Précis of philosophical analysis in the twentieth century, volume 2, the age of meaning

Volume 1 left off. In the years immediately following World War II, logical positivism was drawing its last breaths, and new approaches to philosophy were gathering steam. In America, Quine was attempting to strip positivism of two of its cherished doctrines—the analytic/synthetic distinction, and the verificationist analysis of individual sentences—while rehabilitating its commitments to the centrality of science in philosophy, and the need for a properly empirical conception of meaning. In Britain, the ordinary language school took a different tack—retaining the linguistic conception of philosophy, while eschewing both formal methods and wholly representationalist models of language. Having covered the early Quine in Volume 1, I begin Volume 2 by discussing Wittgenstein, Ryle, Austin, Strawson, Hare, Malcolm, and Grice. For the later Wittgenstein, language differs from formal calculi, formal derivability plays no special role in explaining conceptual connections, and meaning is not based on naming. Instead, it arises from socially conditioned agreement about the use of words to serve social ends. To understand a word w is not to know what w names, or how to define w, but to know how to use w in concert with others. Such understanding is not a psychological state, but a disposition to apply w in the correct way; where by the correct way we do not mean the way determined by an internalized rule, or indeed by anything else purely internal to the speaker. Rather, Wittgenstein suggests, for one to use w correctly is for one to apply w in conformity with the way it is applied by others. The problem of giving a precise explanation of this meaning-constituting conformity is one, I argue, that Wittgenstein failed to solve. Nevertheless, his social conception of meaning was central to his philosophy—providing the basis for both his deflationary metaphilosophy, and his private language argument, according to which words are associated with public criteria for assessing correct use, and psychological terms do not make essential reference to internal states.