VERSION 11/11/98 Words in Contexts Fregean Elucidations

The question I am interested in in this paper is "How do words obtain their meanings?" The author I shall ask for help in answering this question is Gottlob Frege. This may appear surprising, since Frege is known as not being interested in the question posed. Frege wanted to provide mathematics with solid foundations. To achieve this, he aimed at constructing from scratch logical systems that model mathematical reasoning with unprecedented precision. Frege started what came to be known as the logicist programme with arithmetics around 1880. After he received the famous letter from Russell in 1902, he became convinced that his program was doomed to failure. Frege had supposed that the fundamental primitive notions underlying his system (like 'object', 'concept', 'function', 'extension', 'truth', ...) do have a sufficiently clear meaning. It turned out that Frege was wrong on this, but it is debatable whether conceptual confusions were really responsible for the failure of his program. Anyway, in his later writings Frege became more conscientious about the interpretation of primitive terms in both theoretical and meta-theoretical contexts. In my search for an answer to the question how words receive their meanings, I shall make use of Frege's rather scattered but clear-sighted remarks on this topic. I try to do this without addressing the problem of what exactly these meanings are supposed to be.