ABSTRACT
PEOPLE have often contrasted the picture theory of meaning of the Tractatus with the use theory of meaning of the Philosophical Investigations. Many have also argued that the picture theory of meaning is based on the concept of ‘naming’, since in the picture theory language catches on to reality through names which stand for objects. This has led people to talk as if the use theory of meaning was an expression of Wittgenstein’s later rejection of his Tractatus theory. I believe that talk of such contrast is highly misleading, and that it arises out of a misunderstanding of the Tractatus view of what it is for a name to refer to (bedeuten) an object. This misunderstanding is also responsible for the false and widely held belief that Wittgenstein’s theory of meaning and language renders conceptual change impossible and disables social criticism. It seems to me to be a truism that a word or a symbol cannot have the rôle of referring to a fixed object without having a fixed use. How could there be a philosophical doctrine of expressions and the objects to which they referred which was not at the same time a theory about the use of those expressions? No interesting philosophical question about the meaning of such expressions can be based on a contrast between ‘naming’ and ‘use’. The interesting question, I think, is whether the meaning of a name can be secured independently of its use in propositions by some method which links it to an object, as many, including Russell, have thought, or whether the identity of the object referred to is only settled by the use of the name in a set of propositions. If the latter holds, then the problem of the object a name denotes is the problem of the use of the name.
