ABSTRACT
The great German philosopher and mathematician Gottlob Frege suggested at one place that we should not ‘ask for the meaning of a word in isolation, but only in the context of a proposition.’1 In the same vein, it may be said that the meaning of a proposition or a hypothesis should not be asked for except in relation to the particular context in which it has been advanced. And we can maintain this without requiring the description of such a context to be fully explicit or even one which can be easily expressed in words. A proposition needs to be understood in relation to the fullest possible description of its implicit and explicit contextwhich may be a good sense, too, in which to understand the reference by Wittgenstein to the concept of a ‘language-game’.2
