Ludwig Wittgenstein - Philosophical Investigations
The later Wittgenstein: meaning is use, worked out in language-games inside a form of life.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations — first published posthumously as Philosophische Untersuchungen, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953 (bilingual German–English, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe; Part I largely complete by 1945).
The later Wittgenstein turns on the earlier one. There is no more picture, no single logical form underwriting sense. Meaning is not a thing a word points at; it is what the word does. Language is a motley of language-games — ordering, joking, thanking, counting, praying — each with its own rules, each learned by playing, all embedded in a form of life. Words have no essences, only overlapping _family resemblances_. The famous compression, §43:
…the meaning of a word is its use in the language.
(He is careful: this holds “for a large class of cases,” not all.)
This is the use the misplaced manifesto means when it says a model’s meaning is in the use, not in the model. A language model does not carry sense inside it like a payload; it comes to mean something when it is put to work in some game — as a component, in a system, doing a job. It is also why fluent generation on its own is uninteresting: a move with no game around it. And it is the statistical half of the seam whose symbolic half is the Ludwig Wittgenstein - Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus — the same author, having argued himself out of his first picture and into the one my work lives inside.