Understanding Context

Chapter 1. Everything, Yet Something

All and everything is naturally related and interconnected.

—ADA LOVELACE

Birds in Trees, Words in Books

IT WOULD BE GREAT to say there’s a simple secret that lets us figure out a subject such as context quickly and easily. But let’s not kid ourselves; context is a big, hairy, weird topic. By nature, it’s about everything. And if something is about everything, how can we even begin to understand it? When we think we’ve caught it and we try to crack it open to see what’s inside, all we seem to get is more context. It’s the stuff of late-night dorm conversations among philosophy students, or tedious debates among philosophers and physicists. Context shifts and dances, it slips and slides. It insists on its mystery, yet it demands we come to terms with it every single day.

Still, in some ways, context actually isn’t so mysterious, because from one moment to the next we seem to know it when we see it. Whenever we’re trying to figure out what one thing means in relation to something else, we say we’re trying to understand its context.

It can be a bird in a tree, or a stone in a stream. It can be a single word in a sentence. It can also be that sentence in a paragraph, that paragraph in a book, and that book’s context in a library or on a bedside table—all of which can influence how we interpret the single word where we started.

It can be the context of a text message I receive on my phone, where a “:-)” emoticon can make the difference between an insult ...