Abstract
Taking a lead from Eva Picardi’s work and influence, I investigate the significance of Frege’s context principle for the philosophy of language (setting aside its role in Frege’s argument for mathematical platonism). I argue that there are some interpretive problems with recent meta-semantic interpretations of the principle. Instead, I offer a somewhat weaker alternative: the context principle is a tool to license certain definitions. Moreover, I claim that it merely lays out one of many possible ways of licensing a definition. This means, among other things, that despite Frege’s imperative injunctions, the context principle formulates a permission—not a requirement.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsBibliography
Boolos, George. 1990. The Standard of Equality of Numbers. In Meaning and Method: Essays in Honor of Hilary Putnam, ed. G. Boolos. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Reprinted in George Boolos, Logic, Logic and Logic, Harvard University Press, 1998.
Brandom, Robert. 1994. Making It Explicit. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Brandom, Robert. 2002. Tales of the Mighty Dead. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Carnap, Rudolf. 1928. Der Logische Aufbau der Welt. Felix Meiner Verlag [English translation, The Logical Structure of the World; Pseudoproblems in Philosophy]. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.
Chierchia, Gennaro, and Sally McConnell-Ginet. 1990. Meaning and Grammar, 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.
Dummett, Michael. 1956. Nominalism. The Philosophical Review 65 (4): 491–505.
Dummett, Michael. 1973. Frege: Philosophy of Language, 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Dummett, Michael. 1981. The Interpretation of Frege’s Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Dummett, Michael. 1991. Frege: Philosophy of Mathematics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Dummett, Michael. 1995. The Context Principle: Centre of Frege’s Philosophy. In Logik und Mathematik: Frege-Kolloquium Jena 1993, ed. I. Max and W. Stelzner. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Frege, Gottlob. 1884. Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik [English translation, Translated by J.L. Austin, Foundations of Arithmetic]. Oxford: Blackwell, 1953.
Frege, Gottlob. 1892. Über Sinn und Bedeutung. In Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, 100: 25–50. Translated as ‘On Sense and Reference’ by M. Black in Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, P. Geach and M. Black (eds. and trans.), 3rd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1980.
Hale, Bob. 1987. Abstract Objects. Oxford: Blackwell.
Hale, Bob, and Crispin Wright. 2001. Reason’s Proper Study. Oxford: Clarendon.
Heim, Irene, and Angelika Kratzer. 1998. Semantics in Generative Grammar. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Kleemeier, Ulrike, and Christian Weidemann. 2008. In Robert Brandom: Analytic Pragmatist, ed. Bernd Prien and David P. Schweikard. Ontos.
Lewis, David. 1975. Languages and Language. In Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, ed. K. Gunderson, 3–35. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Lewis, David K. 1983. New Work for a Theory of Universals. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 61: 343–377.
Linnebo, Øystein. 2009. Frege’s Context Principle and Reference to Natural Numbers. In Logicism, Intuitionism, and Formalism: What Has Become of Them? ed. S. Lindström, E. Palmgren, K. Segerberg, and V. Stoltenberg-Hansen, 47–68. The Netherlands: Springer.
Pelletier, Francis Jeffry. 2001. Did Frege Believe Frege’s Principle? Journal of Logic Language and Information 10: 87–114.
Picardi, Eva. 2002. Il Principio del Contesto in Frege e Wittgenstein. In La Svolta Contestuale, ed. C. Penco, 1–23. Milano: McGrawHill.
Picardi, Eva. 2009. Wittgenstein and Frege on Proper Names and the Context Principle. In Wittgenstein, Mind, Meaning and Metaphilosophy, ed. P. Frascolla, D. Marconi, and A. Voltolini, 167–188. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Picardi, Eva. 2016. Michael Dummett’s Interpretation of Frege’s Context Principle: Some Reflections. In Justification, Understanding, Truth, and Reality: Themes from Dummett, ed. M. Frauchinger. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Quine, W.V.O. 1951. Two Dogmas of Empiricism. In From a Logical Point of View. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Quine, W.V.O. 1969. Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. New York: Columbia University Press.
Resnik, Michael. 1967. The Context Principle in Frege’s Philosophy. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 27: 356–365.
Soames, Scott. 2014. The Analytic Tradition in Philosophy, Volume 1: The Founding Giants. Princeton University Press.
Stainton, Rob. 2005. The Context Principle. In Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd ed., vol. 3, ed. K. Brown, 108–115. Oxford: Elsevier.
Stainton, Rob. 2006. Words and Thoughts. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Stalnaker, Robert. 1998. Reference and Necessity. In Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Language, ed. B. Hale and C. Wright, 534–554. Oxford: Blackwell.
Szabó, Zoltán Gendler. 2013. Compositionality. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2013, Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2013/entries/compositionality/.
Travis, Charles. 2009. To Represent as so. In Wittgenstein’s Enduring Arguments, ed. E. Zamuner and D.K. Levy, 4–29. London: Routledge.
Wright, Crispin. 1983. Frege’s Conception of Numbers as Objects. Aberdeen University Press.
Acknowledgements
I thank Paolo Santorio and Rob Stainton for conversations about this material, as well as Annalisa Coliva, Paolo Leonardi and Sebastiano Moruzzi for editing this volume and inviting me to contribute. My biggest debt is to Eva herself: I owe her for the mentorship, the conversations, for helping me track down some of her writings on this subject, but most of all for inspiring me to become, like her, a quietly irreverent philosopher.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Cariani, F. (2018). A Context Principle for the Twenty-First Century. In: Coliva, A., Leonardi, P., Moruzzi, S. (eds) Eva Picardi on Language, Analysis and History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95777-7_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95777-7_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-95776-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-95777-7
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)