Exploring the Use Theory of Meaning in Language

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THE USE THEORY OF MEANING
A Reading of the Philosophical Investigations

Anil Kumar

In the opening section of the Investigations, Wittgenstein gave a simple statement as ‘a particular picture of the essence of human language’. The individual words of language name objects sentences are combinations of such names. In this picture of language we find the roots of the following idea: Every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands (PI 1). It means there is a relationship between words and objects through language. We might say that in the case of word and object it is one of meaning- the meaning of a word being ‘the object for which the word stands’. The meaning seems to depend, rather, on the meanings of the words making up the sentence. …show more content…

Having described the ‘particular picture’ of human language (which is essentially that of the Tractatus) he immediately gives an example of someone asking for ‘five red apples’ in a shop, and points out that each of these words has to be acted upon in a different way. To comply with the word ‘apples’, the shopkeeper opens a drawer marked ‘apples’; for the word ‘red’, he looks at a colour-chart; and in the case of ‘five’, he says the numbers from one to five, taking out an apple for each number (PI 1). This diversity of use is to be contrasted with the uniformity of the ‘particular picture of human language’. Wittgenstein then proceeds to pose what may be called the ‘meaning question’, choosing for this purpose the word ‘five’. But what is the meaning of the word ‘five’? (PI 1). One may be inclined to think that there must be an object of some kind, corresponding to the word ‘five’, in virtue of which it has

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