This book provides a novel interpretation of the ideas about language in Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. Travis places the "private language argument" in the context of wider themes in the Investigations, and thereby develops a picture of what it is for words to bear the meaning they do. He elaborates two versions of a private language argument, and shows the consequences of these for current trends in the philosophical theory of meaning.

Two pictures of semantics; The making of semantic fact; The uses of language games; Doubt and knowledge ascription; The limits of doubt; Through the wilderness; The autonomy of fact-stating; The problems with private semantics