CLAUDINE VERHEGGEN

THE MEANINGFULNESS OF MEANING QUESTIONS

ABSTRACT. 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.

1.

One way to deal with philosophical questions is to reject them. According

to many commentators on Wittgenstein’s later writings,1 such was Wit-
tgenstein’s favoured way of doing philosophy, hence his claim that he had
no philosophical thesis and that none should be advanced; hence too his
proneness to characterize his positive remarks as descriptive rather than
explanatory. John McDowell has recently joined the ranks of those who
recommend such a reading of Wittgenstein, focusing on his remarks on
rule-following and contending that Wittgenstein’s message in those re-
marks is that questions such as “How is meaning possible?” ought to be
dismissed rather than answered, for the sceptical worries they give voice
to rest on an assumption which is, once properly diagnosed, untenable.2
In this paper, I shall argue that philosophical questions about meaning
are meaningful and that Wittgenstein gave us ample reason to believe so.3
My disagreement with McDowell is two-fold. First, though I share his view
that Wittgenstein should be understood as rejecting the sceptical problem
about meaning that some commentators claim to find in his later writings,
I disagree with the conclusion that he draws from that. The rejection of
the sceptical problem does not entail that there are no philosophical ques-
tions about meaning worth answering. Rather, it requires that we abandon
the questions that philosophers have traditionally addressed and that we

Synthese 123: 195–216, 2000.

© 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
196 CLAUDINE VERHEGGEN

replace them with more appropriate ones, to which constructive answers

are forthcoming. Second, though I acknowledge, with McDowell, that
Wittgenstein’s positive remarks about meaning are not reductionist, I do
not share his contention that the only alternative to reductionism is quiet-
ism (the view that no philosophically constructive claim about meaning
can be made). The rejection of reductionism and of the sceptical problem
do not force us to end all constructive philosophy about meaning; rather,
they oblige us seriously to revise our sense of what such philosophy can
achieve.
I start by reviewing the interpretations McDowell wishes to repudiate.

2.

The two main interpretations McDowell discusses portray Wittgenstein as

admitting that there is a sceptical problem about meaning and searching for
its solution. As first emphasized by Saul Kripke, the main defender of one
such interpretation, the kind of scepticism that may be taken to threaten
meaning is expressed in the paradox Wittgenstein recapitulates in Section
201 of Philosophical Investigations.
This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every
course of action can be made out to accord with the rule. The answer was: if everything
can be made out to accord with the rule, then it can also be made out to conflict with it.
And so there would be neither accord nor conflict here.

More specifically, a linguistic expression whose every application can be

said to accord, or to conflict, as the case may be, with its meaning, or a
linguistic expression whose every application can be said to be correct, or
incorrect, as the case may be, cannot be said to be subject to any standards
of correctness, and hence cannot be said to be endowed with any meaning.
For surely, if a linguistic expression is to be at all meaningful, there must be
standards of correctness governing its applications.4 (Hence the claim that
linguistic behaviour is rule-governed and Wittgenstein’s focus on rules.)
Now, according to Kripke, Wittgenstein has thought of considerations that
call into doubt the possibility of meaning so understood. There is a problem
here, Kripke argues, because when an individual understands the meaning
of a word there is no state she is in that uniquely determines what she
means by that word. According to Kripke, there is actually no individual
fact of any sort, to be found in either one’s mind or one’s behaviour, that
one could appeal to in order to justify one’s acting in accordance with
a rule or using a sign correctly. For all the facts one may cite – one’s
past or present behaviour with the sign, the mental images one associates
 THE MEANINGFULNESS OF MEANING QUESTIONS 197

with the sign, and even one’s dispositions to use it in certain ways – are
rejected by Kripke on the ground that none of them dictates a unique set
of applications. Each of them is such that it is compatible with a variety
of courses of action that could be said to conform to the rule or meaning
attached to the sign. Kripke concludes that there are no standards that could
govern the application of an individual’s signs, so long as the individual is
considered in isolation, since there is no individual fact that could determ-
ine such standards. And thus there is nothing that an individual considered
in isolation could mean by the signs she produces.5 Hence the sceptical
problem: given that no individual fact can determine meaning, what other
kind of fact does?
Kripke’s answer is that no fact of any kind does; ascriptions of mean-
ing to people’s utterances have no truth-conditions. Accordingly, Kripke
provides the sceptical problem with a sceptical solution, that is, one which
shows how we can live perfectly well without the sort of justification
the sceptic is seeking. Specifically, Kripke contends, our ascriptions of
meaning to an individual’s utterances can be regarded as justified if the
individual’s applications of her words agree often enough with those made
by the members of the community in relation to which she is being con-
sidered. (Precisely which community this will be – hers, ours, or some
other – will depend on our aims in interpreting her.) For instance, if
someone’s responses to addition problems agree consistently with those
we would give, we can assert that she means addition by ‘plus’. Ultimately
what justifies such practices of ascription are the role and utility they have
in our lives.6
For the purpose of this paper, there is no need to go into Kripke’s
sceptical solution any further for, whether or not Wittgenstein should be
understood as accepting the sceptical problem about meaning, it is obvi-
ous that he did not mean the solution to be sceptical, as the paragraph
immediately following his summary of the paradox clearly demonstrates.
It can be seen that there is a misunderstanding here from the mere fact that in the course of
our argument we give one interpretation after another; as if each contented us at least for a
moment, until we thought of yet another standing behind it. What this shows is that there is
a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we
call “obeying the rule” and “going against it” in actual cases (1958, #201; see also #198)

The suggestion here is that the sceptical solution seems unavoidable, not
so much because we are unable to find a fact that justifies our following
a given rule, but because we are assuming that in order to follow a given
rule we must first interpret it in a certain way. This assumption precludes
the possibility of meaning from the start. For any interpretation that we
might come up with would itself need to be interpreted. An interpretation
198 CLAUDINE VERHEGGEN

is after all but a sign and so, as Wittgenstein puts it, “still hangs in the air
along with what it interprets, and cannot give it any support” (1958, #198).
Thus the paragraph immediately following the summary of the paradox
suggests that, far from advancing the sceptical solution, Wittgenstein in
fact dismisses it by pointing out that it seems necessary only on the false
assumption that grasping a rule involves interpretation.
Many commentators,7 contra Kripke, agree with this picture of what
is going on in the section under consideration. They agree that the scep-
tical solution is unnecessary so long as one sees that grasping a rule need
not involve interpretation. But many of them also believe that, even so,
the sceptical problem still remains, for they believe that all individual
facts are such that they could determine meaning only by being inter-
preted. This brings us to the second reading of Wittgenstein’s remarks on
rule-following that McDowell attacks.
Proponents of this second reading think that we must look outside the
individual for facts that could determine meaning without being inter-
preted. And, not surprisingly, what they hit upon are precisely the social
practices that Kripke focuses on. However, where Kripke despairs of find-
ing a fact that constitutes an individual’s understanding of a rule and gives
us instead a substitute characterized in terms of social practices, the com-
mentators McDowell is addressing here – among whom, I believe, is his
former self – claim that the individual’s occupying a certain position in a
community actually constitutes the relevant fact. Thus theirs is a straight,
rather than sceptical, solution to the sceptical problem. Accordingly, Mc-
Dowell’s former self would say that in order to produce meaningful signs
an individual must have been initiated into the linguistic practices of a
community and share these practices with her community’s members.
What determines, say, that someone means plus by ‘plus’ is the fact that
this is what her community means by the sign.8 Proponents of this anti-
sceptical reading take seriously then Wittgenstein’s remark that there is a
way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation and they make every
effort to find a fact that can account for that. However, as McDowell now
recognizes, this straight solution is little more than a “notational variant”
of Kripke’s sceptical solution – something that surely should give us pause
(1992, 45). It suggests that Wittgenstein’s worries about the sceptical solu-
tion may go deeper than the anti-sceptics acknowledge and that they may
apply to their own position as well.
According to McDowell, what both camps fail to realize is that Wit-
tgenstein actually rejects the sceptical problem and so sees no need for a
solution, either sceptical or anti-sceptical. And the reason they both miss
this is that they share an assumption that makes the sceptical problem seem
 THE MEANINGFULNESS OF MEANING QUESTIONS 199

real. This is the idea that, to put it in McDowell’s terms, “the contents of
minds are things that, considered in themselves, just ‘stand there’ ” (1992,
45), the idea, that is, that the contents of minds are somehow neutral. Hence
the necessity of interpreting them in some way or other if they are what
is to determine meaning, if pieces of linguistic behaviour are to be said
to accord or to conflict with them. But then, as we know, the sceptical
problem is unavoidable and has to be answered either by the sceptical or
by the straight solution. According to McDowell, however, the sceptical
problem can be avoided, for the assumption that it depends on, that is, to
repeat, the idea that the contents of mind, considered in themselves, just
“stand there”, is by no means compulsory. On the contrary, it is absurd.
For it “implies that what a person has in mind, strictly speaking, is never,
say, that people are talking about her in the next room, but at most some-
thing that can be interpreted as having that content, although it need not”
(1992, 47). Once we realize that this assumption is untenable, however, the
sceptical problem it generated vanishes and philosophical questions about
meaning or, more generally, about intentionality are left unmotivated. Or
so McDowell concludes.
Is there really an assumption such as McDowell has in mind behind
the sceptical problem, and is it really as absurd as he suggests? To answer
these questions we must first look more closely at the assumption.

3.

According to the assumption, McDowell writes, “whatever a person has

in her mind, it is only by virtue of being interpreted in one of various
possible ways that it can impose a sorting of extra-mental items into those
that accord with it and those that do not” (1992, 45). The crucial question
here is: What does “whatever a person has in her mind” stand for? As
mentioned above, McDowell also describes it as the contents of a mind.
Now, in one obvious sense, it is absurd to think of the contents of a mind as
just “standing there”, in need of interpretation. For what would the purpose
of this be? To make them contentful? But if they are bona fide contents, that
is, presumably, thoughts, they already are contentful, for how else could
we individuate them if not in terms of their content? And if we cannot
individuate them why should we refer to them as thoughts at all? It is hard
to see how anyone could maintain that the contents of a mind so understood
need to be interpreted in order to endow signs with meaning. That is, it
is hard to see how anyone could maintain that what someone has in her
mind, in that sense of having it in her mind, when she understands a word
is something that needs to be interpreted in order to determine the meaning
200 CLAUDINE VERHEGGEN

of the sign to which it is attached. Not even Kripke, I think, would maintain
that. For presumably even Kripke does not believe that whenever I have a
thought I have to consider myself in relation to some community in order
to figure out what it is. In any case, however, the “contents of minds”, if
we may call them so here, that for Kripke just “stand there” are something
quite different.
That they are something quite different is implicit in Kripke’s insistence
that the solution to the sceptical problem has to be sceptical. And this
insistence also shows that what Kripke means by “contents of minds” may
be different not only from what McDowell means but also from what the
anti-sceptics mean. As we saw earlier, the anti-sceptics think that Kripke
is led to his sceptical solution rather than their straight solution because
he falsely assumes that facts (be they individual or social) could determine
meaning only if they were interpreted. But, in fairness to Kripke, we should
note that he is working with a different, and narrower, idea of what facts
are. The social practices that both Kripke and the anti-sceptics appeal to
in their solution to the sceptical problem are not things that Kripke would
regard as facts, for they are characterized in intentional terms – in terms,
for instance, of the “fact” that the speaker’s responses to addition problems
agree consistently with those we would give. But the facts that Kripke is
seeking are non-intentional, presumably physical, facts,9 and no such fact
is to be found that could play the role of determinant of meaning in the
social realm any more than in the individual realm.10 All the physical facts
to be found in either realm are such that they are compatible with anyone
meaning a variety of things by any given sign. Of these facts it is true
to hold that they could determine meaning only if they were interpreted.
Considered in themselves they can indeed be said just to “stand there”.
And so, Kripke concludes, the solution to the sceptical problem must itself
be sceptical.
Now Wittgenstein’s view would clearly be that Kripke’s exclusionary
fixation on the non-intentional is indefensible – as noted earlier, he at the
very least wishes to close the door to any sceptical solution. However,
Wittgenstein would agree that physical facts cannot determine meaning
– and not because the claim that they would need to be interpreted is in
itself absurd, but because, for the very reason that they would need to be
interpreted in order to do their job, no such facts could do the required
job. So Wittgenstein would agree with Kripke that, if the assumption that
is alleged to generate the sceptical problem is construed in Kripke’s way,
then it is true and the problem does exist. But the assumption is also true
and the sceptical problem also exists if it is construed in yet another way,
different both from Kripke’s11 and from McDowell’s. This third construal
 THE MEANINGFULNESS OF MEANING QUESTIONS 201

of the assumption is one which Wittgenstein does explore at some length

in the sections on rule-following, (1958, #138 and ff.), and it is the con-
strual that the commentators I have called anti-sceptics are most likely to
have in mind when they accept the sceptical problem. What it involves
is neither Kripke’s physical facts nor McDowell’s full-blown contents of
minds, but other individual inner items which, Wittgenstein will argue, are
also useless as determinants of meaning. Before turning to this, however,
let me make clear where things stand for Wittgenstein at this stage of his
investigations. This will help to contrast my reading with McDowell’s.
McDowell makes it sound as if Wittgenstein started with a conception
of the mind as containing only items which, considered in themselves,
just stand there. Hence, according to McDowell, the philosophical question
about meaning: since the meaning of words cannot be determined by items
that need to be interpreted before they can do their job, how is meaning
possible? And then, as soon as the incoherence of that conception of the
mind is recognized, the philosophical question and the sceptical problem
about meaning it embodies disappear, or so McDowell argues. But this, I
think, is to misread Wittgenstein’s argumentative strategy. What initially
prompts Wittgenstein to ask the question how meaning is possible is not
his considering an erroneous conception of the mind. The question has two
other sources.
First, there is the idea that Wittgenstein has been developing, starting
in Section 1 of Philosophical Investigations, as an alternative to the then
wide-spread claim that, at bottom, all there is to the meaning of words is
their standing for extra-linguistic items. There is the idea, that is, that “for
a large class of cases . . . the meaning of a word is its use in the language”
(1958, #43). Second, there is the condition, most explicitly expressed in the
summary of the sceptical paradox, that any linguistic expression must meet
in order to be meaningful, namely, that there be standards of correctness
governing its applications. This entails that most applications of words are
determined in advance to be correct or incorrect.12
Now, taken together, these considerations create a rather impressive
list of puzzles. To begin with, if in most cases the meaning of a word
is its use, how is it ever possible to understand the meaning of a word?
As Wittgenstein says, the whole use of a word cannot come before the
mind when we understand it (1958, #139). We grasp the meaning of a
word “in a flash, and what we grasp in this way is surely different from
the ‘use’ which is extended in time” (1958, #138). Moreover, if in most
cases the meaning of a word is its use, how exactly can most applications
of a word be determined in advance to be correct or incorrect? And, if
most applications of a word are so determined, how, again, can we ever
202 CLAUDINE VERHEGGEN

grasp the meaning of a word since, though we obviously do not grasp most
possible applications of a word when we understand it, what we grasp is
something that is supposed to divide them into those that are correct and
those that are not? This aspect of meaning – which from now on I shall
call the normative aspect – seems to make understanding the meaning
of a word an extraordinary feat to accomplish, and is certainly puzzling
enough to instigate Wittgenstein’s inquiry into the possibility of meaning
independently of any preconception he may have about this. But more to
the point, as I have just indicated, the normative aspect of meaning seems
to jeopardize the view that Wittgenstein has been developing – the view
that in most cases the meaning of a word is its use – and this motivates him
to take a second look at the views that he had discarded, for these allegedly
can account for the normative aspect of meaning.
It is indeed this aspect of meaning that has tempted some philosophers
to postulate as determinants of meaning abstract entities, such as Fregean
senses, which our mind grasps when we understand words and which guide
our applications of words and ensure communication. Thus this is one of
the views that Wittgenstein proceeds to examine13 together with another
traditional view according to which the meaning of words is determined by
mental pictures which come before the mind when we understand words.
Consequently there are two sorts of items that he scrutinizes at this stage,
instances of neither of which, he will argue, are admissible as determinants
of meaning, because instances of each sort, considered in themselves, just
stand there, as McDowell would put it. However, as we are about to see,
there is nothing absurd in this idea. But then perhaps there is nothing wrong
with the claim that there is a sceptical problem about meaning, or so one
might think.
What then could come before the mind when we understand a word?
The first suggestion Wittgenstein addresses is that of a picture. The draw-
ing of a cube, for instance, may come before my mind when I understand
the word ‘cube’. Of course, such a picture is often absent, and for many
words no such picture seems to be available. But even when a mental pic-
ture is present, how could it determine that certain applications of the word,
rather than others, are correct? For instance, it seems that the same picture
could accompany different applications all of which we would deem to be
correct, which is to say that the same picture could accompany words with
different meanings (1958, #140). And adding to the picture a “method of
projection”, say, a “picture of two cubes connected by lines of projection”,
which would also come before the mind, is of no help for we could also
imagine different applications of that method (1958, #141).
 THE MEANINGFULNESS OF MEANING QUESTIONS 203

The second item that may be said to come before the mind when one
understands a word Wittgenstein considers at much greater length. This is
what he calls a rule, presumably the putative meaning itself, an abstract
entity which we grasp when we understand the word. Wittgenstein con-
centrates on mathematical rules but his remarks apply to all domains that
use signs to which some semantic rule or meaning must be attached if they
are to be used correctly or incorrectly.14
How then are we to make sense of the claim that it is a rule that comes
before the mind when one understands a word? Well, Wittgenstein asks,
what does occur to one’s mind when one understands a mathematical rule,
when one claims one can now go on, one can now continue the series?
Perhaps, he suggests, one thinks of a formula, say, an algebraic formula;
but surely, he immediately replies, “we can think of more than one applic-
ation of an algebraic formula” (1958, #146). Moreover, the statement “she
understands the principle of the series” does not mean simply “a certain
formula occurs to her” (1958, #152). Or perhaps, Wittgenstein continues,
one does not think of any formula but one has all sorts of other thoughts, or
sensations (1958, #151). When I describe what occurred to me when I un-
derstood the rule, I may indeed describe a certain experience (1958, #155).
However, as Wittgenstein notes, all those phenomena may occur in the
absence of understanding, and understanding may occur in their absence
(1958, #152). In short, the problems confronting the idea that understand-
ing a word is grasping some semantic rule or abstract entity are similar
to the problems confronting the idea that understanding a word is having
some mental picture before the mind. No image, be it abstract or figurative,
is either necessary or sufficient for understanding to occur. Moreover, all
images can be variously interpreted; considered in themselves, they just
stand there. Let me stress, though, that these items are different from those
that McDowell seems to refer to when he talks about “the contents of a
mind”; there is nothing absurd in the idea that, considered in themselves,
the internal items we have surveyed do just stand there. And if there is
good reason to focus exclusively on these items, and not on McDowell’s,
then there is nothing wrong with the sceptical problem after all, given their
obvious failure as determinants of meaning. The question then is, is there
some good reason to focus exclusively on the internal items Wittgenstein
considers?

4.

The answer, in the end, is that there is not. Even though for Wittgenstein it
made sense, at one stage, to examine those internal items seriously, it is not
204 CLAUDINE VERHEGGEN

as if he thought that we had to construe the expression “whatever a person

has in mind when she understands a word” in terms of mental pictures
or abstract entities. Thus he also construes it in the way suggested by
McDowell. So, on the one hand, Wittgenstein recognizes that, construed in
one way, a rule does stand there, like a sign-post, in need of interpretation,
and hence is useless as an answer to what we grasp when we understand
a word. As long as what we grasp is conceived of as just a sign, abstract
or otherwise, it is useless as an answer to what determines the meaning of
the word. On the other hand, however, as Wittgenstein points out in early
sections of Philosophical Investigations, “sometimes the sign-post leaves
room for doubt and sometimes not” (#85) and “the sign-post is in order –
if, under normal circumstances, it fulfils its purpose” (#87). Wittgenstein
gives us a summary of the contrast I am trying to get across here towards
the end of the reflections that culminate in the recapitulation of the paradox
(1958, #201). First we find his interlocutor declaring again: “It’s as if we
could grasp the whole use of a word in a flash”. To which Wittgenstein
replies:

And that is just what we say we do. That is to say: we sometimes describe what we do
in these words. But there is nothing astonishing, nothing queer, about what happens. It
becomes queer when we are led to think that the future development must in some way
already be present in the act of grasping the use and yet isn’t present. – For we say that
there isn’t any doubt that we understand the word, and on the other hand its meaning lies
in its use (1958, #197).

Thus Wittgenstein seems to have no qualms about saying that, in some per-
fectly good sense, when we understand the meaning of a word something
does occur in the mind, there is a state we are in that need not be interpreted
and which does determine the meaning of the word we are using. That is
to say that Wittgenstein seems to agree that, in some perfectly good sense,
it is absurd to think of the contents of a mind as just standing there. Our
having ruled out certain internal items as determinants of meaning does not
entail that understanding does not happen in the mind at all or deny that in
a straightforward sense minds are contentful, in the sense, that is, that they
are full of thoughts. As McDowell contends, this means that there really
is no sceptical problem about meaning for Wittgenstein. However, contra
McDowell, it does not mean that there is no philosophically constructive
work for his positive remarks to do. It is not as if the acknowledgement of a
sense of “contents of minds” that rules out the assumption upon which the
sceptical problem depends precludes any further philosophical question
about meaning.
To begin with, there remain the considerations that, I argued earlier,
initially prompted the question how meaning is possible. We still have
 THE MEANINGFULNESS OF MEANING QUESTIONS 205

to explain how we can understand words given the normative aspect of

meaning and the claim that meaning is use, as well as how meaning can be
normative given that it is by and large a function of use. Moreover, though
there is, even for Wittgenstein, a perfectly innocuous sense in which the
contents of a mind can be said to determine the meanings of words, it is
not as if he thought that meaning also started in the mind, as if in order
to account for the meanings of words we just had to point to the contents
of minds, and these were in turn ready-made, as it were. If this were Wit-
tgenstein’s view, there would be, for one thing, no making sense of the
positive remarks that he makes about meaning and understanding in the
passages immediately following the summary of the paradox. Why bother
claiming that obeying a rule is a custom, a technique, the result of training,
if it is just, as McDowell suggests, a matter of being in a certain state
of mind? Furthermore, we must take more seriously than McDowell does
Wittgenstein’s rejection of possible internal candidates as determinants of
meaning, that is, we must take more seriously Wittgenstein’s consideration
of the other construals of “what a person has in her mind”. We must take
Wittgenstein seriously when he boldly denies that understanding is a men-
tal state or process (1958, 59; #154). Again, this claim is not intended to
deny that in some straightforward sense understanding does happen in the
mind. But it is intended to emphasize dramatically that pointing that out is
of no help in explaining what makes meaning and understanding possible –
indeed, all that it has accomplished is to lead philosophers astray. And this
fact ought to be stressed at least as much as the fact that the assumption
underlying the sceptical problem can be construed in such a way that it
becomes absurd.
What I am claiming, to put it in contemporary jargon, is that, in the
passages on rule-following, Wittgenstein is arguing against any kind of
internalist conception of meaning and understanding, be it reductionist or
anti-reductionist.15 If we were content with having found a construal of
“what a person has in her mind” that prevents the sceptical problem about
meaning from arising and simply left it at that, we would still be leaving
room for a conception of content and meaning that is internalist, be it
someone like Descartes’s conception or someone like Searle’s. Both are
quite happy to maintain that the contents of minds are not constituted by
anything external to the minds, nor of course are they reducible to anything
physical or to be explained in terms of mental images or abstract entities.16
Now it would be absurd to suppose that Wittgenstein leaves the door open
to internalism (not that McDowell supposes this, but in his case the reason
he does not is simply that he thinks Wittgenstein had no thesis of any kind).
One of Wittgenstein’s most important accomplishments was to urge, for
206 CLAUDINE VERHEGGEN

the first time since analytic philosophers turned their attention to linguistic
meaning and understanding, that questions about these matters be settled
by looking at what goes on outside the mind (not of course at some third
realm of abstract entities but at the environment in which people live). This
conclusion may not strike us as so revolutionary now that we have become
accustomed to externalist views of meaning and content.17 But we should
not let this fact blind us to the power of Wittgenstein’s conclusion. Wittgen-
stein should not be read as merely providing yet another argument against
internalism; his argument also rules out many versions of externalism,
specifically, any version of externalism that holds that words have meaning
by being directly connected to external events, objects or properties.18 For
these external things no more wear meaning on their sleeves than the in-
ternal items Wittgenstein focuses on in the remarks on rule-following.19 In
rejecting these internal items as candidates for determinants of meaning,
Wittgenstein also rules out a certain conception of what it is to understand
the meaning of a word and he urges us to stop seeking a certain kind of
explanation. In that sense Wittgenstein has rejected a sceptical problem
since he has discarded the way of thinking that led to it. We should indeed
no longer be searching for something that understanding a word could
be associated with and which would determine its meaning. This entails
that we should stop looking for facts that could serve as determinants of
meaning. Thus it entails the dismissal not only of all individual facts but
also of the social facts invoked by the anti-sceptics. Rather than look for
determinants of meaning, we should start thinking of meaning in terms
of activities in which people engage. Thus in ruling out internalism Wit-
tgenstein is not urging us to abandon all philosophically constructive work
about meaning but he is urging us to get out of the mind to explain how the
contents of mind, and hence the meanings of words, are such as they are,
and to approach this task in a radically different way.
What is this way, and what kind of explanation of meaning and under-
standing does it afford? To answer these questions, I turn to the positive
remarks Wittgenstein makes after the summary of the paradox.

5.

Wittgenstein’s view is encapsulated in the statement that “obeying a rule is

a practice” and what this practice amounts to, at least in part, he often char-
acterizes as a custom (1958, #202). What Wittgenstein in effect reasserts
and refines here is the claim that he had developed prior to the remarks
leading to the paradox, namely, the claim that very often the meaning of
a word is its use. So, it is worth noting that, stylistic appearances to the
 THE MEANINGFULNESS OF MEANING QUESTIONS 207

contrary, Wittgenstein’s text has a traditional form: first some thesis is

presented – meaning results from what people do with signs;20 then an
objection is put forward – the thesis seems to be incompatible with the
normative aspect of meaning; finally, the objection is refuted – it is only
if the thesis is true that meaning can be normative, that is, it is only if we
cease to think of the meanings of words as being determined by items that
need to be interpreted that we can start making sense of the applications
of words being subject to standards of correctness. But this refutation de-
mands that the thesis be refined by making more precise the sort of use that
meaning consists in: it is a custom, that is, not just something people do,
but something they do repeatedly.21 Wittgenstein’s remarks about the latter
claim are notoriously sketchy and I do not have time to defend here one
or the other interpretation of them, though, I should say, I do believe that
Wittgenstein meant the practices that constitute meaning to be social rather
than individual.22 What I do want to examine in some detail is McDowell’s
construal of those positive remarks for, according to him, they confirm
the claim that Wittgenstein aimed at rejecting questions such as “How is
meaning possible?”.
McDowell quotes the following passage as “crystallising the role of the
concept of custom” (1992, 49):
Let me ask this: what has the expression of a rule – say a sign-post – got to do with my
actions? What sort of connexion is there? – Well, perhaps this one: I have been trained to
react to this sign in a particular way, and now I do so react to it.
But that is only to give a causal connexion; to tell how it has come about that we now go
by the sign-post; not what this going-by-the-sign really consists in. On the contrary; I have
further indicated that a person goes by a sign-post only in so far as there exists a regular
use of sign-posts, a custom. (1958, #198)

McDowell maintains that, contrary to what is often supposed, “the concept

of custom and its cognates [do not] figure in Wittgenstein as elements in
a constructive philosophical response to questions like “How is meaning
possible?” (1992, 49). For if they did “the custom mentioned would need
to be characterizable in terms that do not presuppose meaning and under-
standing” (1992, 50). It is not so characterized, however, since the custom
appealed to in the response is the custom of following sign-posts or rules,
which presupposes the notion that needs explaining, namely, the notion
of accord. What is the role of the concept of custom then? According
to McDowell, it is to help the notion of training to do its work. This in
turn is to block the regress of interpretations, which made the notion of
accord problematic and so from which the sceptical problem followed.
The idea here is that understanding the meaning of words and meaning
something by them is not the result of interpreting some mental items in
certain ways, but it is the result of conditioning into some kind of regular
208 CLAUDINE VERHEGGEN

behaviour. However, this training cannot be mere conditioning, lest all talk
of meaning and understanding become senseless. And this is where the
concept of custom enters the scene. As McDowell writes: “the point of the
appeal to custom is just to make sure that that first move [that is, the appeal
to training] is not misunderstood in such a way as to eliminate accord, and
with it understanding, altogether” (1992, 50).
One baffling thing to note here is that McDowell still takes seriously
the need to block the regress of interpretations even though he has ar-
gued earlier that, once the assumption underlying the sceptical problem is
correctly diagnosed and so the problem abandoned, the regress no longer
threatens. Indeed, to reject the assumption is to reject the threat. But Mc-
Dowell’s apparent inconsistency should perhaps not be accorded too much
weight. Perhaps what we have here is simply a misleading way to say that
all talk of interpretation should be dropped. So let me leave that worry
aside and consider rather the reason McDowell gives for not construing
Wittgenstein’s appeal to the concept of custom as a constructive philo-
sophical answer to the question “How is meaning possible?” The reason in
effect is that the answer does not reduce meaning to anything else. All it
says is that individuals follow rules insofar as they participate in customs
of following rules; but what it is to follow a rule is itself left unexplained,
that is, unreduced to something non-intentional, something that does not
presuppose meaning and understanding.
McDowell is obviously right in saying that the explanation suggested
by Wittgenstein’s positive remarks is non-reductionist in character. It could
hardly be otherwise, given that all the items we may think of as candidates
for determinants of meaning are useless. For either they are Kripke’s phys-
ical facts or the mental items Wittgenstein considers, in which case they
need to be interpreted before they can do their job and so they cannot in
fact perform it, or they are McDowell’s full-blown contents of mind or
the anti-sceptics’ social facts, in which case they are themselves already
loaded with intentionality. Yet, for all that, I believe that Wittgenstein’s
positive remarks should be understood as explanatory and not as the ex-
pression of a rampant quietism. One thing McDowell fails to realize is
that, as Wittgenstein’s inquiry evolves and some problems get dismissed,
the original questions get to be reconstrued in such a way that some of them
eventually are answered. McDowell makes it sound as if Wittgenstein had
a preconception of what needs to be explained and how it should be ex-
plained and as if he thought that, once it is revealed that this preconception
rests on a misconception, no more explanation is called for. I think that for
Wittgenstein what needs explanation and what kind of explanation can be
obtained is itself something to be discovered through investigation.23 As
 THE MEANINGFULNESS OF MEANING QUESTIONS 209

he writes, “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way

about’ ” (1958, #123).
As I have argued, Wittgenstein is indeed better seen as exploring and
elucidating the question "How is meaning possible?" than as rejecting it.24
The question needs at any rate to be rephrased in some way before it even
starts making sense. And this is what Wittgenstein does at every step of
his inquiry. I have suggested that initially the question is prompted by a
combination of two claims, the claim that typically the meaning of a word
is its use and the claim that most applications of any meaningful word
are determined in advance to be correct or incorrect. Then, given that it
is impossible for much of the possible use of a word to come before the
mind, the questions arise how it is ever possible to grasp the meaning of a
word, with what mental item a word could be associated for understanding
to be achieved, and how whatever comes before the mind can yield stand-
ards of correctness? This initial approach to the question how meaning
is possible is in keeping with the then philosophical tradition of looking
inside the mind in order to settle questions about meaning. However, upon
examination, it turns out that no mental item is adequate to play the role
of determinant of meaning. (Of course in some sense McDowell’s full-
blown contents of mind can play this role but, as I have stressed earlier,
Wittgenstein does not want to stop the inquiry at that stage. Again, this by
itself indicates that he is not satisfied with abandoning all philosophically
constructive work about meaning.) Wittgenstein then proposes that we re-
consider the whole approach to meaning questions and that we both look
outside the mind for an answer and cease to look for items with which to
associate the meanings of words. That is, he then proposes, in effect, that
we cease to look for determinants of meaning and that we think of meaning
in terms of what people do and not in terms of what they say or think. Thus
the question how meaning is possible should no longer be understood as
“What must an individual’s mind be like if she is to produce meaningful
signs?”, but “What must an individual’s relation to her environment be
like if she is to produce meaningful signs?” To this question, illuminating
answers may be offered, even though they do not reduce meaning to any-
thing else. Wittgenstein’s answer, in terms of training and custom, is one
of those, sketchy as it may be.
Now I suspect that it is in part the sketchiness of Wittgenstein’s answer
that leads McDowell to deny that it is at all a philosophically constructive
answer. For McDowell all that Wittgenstein’s positive remarks amount to
saying is that people mean whatever they do by their words because they
have been initiated by members of their community into a given set of lin-
guistic practices. In fact McDowell’s new reading is really just a notational
210 CLAUDINE VERHEGGEN

variant of his earlier, anti-sceptical interpretation (itself, as he himself in-

sists, just a notational variant of Kripke’s sceptical solution). According to
both readings, people mean by their words whatever those from whom they
got their language mean by those words. So, e.g., someone means plus by
“plus” because that is what the members of her community mean by that
sign. The only difference between present and earlier readings is that the
social fact just mentioned no longer counts as a fact in a straight solution
to a sceptical problem, but instead counts as an observation to be given no
philosophically constructive weight. What caused McDowell’s change of
mind?
Very likely it is the realization that the above “solution” not only fails to
solve the sceptical problem, since there is in fact no such problem, but also
does not seem to tell us anything interesting about meaning. To say that for
someone to mean something by her words is to mean the same as members
of her community mean by those words may indeed appear not to shed any
light on meaning at all, even if we also specify what the community means
by those words. For the question now becomes, what is it for a community
to mean whatever it means by its words? Now McDowell’s suggestion
is that Wittgenstein must regard this new question as making no sense,
since in his positive remarks he is content to invoke people’s training into
an existing custom, the custom of using words in certain ways, without
going on to address the question what makes such a custom possible, that
is, what transforms a certain kind of regular behaviour into possession
of a language. I think, however, that the question is meaningful and that
Wittgenstein himself indicated why.
To see this we must understand properly Wittgenstein’s admonition that
we describe our linguistic pratices rather than try to explain them. Nowhere
does Wittgenstein say that we should be content with pointing to the fact
that people acquire a first language through linguistic training. There is no
suggestion that he would not also welcome more specific descriptions of
this acquisition. But as soon as we offer these descriptions some features of
what it takes to acquire a first language will become apparent, such as the
necessary sharing by teachers and pupils of their environment – we cannot
start teaching children words that refer to external objects and events ex-
cept in the presence of such objects and events. This in turn suggests that
externalism of some sort must be true – viz., it must be true that what we
mean by our words depends on the circumstances in which we acquire our
first language. Moreover, if, as I think, the interaction between teacher and
pupil is also necessary, then the descriptions of linguistic training further
lead to the conclusion that only socially situated individuals could have a
language. But this is to say that, by describing the conditions under which
 THE MEANINGFULNESS OF MEANING QUESTIONS 211

someone acquires a first language, we in effect provide an answer to the

question what makes the custom that language is possible, that is, what
makes it possible to think and talk about external objects and events.25
Thus, contra McDowell, Wittgenstein’s positive remarks can be seen
as an answer to a philosophical question. As I have said before, what Mc-
Dowell fails to realize is that the initial philosophical question has changed.
Again, it is no longer the question what determines meaning in the sense
of with which extra-linguistic facts must signs be associated in order to
be meaningful, but it is the question what conditions must be fulfilled for
someone to possess the kind of language we do. In other words, though
Wittgenstein’s positive remarks do not provide sufficient conditions for the
possibility of meaning – given the failure of reductionism, this would be
too much to hope for – they still provide necessary conditions, necessary
conditions which are far from trivial since they are denied by a great many
philosophers. What the two readings McDowell repudiates and his own
reading have in common is that they all connect Wittgenstein’s appeal to
training and custom to the initial question, the former two regarding that
appeal as an answer to that question, McDowell taking it to confirm the
claim that all philosophical questions about meaning should be rejected. In
contrast, I think that Wittgenstein rejects the initial question once he sees
that any potentially illuminating, i.e., reductionist, answer to it leads to
scepticism, and he replaces it by another question to which the description
of linguistic practices is an answer.
Thus I agree with those commentators who take Wittgenstein’s claim
that his positive remarks should be seen as descriptive rather than ex-
planatory to indicate that philosophical questions about meaning should
be replaced by descriptive questions about our linguistic practices. For in-
stance, the philosophical questions, “What enables us to talk about right?”,
“What makes it possible for there to be a difference between correct and
incorrect?”, should be replaced by descriptive questions such as, “What is
it like for there to be talk about right?” “What does the use of the word
‘correct’ look like in human life?” (Diamond 1989, 27–33). The latter
questions are certainly among those that Wittgenstein would recommend.
The problem is that too often the commentators who urge us to ask them
fail to say why Wittgenstein thinks we should ask them in the first place;
that is, like McDowell to some extent, they do not consider the negative
remarks which, I have argued, motivate the new approach. But whether we
consider these or not makes a difference to our understanding of Wittgen-
stein’s positive remarks. Once we see that Wittgenstein’s recommending
the questions he does recommend stems from his rejection of any kind of
internalist picture of meaning as well as of a certain conception of what it
212 CLAUDINE VERHEGGEN

takes for words to have meaning, it also becomes more plausible to take his
positive remarks as constructive answers to philosophical questions about
meaning. So, when Wittgenstein maintains that “we must do away with
explanation, and description alone must take its place” (1958, #109), I am
taking this to be a dramatic way to say that by describing our linguistic
practices we will get the best explanation we can get of how signs can be
meaningful.
What this means is that, even though I agree with those commentat-
ors who think that Wittgenstein wished to replace philosophical questions
about meaning by descriptive questions about our linguistic practices, I
do not accept their claim that this replacement amounts to a rejection
of philosophical questions about meaning. Rather, I take the descriptive
questions to elucidate the philosophical ones and I take answers to the
descriptive questions to constitute answers to the philosophical ones. Thus,
in my view, when Wittgenstein maintains that all we can do in order to
deal with philosophical questions about meaning is describe our linguistic
practices, he is not thereby distinguishing between two kinds of domain,
one philosophical and the other non-philosophical, and simply discarding
the former. Rather, he is redefining the philosophical. That is to say, to
put it less cryptically, he is reconceiving in a radical way how to address
philosophical questions. As he himself continues in Section 109, “this de-
scription gets its light, that is to say its purpose, from the philosophical
problems”. And as he stresses in Section 198, quoted above, the description
of one’s training in order to explain one’s following a sign-post is meant
to explain what makes going by a sign-post possible, “what this going-
by-the-sign really consists in”. That is, the connexion between following a
rule and engaging in a custom of following rules is not just causal but it is
constitutive. Again this means that it is only by describing phenomena that
we can discover what can be explained and what kind of explanation is
available. Any attempt to explain phenomena in terms of what lies behind
what is open to view is ruled out. Thus, if there is a sense in which Wittgen-
stein can be said to have no philosophical thesis, it is the sense in which
the explanations afforded by the descriptions do not include any conjecture
about what lies behind the surface.26 One last point in connection to this.
Precisely because Wittgenstein does not advance any thesis in the tra-
ditional sense, one may wonder what exactly the philosophical status of
his claims is in the end. Thus let us assume that the description of our
linguistic practices does yield the claim that only socially situated beings
could have a language. How exactly are we to understand the modality of
the claim here? Surely Wittgenstein does not want to say that it is logically
impossible for a socially isolated person to have a language. The claim that
 THE MEANINGFULNESS OF MEANING QUESTIONS 213

such a person could have a language is after all not self-contradictory. Wit-
tgenstein himself writes that if “we imagine certain general facts of nature
to be different from what we’re used to, . . . the formation of concepts dif-
ferent from the usual ones will become intelligible” (1958, 230). To this
he might have added that acquiring concepts in a way different from the
usual one will become intelligible too. Now, we perforce can describe only
the way things are with creatures like us. Hence the conclusions we reach
about meaning can apply only to creatures like us and not to all creatures
conceivably capable of having a language. However, by giving the way
things are with us more weight than it is usually given by philosophers –
and of course by being justified in giving it that weight, thanks to all of
Wittgenstein’s negative remarks – and by accordingly unravelling what it
takes for us to have a language, Wittgenstein forces us to start thinking of
those logical possibilities in a different light and to conclude, I think, that
there is no reason to take them seriously. And let me stress that this is so
for two reasons: first, because the traditional explanations of meaning and
understanding have been dismissed and, second, because we have no clue
what could account for a person’s possession of a language except what
we know about ourselves. That someone might acquire a first language in
a way different from ours is intelligible, but what this acquisition might be
like is itself a mystery.27 But this is to say that the possibility claims are
hardly interesting in the end, since they shed no light on creatures like us.
What the above considerations entail is that all the claims about neces-
sary conditions for meaningfulness and the possession of language which,
I have argued, can be found in Wittgenstein’s positive remarks, cannot be
understood in traditional ways. Obviously much more needs to be said
about what this alternative understanding amounts to. That is, much more
needs to be said about the sense in which descriptions can become ex-
planations. And much more also needs to be said about what particular
explanations the descriptions of our linguistic practices will produce. The
most I hope to have established in this paper is that Wittgenstein showed
that this is what philosophy should now investigate.28

NOTES

1 See, e.g., Cavell (1962), Goldfarb (1983), Fogelin (1987), Diamond (1989) and Putnam
(1995).
2 The more specific claim that Wittgenstein advocated the rejection of questions such
as “How is meaning possible?” has also been made by Diamond in (1989). I shall have
something to say about her discussion towards the end of the paper.
3 This is not to say that all such questions are meaningful. As we shall see, Wittgenstein
was certainly concerned to reject some sceptical questions about meaning. (As I have ar-
214 CLAUDINE VERHEGGEN

gued elsewhere, I also believe that he was concerned to show that questions such as “How
could a languageless creature deliberately establish a linguistic practice?” are incoherent.
See Verheggen (1995).)
4 I take this condition to be uncontroversial since it is to be understood as saying only
that whether the conditions of satisfaction of the sentences in which a linguistic expression
occurs are fulfilled or not depends in part on what the expression means. It is an open
question how exactly standards of correctness are established.
5 This is but a brief summary of the elaborate discussion appearing in the second chapter
of Kripke (1982).
6 See Kripke (1982, 89–93).
7 See, e.g., McGinn (1984), McDowell (1984), Malcolm (1986) and Pears (1988). For a
recent dissenting voice, see Wilson (1998).
8 See McDowell (1984, especially p. 351).
9 That this is so is also shown by Kripke’s rejection of dispositions as candidates for
determinants of meaning. For more on this, see Goldfarb (1984).
10 See Kripke (1982, 111).
11 More accurately, this third construal is different from the one Kripke is most concerned
with, the construal in terms of physical facts or dispositions, which he thinks has tra-
ditionally received less attention than the construal I address below. See Kripke (1982,
44).
12 I say “most” rather than “all” to leave room for those words whose boundaries of ap-
plication are not sharply defined, e.g., ‘bald’, as well as for the odd applications, which
may affect any word, whose correctness or incorrectness we cannot quite decide, e.g.,
Wittgenstein’s example of the vanishing chair (1958, #80). Again, I take this condition on
meaningfulness to be uncontroversial – all it amounts to is that the ways words contribute
to the conditions of satisfaction of the sentences in which they occur are determined in
advance of most possible applications. Needless to say, the condition concerns only the
literal use of words and it does not entail that a word cannot change its meaning.
13 More precisely, this is one of the views he proceeds to reexamine. Preliminary criticism
of it already appears in Wittgenstein (1958, #73).
14 As McDowell observes, concentrating on mathematical rules makes it easier to focus
on the normative aspect of meaning because in order to judge whether a mathematical
expression is used correctly or incorrectly we need only look at its meaning and not also at
the ways of the empirical world (1992, 41).
15 See Searle (1983) as an instance of present-day anti-reductionist internalism and Loar
(1987) as an instance of present-day reductionist internalism. Internalism is broadly under-
stood here to include, not just views of these sorts, but also the view that the meanings of
words are determined by abstract entities which the mind must grasp in order to understand
those words.
16 Of course for Searle intentional states are states of the brain, the product of biological
evolution, but intentionality cannot be reduced to anything else, and indeed Searle insists
that the question what determines content makes no sense. See Searle (1983).
17 Various versions of which have been developed in the last two decades by Putnam
(1975), Kripke (1980), McDowell (1986), Burge (1989) and Davidson (1991), to cite but
some of the most prominent defenders.
18 Thus it rules out the versions of externalism advocated by Putnam (1975) and Kripke
(1980), for instance.
 THE MEANINGFULNESS OF MEANING QUESTIONS 215
19 Wittgenstein argues against some versions of externalism in the early sections of
Philosophical Investigations.
20 Goldfarb takes Wittgenstein’s remark that for most words their meaning is their use to
be a “denial of the possibility and appropriateness of theorizing about meaning” (1983,
279). As we shall soon see, my agreement or disagreement with this depends entirely on
what is meant by “theorizing about meaning”.
21 See Wittgenstein (1958, #199). That at least some words must be used repeatedly in
order for any word to have meaning is already suggested in Wittgenstein’s discussion of
ostensive definition (1958, ##28–30).
22 I give what I take to be a Wittgensteinian defence of the claim that language must in
some way be social in Verheggen (1997).
23 Cf. Goldfarb (1992, 111).
24 For different defences of the claim that Wittgenstein wished to reformulate philosophical
questions, see Glock (1991) and Hilmy (1991).
25 This is not the place to pursue the matter, but I suspect that unravelling the features
that make the acquisition of a first language possible will show that the particular sort of
social externalism that is often attributed to Wittgenstein, according to which people must
attach to their words the meanings that their community attaches to them, is unfounded.
This communitarian view does not necessarily follow from the claim that interpersonal
interaction is necessary for the acquisition of a first language.
26 This might explain why Wittgenstein says that “if one tried to advance theses in
philosophy . . . everyone would agree to them” (1958, #128). After all, the explanations
embodied in the descriptions could hardly be open to any real dispute.
27 Compare Stroud (1965).
28 Thanks to Michael Levin, Nickolas Pappas, David Pears, Asa Wikforss, Steven Yalowitz
and audiences at Williams College and the 20th International Wittgenstein Symposium in
Austria for comments on earlier versions of this paper. I have especially benefited from
discussions with Robert Myers on these topics.

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Department of Philosophy
City College, City University of New York
138th Street and Convent Avenue
NY 10031, New York
U.S.A.
E-mail: clvcc@cunyvm.cunyvm.cuny.edu