Abstract

Merleau-Ponty claims that linguistic meaning has its origins in a shared, pre-linguistic life-world . This claim places him in tension with traditional intellectualist and empiricist accounts of linguistic meaning. The dichotomy between subject and object underlies these accounts. Merleau-Ponty's approach disassembles this dichotomy and replaces it with the holistic notion that the human being is essentially an embodied creature in a shared life-world. Embodiment in the life-world provides an outside source of, and an external constraint on, linguistic meaning. ;Two additional aspects of Merleau-Ponty's approach are crucial. He provides an explanation of how pre-linguistic meaning, present in the life of embodied experience, is transformed into linguistic meaning. And he provides a defense of his claim that the world of lived experience is a shared and original source of meaning. These claims rely on the primacy of phenomenological reflection on first person experience over other kinds of enquiry, especially those which prize impersonal objectivity and reductive analysis. ;Like Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein rejects intellectualist and empiricist accounts of linguistic meaning, but for different reasons. In his later works, Wittgenstein rejects accounts of language which attempt to connect linguistic meaning with a reality outside of language. Because language already provides us with our world-picture, it does not make sense to talk about the connection between language and the world as if they were separable. Justification of linguistic assertions must take place within language, and comes to an end by running up against grammatical rules or shared judgments accepted by all members of that speaking community. There is to be no external justification of the language system. It grounds itself from within. ;The contrast between Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein lies in their disagreement over the need for, and the presence of, an external source of, and constraint on, meaning in language. I argue that Merleau-Ponty's account is preferable on the grounds that it has superior explanatory power