The later Wittgenstein and contemporary theories of meaning : a dialectical analysis

Abstract

In this study I expose, in part I, the semantic core of the later philosophy. It emerges as the result of the intersection of two extremely powerful analytical confrontations run in tandem by Wittgenstein. In one he overturns the following fundamental notions (which characterise what I style as 'a priorism'): that the expansion of a rule is present in advance of the rule's use; that logical inference and mathematical calculation unpacks, or otherwise brings out, what is already there in the given premises or arguments; that meaning and necessity are contained in the expression of a rule or command, the utterance of a (well-formed) sentence, the coming to hand of a cannonical proof or the experience it represents, or in the (intentional) act of producing a picture or sign; that something in our brains, our physiology, a functional state, a platonic object, a clear and distinct idea, stands behind and gives 'life' to our creation and reproduction of language. In the other arm of his fundamental analytical pincer movement, Wittgenstein crushes what I style as 'cognitivism'. In philosophy of language, the 'cognitivist impulse' manifests as the fundamental idea that, somehow, meaning, understanding and modality, proof, and certainty, are objects of knowledge, or at least, functions of theory, a grasp or apprehension of which is attributed to the language-user. The epistemic relation of theory to use so envisaged ipso facto secures linguistic competence. In critically rejecting this semantic Weltanschauung, Wittgenstein thus rejects the very idea of any truth conditional treatment of meaning: the dissolution of the cognitivist impulse shows that sense and necessity cannot be constituted or reconstructed by or from veridical functions; it shows that the True- False logical calculus is semantically impotent such that whatever it is that logicians have been, and are, doing, it cannot be semantics. The way is thus opened to grasp Wittgenstein's crucial insight that use, as the moment of making the meaningful, is non-cognitive constitutive praxis. This means that taking use seriously-- once we are cured of the cognitivist impulse-- in fact requires the rejection of verificationism, intuitionism, anti-realism and the attendant idealist legacy, as well as the eschewing of the poverty of behaviourism and empiricistic materialism. The result for philosophy of language is an unprecedented semantic- analytical position. It lies in a radical anti-E priorist --'rehabilitation' of the concept of analyticity combined with the equally radical - non-cognitivist -realisation of the determination of sense independent of and prior to truth and falsity, facticity and theory, science and reflection. Consequently, content-- the 'world' understood by the language-game player-- is an achievement of linguistic labour, which labour is directed at (and seeks to dominate, master and transform) the pre-linguistic material world. The result, in stark contrast to the resistances we address in part II of this study, is an anti-metaphysics that is distinctly materialist and fundamentally naturalistic, but which, above all, is 'realism without empiricism'. Show more