Wittgenstein’s later theory of meaning and the special role it assigns to metaphor.

 

Abstract: In the current discussion about the later Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language we can make out roughly two camps. Most of those who are sympathetic to modern logic and structural linguistics tend to find nothing in his later work that could matter for their own interests. Others who are more interested in the history of language and literature treasure some isolated insights of his on culture and value, and are even glad that this author seems to have given up his earlier aspirations to a more systematic way of thinking about language.

The lecture will show that the later Wittgenstein does offer a detailed and comprehensive account of language meaning that is not at all trivial. In this sense his work does contain a ‘theory of meaning’ although the shape it takes is not of the axiomatic-deductive type, as philosophers like Michael Dummett had hoped for when they proposed to follow Gottlob Frege. The lecture will show that the phenomenon of metaphor plays a central role in (on the one hand) setting a limit for such hopes and (on the other) in deepening our understanding of linguistic competence as a human capacity.