ABSTRACT

ONE of Wittgenstein's most important remarks in his Philosophical Investigations is the one to the effect that if language is to be a means of communication there must be agreement in judgments as well as agreement in definitions. 1 If people are to understand each other, they must not only understand the words that other people use, in the sense that they could possibly provide a translation of those words into other words; they must also have some appreciation of the circumstances in which those words might properly be given application. To put it another way—an understanding of what men say involves not only an understanding of the individual words that they use (something that might be expressed in definitions) but also the criteria of truth of the statements that they make by means of those words (something that implies agreement on the circumstances in which those statements might be said to be true). There are thus certain conceptual connexions between the concepts of meaning, truth and agreement; to understand these connexions is to go some way towards an understanding of the notion of objectivity itself.