Rules of use

Abstract

In the middle of the 20th century, it was a common Wittgenstein-inspired idea in philosophy that for a linguistic expression to have a meaning is for it to be governed by a rule of use. Nowadays this idea is widely taken to be mysterious, inconsistent with “truth-conditional semantics,” and subject to the Frege–Geach problem. In this article, I reinvigorate the idea by sketching the rule-governance view of the nature of linguistic meaningfulness, showing that it is not subject to the two problems, explaining its lasting appeal to philosophers from Strawson to Kaplan, and why we should find it continually attractive.