Some readers of the Tractatus claim that, for Wittgenstein, the correct philosophical method is “a method of logical analysis in terms of a symbolic logical notation, whereby the logical, syntactical or formal properties of logically unclear expressions are clarified by translating them into a logically perspicuous notation” (Kuusela 2019, p. 85). This chapter aims at refuting this view, maintaining that Wittgenstein distinguishes between logical analysis and philosophical clarification. More precisely, I would like to establish that, drawing on certain features of Russellian logical practice (as illustrated for instance in On Denoting), Wittgenstein makes a distinction between logically ordered language and completely analyzed language. For him, philosophical clarification does not consist in an analysis of ordinary language but in the visible manifestation (at the level of signs) of the logical ordering of its symbols.

This chapter looks at Donnellan’s referential–attributive distinction from a communication-theoretic perspective, which distinguishes between utterance production and utterance interpretation – in this case between the referential and the attributive use of definite descriptions and their referential and attributive interpretation. The framework is MSDRT, an extension of DRT that provides mental state descriptions (MSDs) for utterance producers and recipients. MSDs consist of propositional attitude representations (PRs) and entity representations (ERs). ERs represent entities from the outside world (their referents), to which they are linked by causal relations and which they can contribute to the contents of the agent’s PRs. The referential use and interpretation of a description are analyzed as those which producer and interpreter take to refer to the referent of one of their ERs (while the attributive use and interpretation take it to refer to whatever satisfies its descriptive content). This approach differentiates more finely between different use scenarios than other approaches and throws new light on the question whether the referential and the attributive use are mutually exclusive and whether they are jointly exhaustive.