Wittgenstein and Anti-Realism

Abstract

Philosophy in the twentieth century has been characterized by its attempt to give an account of the of both words and sentences of language. The goal of such effort is to render philosophical questions and their proposed answers as clear and precise as possible. In this way it is believed that many philosophical difficulties may be resolved. It is in this tradition that we find Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. Whatever else this work may be, it is certainly a major work in the philosophy of language. In this paper I will examine this philosophy of language and suggest that it may be interpreted as an early example of what recently has been called an 'anti-realist' theory of meaning.' What I propose to examine are Wittgenstein's arguments against certain kinds of theories of which may all be called 'realist' theories of meaning. These arguments all rest upon Wittgenstein's conceptions of language games and his famous dictum that meaning is use. 2 After presenting what I take to be Wittgenstein's position regarding these matters I will try to show that Wittgenstein 'offers' an alternate theory of which is satisfactory with respect to his objections to previous theories of meaning. Finally, I will try and bring out certain consequences of these arguments. First I want to consider Wittgenstein's rejection of 'realist' theories of meaning. By 'realist' I do not mean the traditional 'realism' of the realist/nominalist debate or realist/phenomenalist debate. Rather, by 'realist' I mean the recent characterization of Dummett's which makes 'realism' a feature of a theory of for 'a language. 1 Realism in this sense is a view that accepts the principle of bivalence; that is, it is the view that every sentence of the language is either true or false with no third possibility. More importantly, this principle holds independently of us. What this says is that an independent reality (whatever it may be like) renders our sentences determinately true or false. Examples of such theories are the philosophies of language of