Frege’s View of the Context Principle After 1890

Abstract

The aim of this article is to examine Frege’s view of the context principle in his mature philosophical doctrine. Here, the author argues that the context principle is embodied in the contextual explanation of value-ranges presented in Basic Laws of Arithmetic. The contextual explanation of value-ranges plays essentially the same role as the context principle in The Foundations of Arithmetic. It is supposed to show how a reference to natural numbers is possible. Moreover, the author argues against the view that the context principle should be separated from the recarving thesis. This aspect of Frege’s view leads the author to the rejection of the purely referential view of the context principle, which is fairly widely accepted in the current literature.