Rules of use

Abstract

In the middle of the 20th century, it was a common Wittgenstein-inspired idea in philosophy that for a linguistic expression to have a meaning is for it to be governed by a rule of use. Nowadays this idea is widely taken to be mysterious, inconsistent with "truthconditional semantics," and subject to the Frege-Geach problem. In this article, I reinvigorate the idea by sketching the rule-governance view of the nature of linguistic meaningfulness, showing that it is not subject to the two problems, explaining its lasting appeal to philosophers from Strawson to Kaplan, and why we should find it continually attractive.

Rule‐Following II: Recent Work and New Puzzles

“…The question then reappears as one about meaning in public language. But there are several proposals about what it is for expressions to have meanings in a public language, for example, in terms of conventions or rules of use which relate the expressions to mental states (Keiser, 2022; Lewis, 1975; Reiland, 2023b). Naturally, one would now expect the worry to reappear either at the level of individual “competence” with the language, at the level of meaningful use on an occasion, or at the level of representation/content.…”

Meaning change

“…8 In contrast, let us take metasemantics to be about what makes it the case, determines, that expressions have the meanings, contents, reference, intension, etc., that they do. Both projects need to be distinguished from one that tries to tell us something about the nature of meaning, which seeks an explanation of what meaningfulness and meanings are in reductive terms (Reiland, 2022). Minimalism is a very high-level generalization about semantics, not a claim about metasemantics or the nature of meaning.…”