Two Conceptions of Wittgenstein's Contextualism

• Authors: Tamara Dobler
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

How should we understand Wittgenstein's proposals that "the meaning of a word is its use in the language" (Wittgenstein 1953, §43) and that a name only has a meaning in a language-game (ibid. §49)? Are they incompatible with occasion-invariant semantics? In this paper I present two leading interpretations of Wittgenstein's contextualism: James Conant's meaning-eliminativism (ME) and Charles Travis's meaning-underdetermination (MU). I argue that, even though these two interpretations are very similar, the latter gives a more nuanced account of Wittgenstein's contextualism which does not involve a commitment to the claim that words have no meaning outside immediate contexts of use.

Keywords

EN

Wittgenstein; contextualism; Conant; Travis; use; nonsense

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Journal: Lodz Papers in Pragmatics
• Year: 2011
• Volume: 7
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 189-204

Dates

published

2011-01-01

online

2012-01-05

Contributors

author

Tamara Dobler

• University of East Anglia

References

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Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/v10016-011-0010-9