ABSTRACT
Austin’s remarks about the methods of philosophy, and his ideas about language versus reality, are open to criticism, as we have seen. His thoughts on these topics seem to have been rather sparse, for most of what he wrote about them is contained in the passages I quoted. Wittgenstein, by contrast, expressed interest in both topics at length and in various ways. In the Tractatus1 he presented a correspondence theory of meaning, believing that language consists of propositions that can be analyzed into simple constituents which have meaning by standing for simple constituents of reality. At this level, ‘a name means an object. The object is its meaning’ (Tractatus 3.203). These ‘names’, he held, are combined in ‘elementary propositions’, in a way corresponding to the combination of ‘objects’ in states of affairs. (There is a similarity between this and the ‘map theory’ discussed in the last chapter.)
These ideas were, however, rejected in Wittgenstein’s later writings. Meanings, he now held, cannot be identified with objects and propositions are not analyzable in the way he had envisaged. The meaning of a word is to be found in its use and the uses of words are multifarious. He illustrated this variety by a sketch introduced in the very first section of the Investigations,2 in which someone goes shopping with a slip marked ‘five red apples’. Each of these words has to be treated in a different way by the shopkeeper. He ‘opens the drawer marked “apples”; then he looks up the word “red” in a table and finds a colour sample opposite it; then he says the series of cardinal
numbers’ and counts out the apples as he does so. To the question how he knows what to do with each of the words, Wittgenstein replies: ‘Well, I assume he acts as I have described. Explanations come to an end somewhere.’ And to the question ‘what is the meaning of the word “five”?’, he answers: ‘No such thing was in question here, only how the word ‘five’ is used’ (PI 1). To understand the nature of language we must consider how different words actually work in practice (‘he acts as I have described’). We are not to assume that behind these phenomena there must be a systematic correspondence between elements of language and elements of reality, as had been done in the Tractatus and in the systems of other philosophers.3
