A Comparison of Peirce And Wittgenstein’s Approaches to Meaning

Abstract

Developments in the natural sciences led to a re-questioning of method in philosophy, and especially in the second half of the 19th century, with the criticism of Hegelian idealist philosophy, a number of debates on what the correct method in philosophy should be and new philosophical movements emerged on the axis of these debates. The first of these schools is pragmatism, founded by Peirce, according to which philosophy should move away from idealism and seek meaning in practice. In other words, the meaning of a concept or a word lies in its practical consequences; it is either useful or useless, depending on the situation. For example, for a student in a physics class, the concepts of pseudo-sciences such as tarot reading are of no use whatsoever; therefore, in that context, knowing this information is meaningless for us. Ultimately, in order to do a scientific philosophy, the philosopher needs to subject concepts to pragmatic investigation, revise them and use them in this way. Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the 20th century’s most important philosophers and one of the pioneers of analytic philosophy, made various contributions to the philosophy of language; in fact, he was the pioneer of two different approaches in the philosophy of language, which can be expressed as verificationist and language games [...]