View source for Blog talk:Contexts in Context/What is Context?/c000013

== Why is context interpreted in terms of three concepts?==
'''1. Context is an object,''' because it is a noun, meaning a name. Nevertheless it has two references or senses: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/context 1. The circumstances or setting for an event, statement or idea 2. The parts of something written or spoken that immediately precede and follow a word or passage, etc. In both cases the purpose of providing context is to clarify meaning and understanding. This suggests that neither an event, nor a word (clause) is complete or clear without knowing the context.
Consequently, if you specify context in sense 1, you need to specify or describe an event complete with the description/identification of its wider environs that the event belongs to as a smaller entity. In sense 2, your description will be similar, because you identify the elements that include the word or clause needing specification. Notice that anything may call for an explanation or the provision of context and may be provided at other times as context itself. This is what I called the Matryoshka variables metaphore. Once you are a container, once you are containment. If you accept that, then clearly context is an object, although not necessarily easy to identify in physical terms. With texts, it is easy though. Also with pictures, but with ideas, it is hell.

'''2. Context is a property''', because it is used to explain, describe and identify an object that context is the context of. Here your ambition is to discover as many elements constituting context as possible or necessary. The effort is a function of purpose, the aim in your mind. Understanding better? Clarification? Implicatures?  Establishing the frontiers of the universe of discourse or framing? Separate or isolate your point from possible misinterpretations (finding excuses)? To place your item in a sorted system of classification of items?
Notice two phrases: in context and out of context. They identify a location and a location is an abstract object. That abstract object is characterized by the attributes of some other (physical or non physical) object being inside or outside the item making it either more, or less understandable.

'''3. Context is a relation''', because you have two items between which context is contemplated, usually by visual check. This spatial relation is then transitively used to concoct ideas, words in the mind, and then in turn it is represented by lines in 2D planes. We have no idea of how anything is related in the mind, apart from the neurobiological terminology that provides form to what we have here, i.e. concepts, words, etc. as content. We have one word, verb association, connecting, or (two) being connected. Apart from the fact that such a connection, in theory, allows a flow to pass in and to both directions, displaying the property of commutativity, we cannot break it down any further. But it is probably not true; it is not likely that flow in both directions results in the same output. What is more likely, however, is that one direction indicates a move to a larger or wider context and may be this is why we want to arrange (sort by size) things in a linear order and a hierarchy.
But apart from such spatial and hierarchical relation that are used in ontologies the analysis of clauses, the dependents of verbs or the theta roles offer configurations with  a verb in the center. Of course, verbs are different and so are the configurations. We differentiate between verbs of denotation and verbs of connotation, as obviously they have different configurations and plausibility. Besides, verbs represent the components of models that our thinking devises and which are available in abstract word pairs such as cause and effect, space and time, form and content, quality and quantity. They should be used at the next level following objects, relations and properties for the description of the entities that exist in the world. Making sure, however that the entities that exist in poetry and fiction only and not in the real world shall be separated.
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