'Meaning is Use'

We could confuse two views:

(1)  If we know how to use a word, then we know it's meaning.

(2) We give the meaning of a word by giving an account of its use.

The first seems unexceptionable.

The second is much more problematic.  To give an account, we are already depending upon some un-articulated meaning/uses.  Why should some of these be more 'obvious' than others?  Why, apart from a specific context of enquiry (a specific question, or specific ignorance) should some be based on others?

Also, we do not learn use meanings from such definitions - although these may aid us in some specific circumstances.  We learn them through practice, through experiments with use.

Also, approach (2) is confusing with respect to meaningfulness in general - knowing how to talk preceeds knowing that a certain articulated use of a word is correct.  It's perfectly easy to imagine a restricted language game in which the meaning relation didn't exist - in which no accounts of meanings were ever given.  As with the 'slab, brick' game, we might construct a theory of the meanings of the words in such a language.  But giving a type (2) theory in terms of uses rather than representations does not avoid the difficulty that Wittgenstein used this game to illustrate:  we cannot say that the users of the game share our theory of their meanings.

If we play chess with someone who cannot speak, can we say that they are following the rules of chess?  Kripke would say: only provisionally, and they might be following any number of other sets of rules which produced congruent behaviour in the games we had actually played with them.  Wittgenstein might say that they were not following rules, but just playing chess.  And that we might be wrong about that.

When we make a (1) type judgement - that we know how to use a certain word -  we are exposed to Kripke's scepticism about what we might mean by it unless we make it in a shared conversation which 'works'.  To ask whether this shared conversation might rest upon unrecognised Kripkean ambiguities is to ask whether it is, in fact, a shared conversation - a question which cannot arise within it.  When I say 'I know how to talk to you - I know what we mean by what we say', I am not saying something than can be refuted (shown to be false) by some behavioural evidence because a consequence of my being wrong would not be that I had said something false, but that I had not said anything meaningful - and so not anything at all.

So 'meaning is use' turns out to be a warning, not a theory - and, in particular, a warning against the semantic role of type (2) articulations.