Peter Munz on Wittgenstein’s meaning as use

The philosophy of late Wittgenstein consisted largely in the contention that the meaning of a sentence consists in its ‘use’. If ‘use’ equals ‘meaning’ then ‘meaning’ equals ‘use’. [footnote omitted] Since all knowledge is a linguistic phenomenon or something expressed in language, Wittgenstein argued, it has to be assessed for validity in the same way in which we assess language. Since there can be no private language — a private language would be a contradiction in terms — all language is a rule-following activity; and the conception ‘rule’ implies that one is behaving in harmony with, and according to, the consensus of other people who form something like a speech community. Wittgenstein summed up this doctrine in his epigram that there is no private language. Though it may seem superficial that this declaration is a declaration in favour of outside reference and against closed circles, it turns out to be the opposite. The easiest way to establish outside reference is by appeal to observation. But since all observation must initially and in the first instance be a private experience and give rise, linguistically, to personal-report sentences, observation must somehow be linked to ‘private language’. The denial that there is such a thing as a private language amounts, therefore, to a denial that one can break out of a closed circle by ‘observing’ what goes on outside. The people who are inside that community are playing a language game. The notion of ‘rule’ rules out the possibility that one is following instructions just once and once only. If one did, one would clearly not be following a ‘rule’. Again, in thus establishing the meaning of a ‘rule’, Wittgenstein is not saying anything of substance, open to a critical test; he is merely drawing our attention to the fact that a ‘rule’ means what the use of the word has in our community and that the meaning of the word ‘rule’ is how the word ‘rule’ is used. There is a vicious circle here, for we find that Wittgenstein’s justification of his declaration that there is no private language depends, in turn, on his insistence that one determines the meaning of words by their use. The validity of the whole argument depends on the validity of the argument. Supposing that the argument is valid, we are then told that when we grasp that there is something which makes a statement true, we derive this grasp from our use of certain basic forms of statements as reports of observation. This situation in which a report is not a report but merely considered a report because there is a rule that it should be, is echoed in a funny scene in Tom Stoppard’s play Jumpers. The hero is conversing with a psychiatrist while his wife in the next room is being interviewed by a detective who is trying to rape her. She cries ‘help!’ and the husband is understandably alarmed. The psychiatrist, however, calms him by saying it means nothing: ‘In the profession, we interpret this sort of cry as a call for help.’ [footnote omitted]

From Knowledge of the Growth of Knowledge, page 141 to 142