Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He is considered by some to be the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. Wikipedia

Somewhat in contrast with formal semantics, another strand of research rejects correspondence theory and advocates the notion of “meaning as use”. This notion comes from the later work of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. It departs from traditional philosophical approaches where a word or sentence gets its sense from something that is external to it (for instance, in the formal semantics tradition, a world, or a mental representation of a world). For Wittgenstein, the meaning of a word is as diverse as all its contexts of utterance, and there is not much point in trying to give it a definition. Instead, we must observe similarities and overlaps in the actual utterances of speakers.

- Aurilie Herbelot, Making sense when nothing makes sense

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