Jose Luis Linan

The Principle of Context and the Principle of Compositionality only conflict when they are construed as claims about the origin of meanings. I will clarify this point by means of an historical survey into the treatment that PCtxt receives in Frege's Grundlagen and in Wittgenstein's Tractatus. I will argue that Frege actually introduces non-equivalent formulations of PCtxt generating an unstable notion of meaning when related with PCmp. The Tractatus solves this imbalance by assuming both the contextuality and the compositionality at the very core of the notion of meaning, thus by ruling out the claim of two separated —sensitive to collision— principles. My thesis is that in the stage of development of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein found a way to meet and fit together the tensions between PCtxt and PCmp emerging in Frege´s philosophy of language and detected by latter commentators

Joseph Kosuth’s arguments for supporting Conceptual Art take for granted, and merely invert, the very categories of Formalism which are the critical target of his proposal. That is due to a narrow notion of truth, understood as adequatio or as (formal) tautology. A subjectivist and internist conception of the work of art is an unexpected consequence of this view. A different conception comes out if we follow Gadamer in adopting a hermeneutic view regarding the identity of the work, which considers the material conditions of its manifestation.