.” But just as important to Wittgenstein’s concerns in the Tractatus is an account of the meaningfulness of signs, an account of the possibility that otherwise inert written or spoken signs have meaning at all.

He provided this account by appealing to the concept of the use - or, as he put it in the Tractatus , the “logico-syntactical employment” - of a sign in accordance with logical rules.

By examining the set of remarks in section 3 of the Tractatus in which Wittgenstein articulates the first version of a “meaning is use” doctrine explicitly formulated within the analytic tradition, we can understand the relationship of this central strand in Wittgenstein’s philosophical method to the reflection on meaning from which it arose, and thereby begin to understand its decisive relationship to some of the most important critical and interpretive practices of analytic philosophy.