Abstract
In this paper I examine in which way the thought of late Wittgenstein can be said to have accommodated the so-called Fregean Context Principle. I suggest that such an evolution in late Wittgenstein’s philosophy - which could be conceived as an internal dynamics within Wittgenstein’s “two ways of thinking”, since he himself stated Frege’s Principle at Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 3.3 - eventually lead to a deviation from Frege’s methodological statement in the Introduction to The Foundations of Arithmetic. This analysis is not merely historical-conceptual, since the “Context Principle” is claimed by some philosophers of language to lie in the background of contextualist proposals in philosophical semantics. I argue that this cannot be accurate, because the kind of context which late Wittgenstein thought of as indispensable in framing meaningful utterances is altogether different from the context of the “Context Principle”.
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