Abstract

The first half of the essay contains a discussion of Wittgenstein's views on how we misconstrue the mind. It looks to the conception of meaning as use for resistance to the distorted picture of the mind we get by thinking that something must accompany the sounds or marks we make, or the actions we perform in order to make them appropriately meaningful. The second half addresses Kripke's sceptic, who is someone who claims that there is no such thing as a speaker's meaning, or understanding something by a particular expression.