Meaning is use, not reference

Wittgenstein rejects the assumption, including his own earlier one, that a word gets its meaning by standing in for some fixed object or mental image it names. Instead, he argues, the meaning of most words is constituted by the practical role they play across the many different activities in which they're actually used — asking, commanding, joking, describing, calculating.

The same word can function differently depending on context, and there's no single essence underlying every use that a definition could fully capture. Trying to pin down "meaning" as a static thing a word points to, independent of how it's actually employed by speakers, is what generates the artificial puzzles Wittgenstein spends the book dissolving.

This shifts philosophical attention away from abstract theories of reference and toward observing how language actually functions in ordinary practice — a move that influenced how later philosophers approached questions of mind, knowledge, and meaning.

Takeaway: to understand what a word means, watch what people do with it, not what it supposedly points to.