In a certain very fundamental sort of case, a speaker of a language takes note of some item in the world or of some feature of an item in the world. Confronted by some item or feature of the world, he says in words what it is, that is, he uses a kind-term (common noun) or qualitative (adjectival) predicate to classify or describe the item or feature which he confronts. Thinking of such an occasion of use of a kind-term or qualitative predicate by a speaker as a linguistic response elicited by a non-linguistic stimulus, ! shall speak of a responsive using of a general term. 1 A responsive using of a term is one very elementary sort -perhaps the most elementary sort -of application of descriptive or classificatory language to the world.
Like any such application, a responsive using admits of evaluation. It can be either correct or incorrect. I want to investigate in what the correctness or incorrectness of a responsive using consists. I take this to be the main theme of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, the skeleton upon which all else in that inexhaustible book is hung, although it is not an exegetical thesis which I wish to establish here. While the proper method in philosophy may, in the end, be to advance no theses, I believe that the Philosophical Investigations embodies a thesis concerning the correctness of a descriptive application of language -a thesis which is central, radical, and arguably right. It is that thesis which I hope in this essay to articulate and secure.
Like my thesis, both my strategy and my arguments will be drawn from Wittgenstein. In that sense, then, this essay contains nothing new. Yet when, after several years, I finally succeeded in rethinking what Wittgenstein had thought through for us, when I was finally able to appreciate and assimilate what the Philosophical Investigations has to tell us about linguistic correctness, I was vastly surprised by it. Nor could I recall having encountered an effective formulation of the point in what is by now a vast secondary literature. And so I resolved to try my hand at it. Perhaps, then -if I am right and if I am successful -this essay can, in another sense, contain