The Context Principle in Frege’s Grundgesetze

Abstract

According to Frege’s context principle, we must never to ask for the meaning of a word in isolation but only in the context of a sentence. The context principle poses some very hard interpretive challenges; not only are the ideas themselves hard, but relevant parts of Frege’s view change in the course of his career. This principle plays a crucial role in the Grundlagen, especially in Frege’s answer to the question of how numbers and other logical objects are ‘given to us’. By contrast, the context principle figures less prominently in the Grundgesetze. This article argues that, appearances to the contrary, the context principle survives in Frege’s magnum opus, where it still has an important role to play. Reflection on this role sheds important new light on the principle. More specifically, I argue that the context principle must be disentangled from the problematic idea of ‘recarving of content’; that the principle is fully compatible with Frege’s compositional semantics; and that it suggests a more ‘lightweight’ conception of mathematical objects than is typically associated with Frege.