Context and Mythology

In this thesis, I will survey some philosophically representative approaches to the problem of the relationship between context and meaning. Starting from G.W.F. Hegel’s discussion of the meaninglessness of indexical terms in the Phenomenology of Spirit, I will investigate Gottlob Frege’s notion of context and the legacy of this notion in the formal sciences of language, showing that this approach finds a ground for meaning in contexts which themselves must be thought of as meaningful. The formal approach will be compared with the theory of context developed by Philipp Wegener and expanded by the ethnographer Bronislaw Malinowksi, which locates the ground of meaning outside of the purview of the reasoning subject, locating context in culture. These differing conceptions of context as meaningful or effective presence will then be problematized by an assessment of the threat of the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein to any philosophical defense of the notions of meaning and context. Similarities between Wittgenstein’s attack on meaning and th