Theories of meaning can be placed on a scale with, at one end, an emphasis on the importance of an actual (linguistic) community and, at the other end, a contrasting position of the possibility of giving personal (and maybe new) meaning to situations and phenomena. Both are dangerous: if the touchstone of meaning in the end is the community to which one belongs, there is a threat of conservatism and conformism – as the possible meaning is limited to the hitherto existing meaning; on the other hand if the touchstone is the individual, one has to delineate the boundaries of meaning so that not ‘anything goes’. In this chapter the focus is on the highly personal way an individual makes sense of the world in a way that avoids the pitfalls of the so-called private language problem. For Wittgenstein, following a rule can never mean doing so by just following another rule, although we do sometimes follow rules blindly. His idea of the ‘form of life’ elicits that ‘what we do’ refers to what we have learned, to the way in which we have learned it and to how we have grown to find it self-evident. But the reference to the ‘bedrock’, to what was originally learned, is, however, the only kind of situation for which it makes sense to ask whether the meaning of a concept is correctly stated. Dialogue, conversation and exchange of ideas are the right ways to characterise all the other situations. The challenge of Wittgensteinian philosophy is therefore that of a balance of the individual and the community, of language and the world. His insistence on the third person (or the intersubjective level) is countered by the importance he gives to each individual’s personal stance: persons must speak for themselves and do what they can do. Given the growing interest in the kind of educational research where the ‘personal’ is focused on, we will try to take up the challenge to see how language works, here as elsewhere. By making clear what it does for us, it will gradually emerge how this kind of research may itself have to be reinterpreted.