The Context Principle

Abstract

Dummett first confronted the problem of abstract objects in his critique of the reductive nominalism of Goodman and Quine. In a 1955 review of Nelson Goodman’s The Structure of Appearance (1951) and in two follow-up pieces, (1956 and 1957), Dummett attributes the nominalism of Goodman and the early Quine to a failure to grasp Frege’s context principle.¹ Once we understand that it is only in the context of a sentence that a word has a meaning, Dummett argues, then we will no longer be susceptible to the illusion that we always require to be ‘shown’ the referent of a singular term for it to be regarded as legitimate. In prosecuting his case against nominalism, Dummett appeals to a strong version of the context principle as a thesis about reference, according to which if a term fulfils the syntactical function of a proper name in sentences, some of which are true, then we have not only fixed the sense, but also the reference, of that proper name (1956, p. 40). Dummett would later consider this reading of the context principle as exorbitant, on the grounds that the process of identifying a bearer does not play a part in determining the truth conditions of a sentence containing an abstract singular term. In the current section, I outline Dummett’s critique of the nominalism of Goodman and Quine as this is crucial for understanding his subsequent work on the problem of abstract objects. This provides a basis for an examination of the philosophical significance of the context principle in the following section.