The context principle, also known as Frege’s Principle, states that words have no meaning without context. It was created as a reaction against psychologism and compositionality. The meaning of a word is derived from its context within a sentence. Semantic holism believes that the meanings of sentences and words derive from a larger context, which can create problems for language learners.
The context principle establishes the idea that individual words have no meaning or value unless they are understood in the context of a sentence. The notion has also been called Frege’s Principle after its inventor, Gottlob Frege, of contextualism and inverse compositionality. The principle is integral to how words and sentences acquire meaning and which of the two is more important in determining it.
The idea first appeared in Frege’s Foundations of Arithmetic in 1884. In this book, he expounded his three basic principles of philosophical analysis. These principles were to separate the subjective from the objective, to never find meaning in a word without context, and to remember what separates a concept from an object. Frege created the context principle as a reaction against the atomization of meaning as postulated by psychologism and compositionality.
Psychologism is the inclusion of logic and psychology in philosophy. While this idea is primarily German in origin, John Stuart Mill was also a key proponent. Psychologism and compositionality hold that the meaning of a sentence is understood by the combined meanings of its individual parts. This means that each word adds value to the overall meaning.
Reverse compositionality or the context principle takes a diametrically opposite view: a word by itself has no real meaning. Its meaning is derived from its context within a sentence. That doesn’t mean that every word varies in meaning from sentence to sentence, but some, like “set,” do.
Frege only mentioned the context principle on a few occasions in the book and never elaborated on its meaning. It is not even certain whether Frege continued to believe in the principle or whether he diluted or abandoned it altogether in later life. What is known is that Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell took up his ideas and developed them further.
Wittgenstein elaborated Frege’s principle by dividing language into propositions and propositional variables. The proposal is the sentence. The sentence is constructed from a series of variables or words, but it is the sentence that ultimately determines the value of each variable.
There are two versions of contextualism in this principle. In a sense, the meaning of a word is determined only by all its contexts. In the other, the meaning of a word can be determined from any context. The same principles also apply to the meanings of expressions.
The idea of the whole that determines the meaning of the constituent part makes the principle of context a part of semantic holism. Semantic holism is a linguistic principle that believes that the meanings of sentences and words derive from a larger context. While this broader context is not defined, it is commonly understood to mean the whole language.
Taking the principle of context and semantic holism literally creates a problem for language learners. This is because, if a language is to be learned, the learner will need to understand the entire language in order to understand a word or phrase in it. This can be impossible, as language learners build knowledge by acquiring individual words and phrases as they slowly come to understand the whole.
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