Meaning and use

Esa Itkonen has emphasized the pivotal role of rationality, intuition and normativity in the language sciences. He has delimited the study of linguistic meaning vis-à-vis the domains of logic, psychology and the natural sciences, anchoring meaning as an object of enquiry within the hermeneutics of social actions and human consciousness. In his “instrumentalist” Wittgensteinian approach, Itkonen refrains from making a clear distinction between “meaning as use” and language-specific encoded meaning. The central claim of this article is that, in order to accommodate the latter level of “signifieds”, additional conceptual specifications – along the lines of the theories of meaning proposed by Anton Reichling, Eugenio Coseriu and Stephen Levinson – are called for.