ABSTRACT
As we saw in Chapter 3, Wittgenstein’s use-based theory of meaningfulness
in the Tractatus already conceived of the sense of propositions as defined by
the regular possibilities of their significant use, including their inferential
relations with other propositions in a language as a whole. Over the decades
following the publication of the Tractatus, developments of this holist, infer-
entialist program of analysis would come to exert an ever broader and more
widespread influence over the methods of analytic philosophers. It would
play a central methodological role, indeed, in the single development most characteristic of mid-century analytic philosophy. This was the radical cri-
tique undertaken by Austin, Ryle, and Sellars of the various subjectivist,
empiricist, or Cartesian theories of mind that had placed the ‘‘givenness’’ of
private sense-data or other immediate contents of consciousness at the center
of their accounts of knowledge and understanding. Against these earlier
theories, the mid-century philosophers emphasized the essential linguistic
articulation of even the most basic perceptual concepts and judgments.1
Such judgments, they emphasized, are applied, first and foremost, to the description of objective facts, phenomena, and events, and only secondarily
to the ‘‘private’’ phenomena of first-person experience.
