A good theory must explain (1) the possibility of knowing what words mean; (2) the nature of the relation, ‘x means y’; (3) the fact that language can be used to represent reality; (4) the epistemological import of understanding; (5) compositionality—i.e. the dependence of the meanings of sentences on the meanings of their component words; (6) the normative character of meaning; and (7) the explanatory and evidential relations between the meaning of a word and its deployment. It is argued that these constraints have often been imposed in unreasonably inflated forms but that they can be satisfied, when properly understood, by a neo-Wittgensteinian use theory of meaning.
Keywords: compositionality, meaning, normativity, representation, understanding, use, Wittgenstein