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Final, Website A CONTEXT PRINCIPLE FOR THE 21ST CENTURY Fabrizio Cariani Northwestern University 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. Wordcount: 7696 words (including notes, references and front matter). Keywords: context principle, Frege, semantics, meta-semantics, definitions Acknowledgments: 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. For several generations of students at the University of Bologna, Eva Picardi’s course in the philosophy of language has been a unique portal to a difficult subject matter and an exciting philosophical style. Her lectures on Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein were a treasure trove of bold, and yet seriously scrutinized, ideas about language and how it manages to connect up with reality. As one of these students, I went on to write an undergraduate thesis on Frege’s context principle under her attentive and inspiring supervision. This was a fortunate choice, as she was about to devote a good chunk of her subsequent research to the context principle itself 1 (Picardi 2003, 2010, 2016). In the years since, my interests within philosophy of language have shifted somewhat, but I want to use this opportunity to honor Eva’s career and life by resuming that conversation. The context principle (CP) is one of two core pieces of Frege’s methodological legacy. It is often glossed as the requirement that one should never ask for the meaning of a word in isolation, but “only in the context of a proposition”. It makes a (somewhat uneasy) pair with another methodological injunction associated with Frege: the principle of compositionality, according to which the meaning of a sentence is composed of the meaning of its constituent expressions. There are many important problems concerning the proper interpretation and philosophical significance of these principles, and we will get to some of them in order. But the one that got me thinking about CP after all these years is rather frivolous: there is a striking gap between the prime importance that Frege scholars ascribe to CP1 and the relatively marginal role it appears to occupy in contemporary philosophy of language and natural language semantics. This is not because contemporary research paradigms have turned their back on Frege. On the contrary, he remains hailed as one the major pioneers of the field. Yet, very few of the main research programs in philosophy of language and semantics are explicitly premised on CP. This is in stark asymmetry with the principle of compositionality, which survives as a fundamental tenet in the model-theoretic tradition in semantics (see Szabó 2013 for an overview).2 To put the point in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek way: I have seen scores of papers rejected from journals and conferences because of violations of compositionality, but I have never seen anyone complain about violations of the context principle. I can see the sharpshooters lining up to shoot down these claims, so let me qualify them a bit. It is certainly not right to say that no one cares about the context principle. It has been openly embraced by inferentialists (Brandom 1994, sections 7.1-7.2; 2002 ch. 8) and by so-called radical contextualists (Travis 2009). However, it is not clear that these appeals are faithful to the context principle as Frege understood it. Picardi herself (2010, sections 1 and 2) makes a compelling case that Travis’s version of the context principle depends on a richer interpretation of ‘context’ than what Frege had in mind. Serious doubts have also been raised about the accuracy of Brandom’s interpretation (Kleemeier and Weidemann 2008). Even setting these interpretational matters aside, there are two points that are worth emphasizing: (i) The model theoretic tradition in semantics has largely ignored CP. The principle is not mentioned in the dominant textbook in this 2 tradition (Heim & Kratzer, 1998). And while it does put in a surprising cameo in another important textbook (Chierchia & McConnell-Ginet, 1990, section 3.1), it is under an interpretation which is considerably weaker than what Frege seems to have had in mind. (ii) Almost no one, regardless of philosophical preferences, ever invokes CP to argue against other views (it is used by those who use it to elaborate their own positions). This essay proposes an interpretation of the context principle that aims to be as faithful as possible to Frege’s writings (spoiler: I don’t think we can be entirely faithful) while at the same time being of some value for the modern philosopher of language. My interpretation also aims to explain why the context principle is best used defensively (to articulate one’s own views) rather than offensively (to criticize other views). Moreover, I will attempt to do so without relying very much on the role that CP plays in Frege’s argument for mathematical Platonism.3 I do not, of course, deny that CP is part of an argument for mathematical Platonism. Nonetheless, nothing in Foundations suggests that CP is only of significance for Platonists. If the principle is to be a valuable piece of the philosopher of language’s toolkit, it should have purpose and significance when removed from this metaphysical application. If anything, we ought to generalize to the worst case and ask: can the principle be formulated so as to be compelling even for mild nominalists? This is the plan: section 1 lays down basic background concerning CP. Section 2 advances some constraints on an adequate interpretation of it. In particular, it follows several other interpreters (starting with Dummett 1956 and ending with Picardi 2016) in arguing that the slogan “Words only have meaning in the context of a proposition” cannot, literally speaking, be quite right. It will flow out of this argument that the principle must apply in the first instance to explanations of meaning—a conclusion which much of the literature already embraces. Section 3 entertains and rejects a recent suggestion to the effect that the context principle concerns metasemantic explanations (metasemantic interpretations of CP have recently been discussed by Stainton 2006 and Linnebo 2008). Section 4 defends an alternative: I argue that CP concerns what I will call licensing explanations. These are explanations that are required if a theorist is to accept a definition of a term as successful. In section 5, I use the interpretation of the previous section to reassess some delicate questions about the scope of the context principle. In the concluding section, I will tie up some loose ends. 3 1. A brief history of the context principle Here is a familiar story: at four points in The Foundations of Arithmetic (1884, henceforth Foundations), Frege invokes a mantra connecting word meaning with “the context of a proposition”. (I assume, with the rest of the literature, that Frege means ‘sentence’, and not what contemporary philosophers of language mean by ‘proposition’.) The exact formulations of the mantra vary a bit:4 Introduction, p. X: “ask for the meaning of a word in the context of a proposition, not in isolation; […] If one ignores [this principle], one is almost forced to take as the meanings of words mental pictures or acts of the individual mind”. §60 “[…] any word for which we can find no corresponding mental picture appears to have no content. But we ought always to keep before our eyes a complete proposition. Only in the context of a proposition have the words really a meaning (Bedeutung)”. §62 “How, then, are numbers to be given to us, if we cannot have any ideas or intuitions of them? Since it is only in the context of a proposition that words have any meaning, our problem becomes this: To define the sense of a proposition in which a number word occurs” §106 “We proposed the fundamental principle that the meaning of a word is not to be explained in isolation, but only in the context of a proposition: only by adhering to this can we, as I believe, avoid a physical view of number without slipping into a psychological view of it.” There is an important contrast between the passage from §106, which is explicitly about explanations of meaning, and the passages in §60 and §62, which are ostensibly about when words have meanings. (The passage from the introduction seems to be neutral, since “ask for the meaning…” could be understood either way). Despite these differences in formulation, with the exception of §62, Frege is single-minded about what CP is supposed to do: those who ignore it fall into the 4 murderous embrace of psychologism. They end up taking the meanings of number words to be mental pictures or ideas (call this the defensive use of CP). The passage from §62 departs from this talking point to pursue a more positive thought: numbers can be “given to us” if we fix the meaning of certain sentences involving numerals.
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