Here we must regretfully admit and report that later in his life, Malinowski moved away from his views as outlined in his contribution to The Meaning of Meaning. My view is that the opinion expressed by Malinowski in that work is basically correct: there is a profound, fundamental, immensely important difference between the functional, culturally embedded use of language, and the, as it were, disembodied, abstract investigation of the world, which stands in contrast to it. Certainly, Malinowski failed to give any deep account of the nature of non-savage, genuine thought. He had indeed failed to take even the initial and most elementary steps in such a direction. There was no call upon him to do so: he was an anthropologist, and was content with affirming, correctly, that savage thought cannot be understood by projecting onto it abstract scholarly reasoning. But, in his first important essay on this topic, he did at least uphold the recognition that this crucial difference was there, whether or not he personally advanced our understanding of the rational option. His contribution to our comprehension of the culturally embedded, practice-linked option was achievement enough.

In a subsequent work, however, he moved away from this position. From the viewpoint of the history of thought or, rather, the history of the intellectual climate, what is really interesting is that he underwent a development exceedingly similar in its internal logic to that experienced by Wittgenstein.