Abstract

The concept of “grammatical sense” could explain semantic complexity without positing a “sense” on the illocutionary level of “communicating something.” In order to assess the aptness of the concept of “grammatical sense” for resolving Dummett's problem, the author offers a rudimentary sketch of a solution based on Wittgenstein's very simple language games. This sketch shows what a systematic treatment of the meaning side of a language would look like once one recognizes the facts of projection and gives up the requirement that forms for forming complexes must always have just one meaning and always lead the hearer to correctly grasp the “thought” expressed by the speaker. The author addresses the question of whether the recognition of projection (syntactic metaphor) and of the other frequent cases of “positive misuse” in natural languages means that our understanding of the meaning side of language is overwhelmingly unsystematic.