It seems that, since he characterizes language as a whole rather than dealing with the nature of individual words, later-Wittgenstein denies the existence of classes of objects, and thus our accuracy in creating language about them. For example, instead of recognizing the chair as a chair, we would simply recognize the chair as that chair. If his view is accurate, then I think categorization would be better suited for proper nouns rather than objects such as a chair, because reference accuracy in these cases is naturally much more clear, i.e. apply names to named individuals (e.g. Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein). There are many different forms that something we call a chair can take. Of course, as Wittgenstein would agree, there is an endless realm of possible connotations of ‘chair’, but there are certainly objects that we could exclude from the class of ‘chair’, such as a baseball, so there are some current methods of usage by which we must abide when speaking of a chair. However, with the exception of those cases that we can very obviously include and exclude from being connoted by ‘chair’, there are plenty other cases (e.g. a “chair” nailed upside down to the ceiling of an art gallery) that are not so obvious, despite their form or function. At least with individual persons, we know exactly what one is referring to when he mentions ‘Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein’, and we know that he is excluding everything that is not Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein. The line is more clear with proper names. With everything else, not so much. Therefore, categories are irrelevant from a philosophical standpoint and need not exist at all. They only exist within a specific context.
However, more generally, if we apply the word ‘chair’ to a baseball, and if the majority of language-users, after using the term ‘chair’ to refer to a baseball by way of its constant usage in that context, eventually came to use ‘chair’ to connote a baseball (out of unconscious social habit, not conscious agreement), then this would have become an acceptable definition, or use, of ‘chair’. For now, this is not the case. If we used ‘chair’ to connote a baseball, we would not be adhering to chair’s current method of usage, and that usage would be rejected in a social and definitive light and thus in this philosophical one. Though, after much such usage, very gradually, and not at any one particular moment, ‘chair’ could certainly come to connote a baseball. It would, at that point, have become a collective social habit and therefore semantically correct.
Syntax = Semantics
Current Methods of Usage can be applied to both syntactical and semantic rules. In fact, it has deeper implications that there is very little difference, if any at all, between the functions of syntax and semantics.
We traditionally think of syntax as being the grammatical rules of language: punctuation, spelling, sentence structure, etc. Such rules formalize language so our expressions are precise and easily understood. Semantics, on the other hand, is supposed to deal with reference and connotation. The forms, but only the forms, of syntax and semantics are different. However, their functions (which is to say ‘their purpose’) point to the same thing: communication. One can arguably not exist without the other if effective communication is to occur. Syntax and semantics are dependent upon one another like two sides to the same coin. One side is not worth more than the other (as Tractatus would argue that syntax would carry more weight, and semantics is simply incidental). They are both necessary for communication, and therefore, equal in value, especially in spoken language. They are like categories, as described above, and therefore have no philosophical value per se.
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