Three Alternatives on Contexts

Context is a concept used by philosophers and scientists with many different definitions. Since Dummett, we speak of the "context principle" in Frege and Wittgenstein: "An expression has a meaning only in the context of a sentence". The context principle finds an extension in some of Wittgenstein's ideas, especially in his famous passage where he says that " to understand a sentence means to understand a language " (Philosophical Investigations, §199). Given that Wittgenstein believes that "the" language does not exist, but only language games exist, we should conclude that he is speaking of the need always to consider a sentence in the context of some language game. 2 This general attitude is certainly attuned to the contemporary tendency to place contextual restrictions on the interpretations of our sentences. However, we find so many kinds and forms of restrictions that such a general attitude does not suffice to provide us with a viable tool to find an order in the web of the many different theories of context. To look for an order, or at least for some clarification, w e may start with two contrasting theoretical paradigms: the "objective" theory of contexts, where a context is a set of features of the world, and the "subjective" theory of context, where a context is a speaker's or agent's cognitive background with respect to a situation. 3 We have here not only two different ways of using the term 'context', but also two different 1 I would like to thank the many people who commented on this paper: Horacio Arló Costa, first presented the schema of this paper, and to the Giunchiglia research group in Trento, which set up the great opportunity for discussing such topic at Context 99. 2 Penco 1998 and 1999a provide an interpretation of Wittgenstein's remarks in this direction. 3 We have to take into account another general distinction given by Perry 1997, among presemantic, semantic and postsemantic context (the term "presemantic" is used by Kaplan 1977, par.XXII). The presemantic context is what gives an ambiguous epression its linguistic meaning (in "I saw her duck under the table" we have to decide whether "her" is a pronoun or an adjective, or whether " duck " is a noun or a verb). The semantic context is what gives the evaluation of the terms once their linguistic role has been disambiguated ("her" is a particular person – "if" a …