Varieties of Contexts

In this presentation we give a short reminder on the origin of the two main notions of context that are used in philosophy of language in order to draw attention to the main points of discussion common in the meeting on “Contexts in Philosophy”. The use of Context in philosophy begins with Frege’s work: in his book Foundations of Mathematics (1884: xxii) he gives the following maxim: “never to ask for the meaning of a word in isolation, but only in the context of a sentence”. This claim is a criticism of Locke who endorsed the Aristotelian view of meaning as an idea connected with a lexical item (for Aristotle words are signs not of objects, but of the movement of the mind and for Locke the meaning of a word is the idea connected with the word). Frege thought that Locke’s mistake was to look for the meaning of a word in isolation; but (i) for many words there are no corresponding ideas, and the only way to understand or define the meaning of a word is to study how it works in the context of a sentence; (ii) different people may connect different ideas with the same words. But Frege was worried also for other aspects of the use of language: context dependence and fiction. While in mathematics we work with expressions (e.g. numerals) that always refer to the same objects (numbers) independently of the context, in everyday speech, the reference of expressions like “I”, “today”, “this”, “here” changes depending on the context of utterance. Frege dedicated much of his last writings to discuss this peculiarity of natural language remarking that “The mere wording, as it can be preserved in writing, is not the complete expression of the thought; the knowledge of certain conditions accompanying the utterance, which are used as means of expressing the thought, is needed for us to grasp the thought correctly. Pointing the finger, hand gestures, glances