Meaning-as-Use and Meaning-as-Correspondence

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to examine two major arguments in favour of the philosophical thesis that the meaning of an expression is its use, and not its referent or what it corresponds to. A second philosophical thesis which is closely related to the first is that the study of the ordinary, “actual” uses of certain expressions is not of purely linguistic interest but in fact is a way, probably the only proper way, of solving the problems of traditional philosophy; in the sequel to the present article, we shall examine one major argument in favour of this second thesis. Both theses occupy a place of central importance in the dominant movement in contemporary British philosophy, to which we shall refer as “the philosophy of ordinary language”. Together they seem to constitute the basis of the most characteristic claim of this movement: that traditional philosophic discourse is logically improper and that philosophy is a legitimate cognitive discipline only if it is concerned with “the spatial and temporal phenomenon of language” by describing “the actual use of language”. Both theses are necessary for the justifi cation of this more general claim.