Contextual Definition: What Frege might have meant but Probably didn't

Frege stated three fundamental principles in his introduction to Foundations of arithmetic (Evanston, IL: Northwestern U Press, 1968). These principles were intended to help avoid philosophical errors in his study of the foundations of mathematics. Frege's second fundamental principle: "never to ask for the meaning of a word in isolation, but only in the context of a proposition" is discussed. Frege seemingly dropped the principle in his subsequent work, but there are two ways to accommodate this conflict: (1) We can ignore the principle; and (2) We could consider it as telling us to treat only expressions that act grammatically like proper names and definite descriptions, and contextually eliminate other expressions. The fundamental principle ought to be taken as saying something about how we even analyze the use of proper names in sentences. This approach is un-Fregean. Several central points in Frege's work are discussed from this viewpoint. Part II concerns two central passages in Frege's work which are doubtful. J. Hartling