Wittgenstein's doctrine of use

Conclusion

It might be objected to the counterexamples I provided in the preceding section that one cannot refute a doctrine by showing that it is incompatible with another doctrine whose truth has not been established. This objection is beside the point because in outlining the syntactical, semantic and pragmatic levels of language organization I was merely locating kinds of meanings different from senses, and kinds of rulelike uses of words different from the ones Witgenstein identified with senses. I admittedly added some interpretation, but the counterexamples I gave do not depend on it: they stand on their own.

Another possible objection is that Wittgenstein did not claim that the doctrine of use holds for all meanings; he claimed only that it holds for a large class of meanings. We have seen that the only class of meanings for which it holds is the class of syntactical senses. This is a large class but I do not think that Wittgenstein would have claimed that his doctrine is correct on that account.

Finally, it might be said that the whole paper is irrelevant because it is based on the assumption that in §43 of the Investigations Wittgenstein was proposing a philosophical theory of meaning rather than formulating a therapeutic device. Frankly, I do not know what Wittgenstein was doing, but if what I have called his doctrine of use was intended only to be a therapeutic device, it does not follow that this paper is irrelevant. For, arguments against a philosophical assertion, which the doctrine of use assuredly is, must, if they are correct, surely tend to undermine its therapeutic effectiveness.