A Comparative Study Of Later Wittgenstein's And Austin's Theories Of Meaning

The relation of language to the world and the meaning of the language have been the central issues of philosophy of language.The issues are essentially the matter of the relation of language and the world for that how people understand the relation determines people's understanding toward the meaning of language.Traditional philosophers and linguistics regard the language system as an antithetical symbol system with the world so they think that the most important function of language must be describing the world around us.Chen Jiaying thinks that philosophy of language is starting the gradual ascent stage with the development of the modern logistics established by Frege,G.and it consists of three development stages.Gottlob Frege,Bertrand Arthur William Russell and early stage's Wittgenstein are the representatives of the first stage of philosophy of language.In 1892,Frege published his famous article called “On Sense and Meaning” pointing out that the meaning of language is merely the way we use to refer to a certain thing.Wittgenstein's early stage's view about language also agrees with the idea that there is exactly equivalent language to the world and he believed that the proposition can be pictures of the facts so when we talk about a proposition we are describing the facts.The middle period of the development of philosophy of language are represented by later Wittgenstein,ordinary language philosophers.Those ordinary language philosophers led the philosophy of language research back to the language's ordinary use from metaphysical level and they put more emphasis on the analysis of the ordinary language;Willard Van Orman Quine,Putnam Hilary,Davidson,D are the mainly philosophers of later stage of philosophy of language which we call it Logical Positivism.They think that for a sentence,if it is meaningful,then it has to be verifiable.Later Wittgenstein holds the idea that we should turn to how language is used in daily life rather than the logical language and the thing we want to find is not the reference of the language but the meaning behinds life form.Majority of people regarded Later Wittgenstein's thought as a part of the ordinary language philosophy though in fact his philosophical thought has a system of his own.Austin John L.is also one of the important ordinary language philosophers as Wittgenstein.Both of them emphasized the relation of the meaning of language and the use and Austin proposed the famous speech act theory.In Philosophical Investigations,Wittgenstein proposed a concept “language game” so when we talk of the meaning of language actually we mean the functions they perform in different language games.In How to Do Things with Words Austin thinks that speaking entails actions not just simply describe the people's psychological activities and the world.In Philosophical Papers,the paper The Meaning of a Word showed Austin's view about language meaning that is ideal language may mislead us and we should pay attention to the facts of actual language.The research questions are followed like this: what are the similarities between later Wittgenstein's and Austin's meaning theories? What are the differences between later Wittgenstein's and Austin's meaning theories? Through the study,the paper shows their similar views on the philosophical access,language use and building block and the different views on language meaning range,language use and philosophy of language.