Most readings of the meaning skepticism Kripke ascribes to Wittgenstein understand it as metaphysical. The threat to meaning is supposed to follow immediately from the impossibility of citing facts in which meaning consists. I offer an alternative, epistemological, reading that is closer to Wittgenstein. What threatens meaning is the worry that, when I use an expression on any given occasion, I cannot know that my use conforms to previous uses of the expression; instead, in Wittgenstein’s terms, I go on “blindly,” without the understanding which is necessary for meaningful use. This reading makes for a stronger skeptical argument, in that it blocks the non-reductionist response of taking meaning facts to be primitive. But the argument, on this reading, can still be answered: not by citing meaning facts but by showing that I can know how to go on with an expression without needing to appeal to what the expression means.

Paul Horwich has advocated, and attributed to the later Wittgenstein, a “use-theory of meaning” that aims to demystify meaning by reducing it to pure regularities of use. This chapter challenges Horwich’s appropriation of Wittgenstein and seeks to make room for a different conception of the demystification of meaning. It argues that Wittgenstein does indeed aim to demystify meaning, but does not think that this involves any attempt to reduce meaning to something else.

Wittgenstein has often been ascribed a ‘use-theory of meaning’. However, he explicitly renounced theory construction. Furthermore, his slogan ‘Don’t ask for the meaning, ask for the use!’ invites circumventing the question ‘What is meaning?’ altogether. This chapter argues that, Wittgenstein’s ambivalence notwithstanding, there is no merit in avoiding the title question (‘What is meaning?’). Moreover, it is argued that, while Wittgenstein’s reflections are incompatible with a formal theory of meaning, they do lay the foundations of a viable account of the concept of linguistic meaning, namely by elucidating its connections with other concepts like those of rule, explanation, and understanding. The chapter makes a case for a use-theory thus understood.