Claudine Verheggen the Meaningfulness of Meaning Questions

Contra an expanding number of deflationary commentators on Wittgenstein, I argue that philosophical questions about meaning are meaningful and that Wittgenstein gave us ample reason to believe so. Deflationists are right in claiming that Wittgenstein rejected the sceptical problem about meaning allegedly to be found in his later writings and also right in stressing Wittgenstein’s anti-reductionism. But they are wrong in taking these dismissals to entail the end of all constructive philosophizing about meaning. Rather, I argue, the rejection of the sceptical problem requires that we abandon the questions that philosophers have traditionally addressed and that we replace them with more appropriate ones, to which constructive answers are forthcoming. However, though quietism is not the only alternative to reductionism, the rejection of reductionism does oblige us seriously to revise our sense of what constructive philosophy can achieve.