ABSTRACT
Wittgenstein in his early writings believed that ‘Every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands’ (Wittgenstein 1953:1). It is the application of the word that provides the meaning: the context that is given or associated with it. However, as John Locke suggested over three centuries ago, knowledge and understanding are often held back by words that have no fixed signification. As a result a term can appear beset with controversy and debate because of an unacknowledged ambiguity in how it is applied. Could this be the case with the general term ‘scholarship’ which no longer has a fixed significance? If so, we would expect the result to be controversy and ambiguity whenever it is applied.
