Alhassanain(p) Network for Heritage and Islamic Thought

I. EARLY ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY

2. Frege on the Context Principle and Psychologism

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 investigation of language and sense. It was in theGrundlagen 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 beobjective in the sense of being independent of subjective mental states and acts of individual thinkers or subjects of experience. It was particularly important to him, therefore, that the context principle could be used to help demonstrate the inadequacy of existingpsychologistic 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 that followed him in defining this tradition; for the young Wittgenstein as well as for Carnap, for instance, it was essential to the success of analysis that it adumbrate purelylogical 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 theuse orpractice of a language as a whole.

I

Frege twice asserts in theGrundlagen that observing the context principle as a methodological guideline is practically necessary if we are to avoid falling into apsychologistic theory of meaning or content, according to which content is dependent on mental or psychological states or events. Thus formulated, the principle tells us that, rather than looking for the meaning of individualwords in isolation, we should begin by considering words only in the context of thesentences in which they figure. The first suggestion of a connection between it and antipsychologism comes near the beginning of theGrundlagen , where Frege lays out the “fundamental principles” of his investigation:

In this investigation I have adhered to the following fundamental principles:

There must be a sharp separation of the psychological from the logical, the subjective from the objective;

The meaning of a word must be asked for in the context of a proposition, not in isolation;

The distinction between concept and object must be kept in mind.

To comply with the first, I have used the word ‘idea’ [‘Vorstellung’] always in the psychological sense, and have distinguished ideas from both concepts and objects. If the second principle is not observed, then one is almost forced to take as the meaning of words mental images or acts of an individual mind, and thereby to offend against the first as well.[70]

At this point, the suggestion of a connection between the observance of the context principle and the avoidance of psychologism is only programmatic. Frege does not say, here,how the two are connected, orwhy we must think that seeking the meaning of words in isolation will “almost” force us into subjectivist psychologism. Frege’s second mention of the context principle in theGrundlagen provides more detail. It comes in the course of his attempt to define the concept of number, after he has already argued that numbers are independent, self-standing objects, and that each judgment about a number contains an assertion about a concept. Frege considers an objector who challenges the mind-independence and objecthood of numbers on psychological grounds. Such an objector may hold that the conception of numbers as objects cannot be sustained, since we have no idea or image of many numbers; numbers expressing very small or large quantities or magnitudes, for instance, routinely outstrip our ability to provide intuitive images in thought or imagination to represent them. Frege’s response does not dispute the truth of the psychological claim, but instead suggests the replacement of the psychologistic procedure with a logical one:

We are quite often led by our thought beyond the imaginable, without thereby losing the support for our inferences. Even if, as it seems to be, it is impossible for us as human beings to think without ideas, it may still be that their connection with thought is entirely inessential, arbitrary and conventional.

That no idea can be formed of the content of a word is therefore no reason for denying it any meaning or for excluding it from use. The appearance to the contrary doubtless arises because we consider the words in isolation and in asking for their meaning look only for an idea. A word for which we lack a corresponding mental picture thus appears to have no content. But one must always keep in mind a complete proposition. Only in a proposition do the words really have a meaning. The mental pictures that may pass before us need not correspond to the logical components of the judgment. It is enough if the proposition as a whole has a sense; its parts thereby also obtain their content.[71]

Our quantitative judgments about great distances, or about the size of objects, like the Earth, that are vastly larger or smaller than us, do not rest on our ability to form a mental image of anything accurately representative of the magnitudes involved. But this does not deprive our judgments of warrant or show that they do not concern genuine objects. Indeed, Frege avers, our temptation to think that these judgmentsmust be contentless arises from our temptation to identify the meanings of their constituent terms with the intuitive images or mental pictures that occur to us as we hear or consider them in succession. When, because of the inherent limitations of our intuitive faculties, we cannot supply a mental image for a particular term, for instance “the size of the Earth,” we may then be tempted to conclude that the term has no meaning. But we can, after all, make judgments about magnitudes even when they far exceed our intuitive grasp; and although we attach no intuitive content to the idea of there being 0 of any particular type of object, nevertheless our quantitative judgments involving 0 are unimpaired.

The possibility of making such judgments meaningfully, Frege suggests, itself suffices to defend the objecthood of numbers against the envisaged objection. That they can be made at all shows that these judgments concern entities that do not depend on our particular intuitive abilities. Frege’s defense of the objecthood of numbers therefore rests, in this case, on a notion of content according to which judgments may have particular, well-defined contents even if some or all of their key terms cannot be supplied with representativeintuitive images. Given this notion of content, it will be possible to construe the possibility of content-bearing judgments as demonstrating the existence of the objects to which their terms refer. But this conclusion will itself, Frege claims, depend on our considering the contents of sentences as logically prior to the meanings of their individual terms. Beginning with sentence-level contents, we are to identify their real “logical components,” components which may not correspond to anything identifiable as the meanings of the sentence’s constituent words. It will be these true components of the judgment, rather than the mental accompaniments of individual words, that determine the actual existential commitments of the judgment as a whole.

Two sections later, Frege further specifies the sort of judgments we should begin with in order to determine the actual logical content and existential commitments of judgments involving numbers:

How, then, is a number to be given to us, if we cannot have any idea or intuition of it? Only in the context of a proposition do words mean something. It will therefore depend on defining the sense of a proposition in which a number word occurs. As it stands, this still leaves much undetermined. But we have already established that number words are to be understood as standing for independent objects. This gives us a class of propositions that must have a sense - propositions that express recognition [of a number as the same again]. If the symbola is to designate an object for us, then we must have a criterion that decides in all cases whetherb is the same asa , even if it is not always in our power to apply this criterion. In our case we must define the sense of the proposition

‘The number that belongs to the conceptF is the same as the number that belongs to the conceptG ”;

that is, we must represent the content of this proposition in another way, without using the expression

‘the Number that belongs to the conceptF .’

In doing so, we shall be giving a general criterion for the equality of numbers. When we have thus acquired a means of grasping a definite number and recognizing it as the same again, we can give it a number word as its proper name.[72]

Having already argued that numbers are objects and that judgments about number are judgments about concepts, Frege realizes that judgments of the equinumerosity of concepts are at the same time judgments that “express recognition” of particular numbers, that identify a number as the same again in a new case. Given this, the possibility of judgments of equinumerosity suffices to defend the objecthood of numbers against any objection based on the possible failure of intuition to provide images corresponding to them. The possibility of judging that the number belonging to one concept is the same as the number belonging to another provides what an intuitive image cannot: the identification of a particular number as an object, self-identical and re-identifiable in ever-new situations in our judgments of equinumerosity.

Frege’s general reason for requiring a distinctive kind of logically defined content that arises primarily at the level of sentences, then, seems clear. Only by recognizing such a level of content, he claims, will it be possible to underwrite the objectivity of judgment and the existence and mind-independence of its objects. This recognition moreover depends on our according priority in the practice of logical analysis to sentence-level contents. For considering words in isolation will debar us from recognizing their real logical contents and force us to construe their contents as consisting in their idiosyncratic psychological accompaniments. The application of the context principle in theGrundlagen thus requires that contents on the sentential level play a role not only in determining the meaning or content of sentences, but also the possibility of their terms making objective reference.[73] For Frege’s argument moves, as we have seen, from the recognition of the significance of judgments of equinumerosity to the ontological conclusion that number-terms refer to self-standing, independent objects. The general ontological conclusion would not follow if determinations of the meaning of sentences did not also provide general conclusions about the references of the terms which make them up.[74] The sort of content that shows up in the analytic practice that Frege suggests will belogical content, moreover, in that it is at least partly determined by inferential and deductive relationships between sentences in the language. Only this sort of content, because of its determination by logical relations, rather than intuitive or psychological ones, can legitimately participate in logically relevant judgments about the identity of referents. Accordingly, only this sort of content is qualified to ground thepossibility of objective reference.

One might wonder, however, what it is about the role of this kind of content in judgment that entitles it to enjoy this special claim to ground objective reference. Part of the answer lies in Frege’s conception of intuition not only as subjective but also as essentiallyprivate . In “The Thought,” for instance, he argues that intuitive images are not only subjective but also, because of the impossibility ofknowing the contents of another’s mind, strictly private and incommunicable.[75] If this is right, then reference to an intuitive image by itself will clearly be of no use in an argument attempting to establish the objectivity of what it represents. But even if this is the case, we may still wonder whylogical content, simply because it is related to and determined by logical relations of deduction and inference among sentences, should fare any better. For one thing, it is not at all obvious why intuitive contents, even if themselves private, could not at least provide abasis for the public, potentially objective judgments of equinumerosity to which Frege appeals. When Frege wrote, he was well aware that empiricists like Locke and Hume had provided detailed theories of abstraction to account for the possibility of meaningful judgments about mathematics and numbers even when these judgments exceed direct, intuitive support. And Frege’s conversant, Husserl, would soon provide a complex anti-psychologistic theory of abstraction that portrayed particular acts of numerical judgment asgrounded in individual intuitive acts.[76] On any of these theories, the judgments that Frege appeals to as lacking intuitive support, and so exemplifying an alternative sense of content that does not rely on intuition, are construed instead as arising from concrete, intuitive contents by way of a process of abstraction. If these theories of abstraction are at all plausible, Frege’s examples of judgments lacking in immediate intuitive support are not decisive. Moreover, it is difficult to see how the context principle could make the important difference that Frege says it does, if what is at issue is simply theprivacy of intuitive contents. For it is not initially clear why the contents of sentences should be anyless dependent on intuition than are the contents of words, taken alone; and if they are just as dependent on intuition, they must, on Frege’s view, be just as private, and hence just as incapable of grounding objective reference. Alternatively, if there is a distinctive, logically robust kind of content in virtue of which judgments are both public and potentially objective, it is far from obvious why single words, even “considered in isolation,” could not have content in this logically robust sense as well.