Okay, so I’ll admit it now. I suck at remembering to update this blog. It has been around 2 weeks since my last entry, and I am really sorry about that. If I don’t keep updating regularly, even those of you who actually know me are not likely to keep checking back. I do have some news that might help me to remember to write in my blog. I have to write 6 blog entries for my Philosophy course, and so I will be writing them here and copying them over to the school “blog” site. I’ve taken a look at the blog and it looks more like a message board than a blog to me. But, it’s where my posting has to go therefore that’s where it will end up.
Anyway, the idea that has been bouncing around in my mind a lot lately has been the concept of how important context is in understanding absolutely everything that we do. Take almost any quote that you hear and remove it from the context from which it arose and it will either lose meaning, or you will be able to infer a completely different meaning from the sentence. This lack of context can very easily change the meaning of a sentence. For example:
“They will store food.”
What is this sentence talking about? Is it talking about a refrigerator? Maybe a granary or silo? Oh, or perhaps mice, squirrels or hamsters. Just searching “They will store food” on Google, quotations and all, will give you over 20,000 results (as of September 30,2010 11:03 am). Simply removing the quotations will give you a staggering 243,000,000 results. Where in all of that are you supposed to know what that original sentence was referring to? How are we, as humans, supposed to filter through all of our accumulated knowledge to understand what someone else is trying to say to us?
Context.
It’s as simple as that. If we know the context of the sentence, if we can understand what is going on in the world at that time, we can understand each other. Oh, and before I forget to mention, I found the previous quotation from the wikipedia page on the bridled titmouse. (Bonus points for noticing that the bridled titmouse was the inspiration for that birdlike design on the top of my blog.) But this context is so important for understanding. Even simple words require context to be quickly understood. The best, and fastest example I can think of to demonstrate this is a simple one word question: “Sex?” Now, there are two distinct ways that we can interpret this question. The first, and more likely scenario (at least in my mind), is that someone is asking for the gender of the person or creature being registered for some service or other that requires a form to be filled out. The second way, and quite possibly the way that most people think of first (I must count myself among them), is as a proposition for physical intimacy, albeit a clumsy and slightly awkward one. So if “sex” can be interpreted in two ways, and there is no way to differentiate between the two either phonologically, or literarily, how do we know that the attractive veterinarian’s secretary is asking us for the gender of our cat, and not a quickie in the office closet? Based on the context the secretary is simply asking for the gender of our cat. If we are incredibly lucky, or incredibly smooth and winning, then the secretary could potentially be requesting a quickie, but such events are unlikely to occur.
Context isn’t just important for the present, or for recent history. Context is just as important to understand what has happened throughout history as it is to understanding “eggs and rice” as a response to “what did you eat for breakfast today?”. In fact, context is arguably more important to understand history, and historical documents. We live in the present time (philosophical arguments aside) we usually know the present context of things that we read see and hear and read. Not as many of us know the full historical context of Plato when he was doing his great works. In fact, I had to do some research to learn about the context in which Plato wrote Cratylus. And by research, I mean I asked my professor about it. Plato was living in a time where Greek was the “enlightened” language. The language of learning. All other languages, to him, would have been considered barbarian languages, if they were even considered language at all. That’s not to say anything of his personal life, which I can’t speak of here since I have no credible sources. (Sorry, Wikipedia, you don’t count as credible.)
I’d like to leave you with a quick comic from www.xkcd.com that I think shows more or less the importance of context.
Used with permission from XKCD: http://www.xkcd.com/794/
Cheers!
