In the Possibility of Philosophical Understanding
147 In The Possibility of Philosophical Understanding: Reflections on the Thought of Barry Stroud, edited by Jason Bridges, Niko Kolodny & Wai-Hung Wong (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 147-181). Pagination follows the published text. Inside and Outside Language: Stroud's Nonreductionism about Meaning Hannah Ginsborg In the Blue Book, Wittgenstein describes a certain general view of understanding and meaning, namely as mental processes which accompany the signs of our language, and which “give them life.” We are tempted, he says, “to think that the action of language consists of two parts: an inorganic part, the handling of signs, and an organic part, which we may call understanding these signs, meaning them, interpreting them, thinking” (Wittgenstein 1958, 3). Wittgenstein thinks that this temptation is to be avoided. In the place of the view he has described, he goes on to suggest an alternative answer to the question of what gives “life” to the otherwise dead signs of language: “if we had to name anything which is the life of the sign, we should have to say it was its use” (1958, 4). The idea that a sign's having meaning is a matter of its being used in a particular kind of way reappears in a famous passage from Philosophical Investigations: “For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be explained thus: the meaning of a sign is its use in the language” (1953, §43). Wittgenstein's rejection of the idea that meaning and understanding are mental processes which have to be added
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