Abstract

A good theory must explain the possibility of knowing what words mean; the nature of the relation, ‘x means y’; the fact that language can be used to represent reality; the epistemological import of understanding; compositionality—i.e. the dependence of the meanings of sentences on the meanings of their component words; the normative character of meaning; and the explanatory and evidential relations between the meaning of a word and its deployment. It is argued that these constraints have often been imposed in unreasonably inflated forms but that they can be satisfied, when properly understood, by a neo‐Wittgensteinian use theory of meaning.