QuestionsCan we be certain of anything?The meaning of a word is its use
Can we be certain of anything?What escapes words

The meaning of a word is its use

Ludwig Wittgenstein 1889 · 1951The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
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What it claims

For a large class of cases, the meaning of a word is its use in the language.

Why

Many words have meaning without naming an object or sharing a common essence: their meaning is how they are used.

In short

"The meaning of a word is its use" is an argument by Ludwig Wittgenstein (Philosophical Investigations, §1, §23, §43, §66-67) on the question "Can we be certain of anything?" (answer: what escapes words). Its claim: For a large class of cases, the meaning of a word is its use in the language. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P4). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 2 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Philosophical Investigations, §1, §23, §43, §66-67
Valid with an implicit premise

The later Wittgenstein opens his Investigations by quoting Augustine, who tells how he learned to speak: adults pointed at things and said their names. Wittgenstein sees in it a very natural picture of language, which he had defended himself in the Tractatus ("the name means the object"). He takes it apart here, and counts "the author of the Tractatus" among those who were wrong.

P1If the meaning of a word were the object it names, every meaningful word would name an object.
P2Yet many words have meaning without naming any object: "five", and all the words used for asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying.
P3Nor does meaning come from an essence common to everything the word applies to: look at "games", you will find nothing common to all, only "family resemblances".
P4 · implicit premiseIf the meaning of a word is neither the object named nor a common essence, it is the way we use it, as with a tool.
Therefore, for a large class of cases, the meaning of a word is its use in the language.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P4, the computer finds a world where the meaning of a word is neither a named object nor a common essence, nor its use either: for instance an image in the mind, or the conditions under which the sentence is true.
Valid with P4, which stays implicit: it assumes there are only three candidates (the object, the essence, the use). Yet there are others, such as an image in the mind or the conditions that make a sentence true. Wittgenstein criticises the mental-image idea elsewhere, but those passages are not summarised here. Note too how cautious the conclusion is: "for a large class of cases, though not for all". It is not a general theory of meaning, and he does not want it to be one.
Analogy. In a toolbox, the hammer, the saw, the glue-pot and the screws have almost nothing in common, except that we use them. Asking "what object does the word thanks name?" is like asking which nail the glue drives in. The toolbox image is Wittgenstein's (§11).

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

The early Wittgenstein (Tractatus) and Russell 1921 · attacks premise 2

These words seem to name nothing, but the apparent form of a proposition is not its real form. A complete logical analysis would reduce every proposition to elementary propositions made of names of simple objects: "the name means the object; the object is its meaning". The other words ("and", "not", numbers) name nothing, but they only arrange these names.

Wittgenstein replies
Wittgenstein Reply of the later Wittgenstein (Investigations)
He grants that his "objects" in the Tractatus, like Russell's "individuals", were such simple elements. But "simple" has no absolute sense: it makes no sense to speak of the "simple parts of a chair" absolutely; it depends on what we call "composite" in a given language-game. The idea of a final analysis hidden beneath our sentences is only an appearance, born of a picture that held us captive.
D
Donald Davidson (truth-conditional semantics) 1967 · attacks premise 4

Saying that meaning is use does not explain how we understand sentences we have never heard. A theory is needed: the meaning of a sentence is the conditions that make it true, computed from the meanings of its words. Use is evidence of meaning, not meaning itself.

no reply
summary: their text is not yet in our corpus
No reply possible: objection raised in 1967, after the author's death (1951).
The debate goes on (our summary) Wittgenstein's readers answer that he precisely refuses to build a theory ("we may not advance any kind of theory", §109): he wants to describe our uses, not explain them. But most linguists and philosophers of language today use theories of this kind, and the debate remains open.
Objection anticipated by Wittgenstein (the rule-following paradox) attacks the conclusion

If meaning is use, which use? Everything I have done so far with a word can fit infinitely many different rules. So no rule could fix any course of action, since every course of action can be made to accord with it.

Wittgenstein replies
Wittgenstein
The paradox comes from a misunderstanding: there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation. It shows, case after case, in what we call "obeying the rule" and "going against it". Obeying a rule is a practice.
The debate goes on (our summary) Saul Kripke (1982) reads this passage as a sceptical paradox with no direct answer: only a community that corrects its members would give meaning to "following a rule". Many scholars, such as Gordon Baker and Peter Hacker, find this reading unfaithful: Wittgenstein does not concede the paradox, he dissolves it.