Abstract

Language has been the focus of the analytic tradition in twentieth‐century philosophy. A good deal of that philosophizing about language has drawn its inspiration from a simple‐sounding idea: to understand a word is to know how to use it. Verificationism, an influential doctrine about meaning associated with the Vienna Circle, may be presented as a special case of this conception. This chapter explores what verificationism is, its difficulties, and whether there can be a non‐verificationist but still epistemic conception of meaning. It argues that important insights contained in the epistemic conception can be retained even if people treat them as insights about the normative nature of concepts rather than as insights about the form of language‐rules. Finally, the chapter considers the effect of doing this on an influential doctrine whose modern form is closely associated with the epistemic conception of meaning – the doctrine that the a priori is the analytic.