Abstract

The present article examines the context principle (according to which «a word has meaning only in the context of a sentence») from an ontological point of view. The article is divided in two parts. The first part addresses the different role that this principle plays in Frege and Wittgenstein. The second part demonstrates that the context principle - understood as a thesis about reference - can be applied both to singular terms that refer to abstract entities, and to those terms that refer to concrete entities, and that this view is consistent, from an ontological point of view, with descriptivism.