Search

In his post-Tractatus work on natural language use, Wittgenstein defended the notion of what he dubbed the autonomy of grammar. According to this thought, grammar - or semantics, in a more recent idiom - is essentially autonomous from metaphysical considerations, and is not answerable to the nature of things. The argument has several related incarnations in Wittgenstein?s post-Tractatus writings, and has given rise to a number of important insights, both critical and constructive. In this paper I will argue for a potential connection between Wittgenstein?s autonomy argument and some more recent internalist arguments for the autonomy of semantics. My main motivation for establishing this connection comes from the fact that the later Wittgenstein?s comments on grammar and meaning stand in opposition to some of the core assumptions of semantic externalism.

Peter Hacker defends an interpretation of the later Wittgenstein's notion of grammar, according to which the inherently general grammatical rules are sufficient for sense-determination. My aim is to show that this interpretation fails to account for an important contextualist shift in Wittgenstein's views on sense-determination. I argue that Hacker attributes to the later Wittgenstein a rule-based, combinatorial account of sense, which Wittgenstein puts forward in the Tractatus. I propose that this is not how we should interpret the later Wittgenstein because he insists that particular circumstances of use play a necessary role in determining the boundary between sense and nonsense.

How should we understand Wittgenstein’s proposals that “the meaning of a word is its use in the language” (Wittgenstein 1953, §43) and that a name only has a meaning in a language-game (ibid. §49)? Are they incompatible with occasion-invariant semantics? In this paper I present two leading interpretations of Wittgenstein’s contextualism: James Conant’s meaningeliminativism (ME) and Charles Travis’s meaning-underdetermination (MU). I argue that, even though these two interpretations are very similar, the latter gives a more nuanced account of Wittgenstein’s contextualism which does not involve a commitment to the claim that words have no meaning outside immediate contexts of use.