| Summary: | The Context Principle says that words have meaning only in the context of significant propositions. Versions of the principle have been recommended by central figures of the analytic tradition. Its proper interpretation, however, is highly debated. In spite of its pedigree, many have found it either trivial or patently false. I present detailed accounts of how the principle was construed by Bentham, Russell, Frege, and early Wittgenstein. I argue, against the received historical narrative, that the Frege-Wittgenstein construal of the principle should be sharply contrasted with the forms of contextualism propounded by Bentham and Russell. Moreover, I defend in my own voice the Frege-Wittgenstein construal of the principle. I argue that it is not trivial, because it opposes a natural and widespread atomistic conception of sub-propositional meaning, and is not evidently false, because it does not rule out obvious linguistic facts such as word-meaning and compositionality (as is often maintained), but rather supplies constraints for a proper account of these phenomena.
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