ABSTRACT
The Proposition Theory treats sentences and other linguistic items as inert abstract entities whose structure can be studied as if under a microscope. "Use" theories of this kind face two main obstacles: explaining how language use differs from ordinary conventional rule-governed activities, such as chess games, that generate no meaning; and explaining how, in particular, a sentence can mean that so-and-so. Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin developed this social-behavioral idea in different ways. Wittgenstein offered the key analogy of linguistic activity to the playing of games. To emphasize all this, Wittgenstein coined the term "language-game," as in the meeting and greeting language-game, the wedding language-game and the arithmetic language-game. Wittgenstein also scorned the view that meaning essentially involves referential relations between linguistic expressions and things in the world. But that would be to overlook the most incarnation of Sellars' Inferential Theory: Brandom, a 700-page monsterpiece, which at least has the potential for evading some of the foregoing objections.
