Paul Horwich writes in his recent book, Meaning (p. 3): “the picture of meaning to be developed here is inspired by Wittgenstein's idea that the meaning of a word is constituted from its use—from the regularities governing our deployment of the sentences in which it appears.” Horwich makes no claim to a faithful exegesis of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations but I argue in the present article that the conception of meaning he develops in his book is actually quite close to that of the author of the Investigations. I do this by comparing the views of the two philosophers. I also examine the question of holism, which, as it seems, is inseparable from the notion that use is constitutive of meaning.

I present several arguments which provide what I consider to be a definitive argument against certain forms of masculine language in their so-called sexually neutral usage. In the first part, I concentrate on the use of the word “homme,” and I defend the idea that it embodies a perverse contingent a priori. In the second part, I examine how this pernicious a priori—this masculine language virus—infects the pronominal system of French. I conclude with an undoubtedly surprising linguistic and feminist criticism of a recent decision by the Office de la langue française du Québec to feminize job titles, arguing instead that the problem lies elsewhere and hence so does an efficient solution.

In The Quest for Reality, Subjectivism and the Metaphysics of Colour, Barry Stroud appraises various subjectivist theories of colour as they occur in the context of a philosophical project which he characterizes as the quest for reality. “It is meant to be a quest whose goal is the nature of reality—what the world is really like. And it involves distinguishing what is really so from what only appears to be so, or separating reality as it is independently of us from what is in one way or another dependent on us and so misleads us as to what is really there” (pp. 3–4). In a long metaphysical tradition, now more alive than ever, the systematic pursuit of the distinction finds colour on the misleading appearance and not-really-so side of things.