Wittgenstein and Frege on Proper Names and the Context Principle

The paper discusses Frege's Context Principle and Wittgenstein's interpretation of it both in his Tractatus logico-philosophicus and in his Philosophical Investigations, against the background of recent discussions of contexualism. It focuses on the issue of proper names and argues that elememts of context sensitivity affect also the use of proper names. Wittgenstein's later philosophy is more hospitable to Frege's conception of the sense and reference of proper names, for which, however, no uniform semantic treatment is to be expected. Wittgenstein's suggestion that often we use proper names without a fixed meaning is brought to bear on the (variable) information required in specific episodes of communication to specify what or whom we mean to refer to.