When Meaning Isn’t Use
I’m writing these blog posts in an attempt to exorcise Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations from my head. The ideas in there are so sticky and widely applicable, and I want to just write down my thoughts and move to taking up new, other interesting ways of thinking.
One of the most famous sections of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations is within §43:
For a large class of cases of the employment of the word "meaning"—though not for all—this word can be explained in this way: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.
What most people take away is the last part—that the meaning of a word is how it is used in language. This has been a useful observation to keep as a core part of my philosophical thinking, and has helped me sift through philosophical problems to find the ones that interest me most.
However, Wittgenstein says that this is so for “a large class of cases”—“not for all” of them. Which gets me wondering: why not for all cases? Can we come up with some cases for which “the meaning of a word” cannot be explained as “[the word’s] use in the language”? Why does Wittgenstein leave this open?
Wittgenstein’s view that there are ‘no philosophical theses’ is tangentially connected to, but not fully explanatory of, his motivation behind refraining from plainly claiming that ‘the meaning of a word is its use—no ifs, ands, or buts’. Instead, I think that Wittgenstein conditions his statement because he recognizes that he is working within language, and realizes that to stay consistent, he cannot prescribe that ‘meaning is use’, only describe that the word “meaning” is primarily used in such a way that ‘meaning is use’.
‘No Philosophical Theses’ — An Incomplete Explanation
In class, his conditioning of §43 was quickly explained as being Wittgenstein’s way of following his belief that there are no debatable philosophical theses. That is, to do philosophy, one shouldn’t advance philosophical theses; therefore, he shouldn’t say that meaning is use in all cases, for doing so would be advancing a thesis. This reading struck me as describing Wittgenstein as making a dogmatic move—which I wouldn’t put past him, but thought was strange for him to do in what would be an otherwise liberatory work, especially at such a crucial section of it.
First, let’s understand his view on philosophical theses. Wittgenstein states in §128 that “If someone were to advance theses in philosophy, it would never be possible to debate them, because everyone would agree with them.” Wittgenstein thinks that it is philosophy’s job to plainly describe and lay bare how language is used. In this view, if there were anything that could be considered a thesis in philosophy, it would be something so plainly obvious about a language that it would be impossible to debate. These things are likely never described because they are unknowingly stuck as our unconscious assumptions (see §129).
Therefore, the thought might go, meaning is use is not a thesis because it is not plainly obvious. It is debatable (namely between the correspondence and meaning as use camps). But this feels to me like a superficial, incomplete explanation of Wittgenstein’s motivations to leave §43 conditioned in the way that he does.
How Do We Use the Word ‘Meaning’?
The reason Wittgenstein says that there are some cases for which the meaning of a word is NOT its use in the language is to remain consistent with his core belief that what is key about language is its use. This attempt to remain consistent might at first seem contradictory—how can he say that there are cases of meaning ≠ use as a way to hold true to his idea that meaning = use? Wittgenstein can—indeed, must—say this because he recognizes that he is describing language, which he believes does not hold any essential meanings behind words.
If he were to plainly say that meaning is use (that the meaning of a word is how it is used in language), he would be ascribing an essentialist meaning to the word ‘meaning’. He does not wish to do so, and so instead describes the “employment of the word ‘meaning’”—that is, the way the word “meaning” is used—rather than providing an essentialist, analytic definition of ‘meaning’. He wants to make an empirical statement about how the word “meaning” is used in language.
There may well be cases in which the way ‘meaning’ is being used in language isn’t well-captured by meaning is use. For example, the employment of the word ‘meaning’ might have cases where its employment is best described by saying the meaning of a word is its use in language AND something else. Or we might imagine our use the word ‘meaning’ to change over the course of history in a slight way. For these reasons, it seems best not to say that “the meaning of a word” is essentially tied to ‘how the word is used’.
Wittgenstein doesn’t want to prescribe right or wrong ways to use words—in this case, the word “meaning”. He only wants to describe how language is used, and so he must leave open the possibility that the way “meaning” is used in language might not always fit the description that ‘meaning is use’. Still, the word ‘meaning’ is used such that in essentially every case it makes sense to say that ‘the meaning of a word is its use in the language’.
Wittgenstein’s rejection of the correspondence theory of meaning and his recognition that he is using language to describe language requires him to condition his claim in §43 in the way that he does.He leaves it open that ambiguities might exist, admitting that his claims are only capable of being approximate empirical observations.We can never be perfectly precisely descriptive of our language, as those who hold a correspondence theory of meaning might imagine.Instead, we must be satisfied with creating a language that is useful to our ways of living.That is his goal in Philosophical Investigations—to help us disregard much of our philosophical baggage which distracts us from life.
