Two Conceptions of Wittgenstein's Contextualism

Abstract

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 meaningeliminativism (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.