Relation to truth· Truth, language and science
Use theory
Axis: The meaning of words — Where do words get their meaning?
A word's meaning is not a thing it stands for but its employment: meaning is use. We learn what a word means by seeing how it is used in the language games of shared life.
Movements 1
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Pragmatisminferable
Two ideas between which we could imagine no difference of practical effects have, for Peirce, exactly the same meaning: such is the pragmatic maxim, a rule of clarity more demanding than the « clear and distinct ideas » of . To fix a concept's meaning, one lists the whole set of sensible or practical consequences one would expect from it, and nothing more: that inventory of conceivable effects exhausts the meaning. Its bearing is polemical: a metaphysical dispute whose outcome would make no difference to experience is thereby reduced to a verbal conflict with no object. This is the current's founding gesture, from which both its conception of truth and its dismissal of pseudo-problems derive, and which sets it apart from a referential semantics where meaning would precede all use.
Peirce, How to Make Our Ideas Clear; James, Pragmatism
Philosophers 3
Wittgensteinexplicit
The young Wittgenstein took the meaning of a name to be the object it stands for; the later Wittgenstein overturns this "Augustinian picture" of language: a word gets its meaning from the role it plays in a rule-governed practice, a . Yet Wittgenstein keeps his caution: he does not make it a general theory of meaning, "for a large class of cases, though not for all", faithful to his refusal of theses.
Philosophical Investigations, §43; §7, §23 (language-games); §§65-67
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Charles Sanders Peirceinferable
The whole of pragmatism is born of a rule about meaning: to make a conception clear, ask what its object would have, for meaning resides nowhere but in those effects. To say a diamond is hard is to say it would resist being scratched; an idea from which no conceivable difference of experience could be drawn simply has no meaning. The move breaks with the referentialism that lodges meaning in the named object: Peirce places it in regulated conduct, the habit of action the idea engages, which brings him close to a theory of meaning as use, while keeping an experimental anchorage that sets him apart from a . It is a weapon against verbal metaphysics, those disputes where one believes oneself to be thinking though no practical difference is at stake.
How to Make Our Ideas Clear (1878)
Zhuangziinferable
Words do not picture things: they serve to catch them, as the fish trap serves to catch the fish, and "the fish caught, one forgets the trap." Their meaning lies in their use and in what they let one do, not in a fixed correspondence with a referent, so that the logicians' disputes about names spin idly. This instrumental, pragmatic conception of language, in which one may "forget the words" once their office is done, leans toward a use theory with a tint of intention.
Zhuangzi, ch. 26 (the trap and the fish) · Zhuangzi, ch. 2
Clarify by its practical effectsRuleAttested · Peirce
A difference that makes no practical difference is no difference at all.
In "How to Make Our Ideas Clear", offers a rule for dissolving foggy disputes about what something would "really" be: to clarify a conception, ask what conceivable, observable practical difference it would make for it to be true rather than false. The whole content of an idea lies in the effects we can expect from it. This is the . A difference that makes no difference in experience is an empty difference: the dispute has become merely verbal.
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