Two Conceptions of Wittgenstein's Contextualism

How should we understand Wittgenstein’s proposals that “the meaning of a
word is its use in the language” (Wittgenstein 1953, §43) and that a name
only has a meaning in a language-game (ibid. §49)? Are they incompatible
with occasion-invariant semantics? In this paper I present two leading
interpretations of Wittgenstein’s contextualism: James Conant’s meaning-
eliminativism (ME) and Charles Travis’s meaning-underdetermination
(MU). I argue that, even though these two interpretations are very similar,
the latter gives a more nuanced account of Wittgenstein’s contextualism
which does not involve a commitment to the claim that words have no
meaning outside immediate contexts of use.