Context is Not a Given Thing: It's Kind of the Schrödinger's Cat
The Quiet Authority of Resonance — Babu George Essay • Philosophy of Language The Quiet Authority of Resonance How text does not merely carry meaning, but shapes the mind that reads it By Babu George ■ Philosophy & Interpretation ✦ There is a persistent habit, both in common thought and in certain philosophical traditions, to treat text as a stable object and context as its surrounding environment. The text is taken to be fixed, the context to be variable but nonetheless given. Meaning, on this view, is the product of placing one inside the other, as though a specimen were set under glass. This picture is convenient. It is also misleading. Context is not a container within which text resides. It is an activity. More precisely, it is the set of constraints and tendencies by which a mind, situated in a particular history and condition, converts signals into meaning. It does not pre-ex...