Meaning as Use
The later Wittgenstein's most famous formulation appears at Philosophical Investigations §43: for a large class of cases — though not all — the meaning of a word is its use in the language. The thesis replaces reference, mental image, and logical form as candidates for what meaning is. A word means what it does within the practices in which it is employed. This is not relativism; use is governed by the community's shared practices, not by individual whim. But meaning is not a property the word has in isolation. It is a pattern of behavior the word participates in — a pattern that can be examined, described, and learned, but not reduced to a definition.
In the AI Story
The thesis is the engine of the later philosophy. Every other concept — language game, family resemblances, forms of life, rule-following — elaborates it. If meaning is use, then understanding a word is knowing how to use it; learning a word is learning to participate in the practices that employ it; and the question of whether a speaker understands a word is the question of whether they can go on using it appropriately in new cases.
The consequence for AI is exact. The large language model was trained on the products of use — the traces left by billions of speakers engaged in linguistic practice. It absorbed patterns of use without participating in the practices. What does this produce? A system whose outputs are indexed to use, that can respond appropriately in most contexts, that participates in the surface grammar of language games while remaining absent from the form of life within which the games are played.
Wittgenstein's framework refuses to settle the question of whether this constitutes genuine meaning by appeal to hidden inner states. The question is settled — if it can be settled — by the machine's capacity to go on: to apply words correctly in new cases, to respond appropriately to unforeseen contexts, to participate in games whose training data could not have fully specified. On this criterion, the machine's performance is uneven but real. It goes on in many cases. It fails to go on in others, and the failures cluster precisely where genuine participation in a form of life would have made the difference.
The Orange Pill Cycle's central diagnosis — that the machine inherited the dream of perfect language and its blind spot — becomes precise through this concept. The machine operates on use without the background that gives use its point. It generates appropriate moves without participating in why the moves matter. Whether this is enough for meaning depends on what one is willing to count as meaning — a question the thesis itself leaves open by design.
Origin
Formulated definitively in Philosophical Investigations §43, though anticipated in Wittgenstein's lectures of the 1930s and in the Blue and Brown Books.
Key Ideas
Use over reference. A word does not mean the object it names; it means the role it plays in the practices that employ it.
Not all meaning is use. Wittgenstein hedged — for a large class of cases. Some expressions (proper names, some technical terms) resist reduction to use.
Meaning is public. Use is a community practice; meaning cannot be private — a result formalized in the private language argument.
Understanding as going-on. To understand a word is to know how to apply it in new cases, not to associate it with an inner image or definition.
AI implication. Training on use produces systems that can often go on, but whether going-on without participation in a form of life counts as understanding is the question the thesis sharpens without resolving.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations §§43, 138–242
- Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1982)
- G.P. Baker and P.M.S. Hacker, Wittgenstein: Understanding and Meaning (1980)