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Articles

Wittgenstein, Frege & The Context Principle

Susan Lucas on how words gain meaning from their context.

Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is perhaps one of the most startlingly original pieces of philosophy ever written. It has been likened to a philosophical poem; but on another level, it is a very abstract, remote and precise analysis of the logic of language and how we succeed in ‘picturing’ reality in language. Yet for all its originality, the Tractatus evolves from the weaving together of a number of contemporary philosophical threads; and for all its apparent remoteness, at times we see the concerns with the human and the everyday that were to emerge so powerfully, particularly in the Philosophical Investigations, as Wittgenstein’s thinking developed. On the one hand, then, the Tractatus emerged out of the turn towards philosophical logic begun in the last years of the nineteenth century; on the other, the influence of what we would now call ‘continental philosophy’, perhaps particularly the work of Schopenhauer, can be felt, for example in the remarks on ethics towards the end of the book.

Wittgenstein’s predecessors in philosophical logic, Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege, both sought to set mathematics on rock-solid foundations in formal logic.

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