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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Philosophy and the Vision of Language (routledge Studies in Twentieth-century Philosophy) I.

EARLY ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY Frege on the Context Principle and Psychologism ================================================== The “context principle” articulated by Gottlob Frege, holding that a word has significance only in the context of the sentences in which it appears, has played a determinative role in the projects of analytic philosophy’s investigation of language and sense.

It was in the Grundlagen der Arithmetik of 1884 that Gottlob Frege first formulated it; there, he describes it as crucial to his groundbreaking analysis of the logical articulation of the contents of thought. Such contents, Frege thought, must be objective in the sense of being independent of subjective mental states and acts of individual thinkers or subjects of experience.

It was particularly important to him, therefore, that the context principle could be used to help demonstrate the inadequacy of existing psychologistic theories of content that accounted for it in terms of subjective states or events. In this chapter, I shall examine this connection between the context principle and Frege’s argument against psychologism in order to better understand its significance for the most characteristic methods and results of the analytic tradition as a whole.

As is well known, the critique of psychologism that Frege began would also prove decisive for the projects of the philosophers that followed him in defining this tradition; for the young Wittgenstein as well as for Carnap, for instance, it was essential to the success of analysis that it adumbrate purely logical relations owing nothing to psychological associations or connections.

Later on, as has also sometimes been noted, the context principle would figure centrally within projects of analyzing or reflecting on the use or practice of a language as a whole. I Frege twice asserts in the Grundlagen that observing the context principle as a methodological guideline is practically necessary if we are to avoid falling into a psychologistic theory of meaning or content, according to which content is dependent on mental or psychological states or events.

Thus formulated, the principle tells us that, rather than looking for the meaning of individual words in isolation, we should begin by considering words only in the context of the sentences in which they figure.