Did Frege believe Frege's principle? (Q1841520)

The author surveys different positions concerning the so-called `Frege Principle' held within the `Frege Industry'. In fact, two principles are called `Frege Principle', (1) the Principle of Semantic Compositionality, according to which ``the meaning of a syntactically complex expression is a function (only) of the meanings of its syntactic parts and manner in which they are syntactically combined'' (p. 103), and (2) the Context Principle, according to which a word has meaning only in the context of a sentence. The author lists quotations from philosophers who attribute the first or the second of these principles to Frege. He then surveys what the two establishments say about each other. He distinguishes several types: directions that attribute only one of these principles to Frege, and directions that claim that Frege held both principles, this last type being subdivided on several levels. In his conclusions the author compares these positions with Frege's theory as represented in his work. As to the question posed in the title, the author arrives at the following concluding remark: ``(a) Frege never believed anything like the semantic principle of contextuality, (b) Frege may have believed the principle of semantic compositionality, although there is no straightforward evidence for it and in any case it does not play any central role in any writing of his [\dots]. Therefore neither Contextuality nor Compositionality should be called `Frege's Principle''' (p. 111).