ABSTRACT
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 investiga-
tion 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 inde-
pendent of subjective mental states and acts of individual thinkers or subjects of experience. It was particularly important to him, therefore, that the con-
text 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 who followed him in defining this tradition; for the young
Wittgenstein as well as for Carnap, for instance, it was essential to the suc-
cess 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.
