Glossar-English:Context

Sub-Item of: Sign theories: Overview

Original: Kontext

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Sign acts and their context Aspects of the utterance situation on which the success of the sign act depends are generally regarded as the context of a sign act ([Levinson 1983a]Levinson, Stephen C. (1983): Pragmatics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ). This fact is undeniable in the case of the deictic sign components, in which the sign users point directly (e.g., gesturally) to parts of the utterance situation, or the anaphoric sign components, in which they employ references to other sign acts carried out immediately beforehand (their own and others, in particular, those directed at them). However, it is also attributed to the influence of the respective context when ambiguous expressions are understood without a corresponding explanation: If, for example, a 'bank' is mentioned in connection with a financial crisis, nobody will think of park furniture because of this context. The content and manner of image use can also depend on aspects of the usage situation. Context and the propositional angle In addition, one can only speak of a propositional angle of a sign act in connection with an associated context because the propositional angle depends on the modality of the sign act. That is, it can only be determined relative to a situation that one can perceive or relate to. This dependency applies in particular to the nomination, which, as a necessary part of every proposition, is employed to attempt to identify for the interlocutor an object from the current discourse universe (cf. [Tugendhat 1976a]Tugendhat, Ernst (1976): Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die sprachanalytische Philosophie. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/M. ). Contexts, in this sense, are generalized from the usage situation of a sign to any situation. Sign acts with a propositional angle, therefore, have a double reference to a context, namely, on the one hand, regarding their usage situation and, on the other hand, regarding the (usually deviating) context for their propositional angle. Formal linguistic-logical approaches to contexts can be found, for example, as Situation Semantics ([Barwise & Perry 1984a]Barwise, Jon & Perry, John (1984): Situations and Attitudes. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. ), Possible World Semantics ([Kripke 1972a]Kripke, Saul A. (1972): Naming and Necessity. In: Davidson, D. & Harman, G. (Hg.), Semantics of Natural Language. Reidel, Dordrecht. ), Mental Spaces Theory ([Fauconnier 1985a]Fauconnier, Gilles (1985): Mental Spaces. Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. ), or also within the Discourse Structure Theory ([Kamp 1990a]Kamp, Hans (1990): On the Representation and Transmission of Information: Sketch of a Theory of Verbal Communication Based On Discourse Representation Theory. In: Klein, E. & Veltman, F. (Hg.), Natural Language and Speech. Springer, Berlin. ). Contexts can be described in a first approximation as structured sets of intentional objects to which one can refer communicatively under favorable conditions. More adequate is the definition as potential behavioral situations to which someone directs their attention. For, on the one hand, behavioral situations intrinsically fulfill the property of deductive completeness, which must first be extrinsically generated over arbitrary sets of objects: A situation is always presupposed to be inherently consistent in its totality, which is not necessarily true for plain sets of objects. On the other hand, behavioral situations are open to interpretation: As is well known, a situation in which one finds oneself does not yet determine as such whether one understands it as a configuration of interacting elementary particles, as a collection of molecules reacting with each other, as interacting living beings, or as party leaders arguing with each other more or less objectively. What kind of set of objects it is about can remain correspondingly indeterminate in the case of a context. It is the context-related propositional angles of sign acts by whose predications an assignment to certain fields of concepts is made. Especially in modal image theory, the concept of contexts plays a central role ([Schirra 2001a]Schirra, Jörg R.J. (2001): Bilder   ——   Kontextbilder. In: Sachs-Hombach, K. (Hg.), Bildhandeln. Interdisziplinäre Forschungen zur Pragmatik bildhafter Darstellungsformen. Skriptum, Magdeburg. Webadresse: www.jrjs.de/Work/Papers/P01/P01-5/index.html ). As potentially inter-individually shared situations, contexts stand, therefore, in the following connections: They are what statements (more generally, propositions) refer to; They are what is subjected to figure/ground distinctions; They are what one reacts to (in Uexküll's sense, the respective Umwelt); They are that in which objects (strictly speaking or metaphorically) appear in each case. Since the current environment of a being provides the basis for the concept of contexts and, thus, includes everything it perceives in the situation, contexts can be roughly simplified as space-time bubbles that envelop the individual and in which it acts. Apart from the current behavioral situation, only the use of signs gives us access to other, non-present contexts: Human attention can only be directed to different situations – spatially or temporally shifted, abstract, hypothetical, fictitious, etc. – by us make each other (or ourselves in the role of another) aware of that context through a sign act. A sign act that makes this possible fulfills the pragmatic function of context building. Objects and behavioral situations The connection between concrete objects and behavioral situations is quite relevant to the concept of contexts: Concrete things never appear in isolation, but we constantly encounter them in spatiotemporal connections with other objects. The respective current situations are, therefore, primary to the objects. They only appear as objects (in the narrower sense) insofar as they are understood as part of different situations – insofar as we encounter them in different ways of being given ([Frege 1892a]Frege, Gottlob (1892): Über Sinn und Bedeutung. Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, 100. Webadresse: www.gavagai.de/HHP31.htm ). Perception thereby means, in particular, that – in a changing manner – something from the current situation is lifted as a figure in front of the ground of the surrounding rest of the situation. In fact, concrete objects are always available to us empirically only in their currently observable, therefore instantaneous (limited to the current behavioral context) manner. The practice of distinction underlying every observation concept takes effect only in the present. That an object actually exists beyond the respective moment of observation, i.e., being for an observer an object with an individual trajectory through space-time, this fact can be grasped by the observer only by assigning the respective current appearance under a corresponding object concept. Such a concept of a persistent object is also needed if you not only want to experience the phenomenon of confusion or deception but also to understand it: Indeed, the fact that some objects can look (deceptively) similar to objects of a completely different nature can only be recognized by someone who knows how to relate momentary mode of appearance and cross-temporal identity. Therefore, even sophisticated concepts of similarity are based on the ability of the judging agent to deal with different contexts – with varying modes of being given of individuated objects (⊳ Equality, Similarity, and Identity). Conversely, Frege pointed out that assertions of identity (for instance: ‘The morning star is the evening star’/‘Phosphorus is Hesperus’) are informative (and, thus, can act as assertions) only if (apparently unconnected) appearances in different contexts are thereby connected to become modes of being given of the same persistent, individual object. In philosophy, object concepts of this kind are often called ‘sortal concepts’ and corresponding objects, therefore, also ‘sortal objects’ (⊳ Sortal Objects and Individuation). Through metaphorical space, it is also possible to situate abstract objects in analogy to concrete, individuated objects as being located in quasi-spatiotemporal contexts so that one can (apparently) point to them and address them in propositions in a corresponding way. Following the school of «cognitive linguistics», such metaphorical transfers are even the actual basis for being able to deal with abstracts at all (cf., for instance, [Lakoff & Johnson 1980a]Lakoff, George & Johnson, Mark (1980): Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London. ). The metaphorical space provides the context: an imaginary behavioral situation in which such objects, which are actually not spatiotemporally classified, can appear at all so that it becomes possible to communicate about them inter-individually by means of sign acts with propositional angles. Image and context The connection between the concepts »image« and »context« exists on two levels: On the one hand, the use of the image itself is context-dependent. On the other hand, images are often, if not always, used for context building. Situational dependency of image use Apart from the fact that an object becomes an image only insofar as someone uses it in a certain way, the influence of the respective context of use is also inevitably noticeable in its use as an image. On the one hand, the use of an image depends directly on the lighting conditions in the respective context: Seeing a panel painting, for example, in a dim cathedral under light colored by stained glass windows or by flickering candlelight, or in a well and neutrally lit museum hall, undoubtedly puts its stamp on the respective pictorial experience. The fact that the image surface itself may exhibit indexical moments through reflection, transparency, or texture-related shadows can be understood as merely a particularly pronounced form of this kind of context dependence, which is rather related to syntactic aspects. If, in this respect, one is to speak with regard to an image carrier of the image, a standard situation for illumination and indexically effective environmental influences is implicitly presupposed, which is by no means cross-culturally unambiguous. On the other hand, the respective use intentions of the participants constitute the currently effective image contents and image references in the first place: With different intentions, the same image carrier may, therefore, appear as different images. Accordingly, the excerpt of a photo from the Vietnam War taken by Nick Ut and published in newspapers was employed by both opponents and supporters of the war with completely different role assignments of the figures depicted. Again, when speaking of the image in view of an image carrier, a presupposed standard situation of usage intentions and required contextual knowledge remains all too often implicit. Accordingly, recent art historical approaches rightly point to the importance of explicit contextualization in any image analysis. Furthermore, images in the surrounding area can influence the use of an image carrier: The hanging in an exhibition and the compilation in a sequence of images, for instance, in the context of an instruction manual or as a comic, are typical examples. Combinations with texts or signs in other media also come into question for this kind of context dependency. However, in such arrangements – be it only images or images with other media – one has to pay attention to whether the mutual contextual influence leads to the formation of new signs on a higher level. Image content as context From the Renaissance idea of ​​Alberti's “window” to the conception of objects in “pure visibility” in phenomenological image theories of the 20th century, the scenes evoked with the help of images and visualized inter-individually have been understood as contexts. One can exchange information about them employing relevant speech acts, for example, and draw attention to objects contained therein (or certain of their properties) with pointing gestures. As far as sortal objects are concerned, the appearances presented in the picture can be identified with appearances in other contexts, for instance, with the help of identity claims. Particularly in the case of pictorial access to abstract “objects” in structural images, these objects, which cannot be classified in a spatiotemporal manner, are presented as (more or less) clearly definable spatial (or spatiotemporal) entities in a situation, a metaphorical context, where they and certain of their properties and relations among them appear in (visual) appearances. However, the above conceptions of the specificity of pictorial contexts owe essential aspects: The conception of Alberti's window ignores the fact that the image use opens up a context that is generally not identical to the context of use: The scene behind an actual window, on the other hand, always remains simply a part of the respective current context. The pictorial surface is misunderstood here as a transparent pane of glass, whereby the apparent “transparency of the medium”, which would only be typical for trompe l'œils, obscures an essential component of the image function: the stepping out of the given “here and now”. The idea of objects in pure visibility basically refers to objects that fall under sortal concepts. However, it is not taken into account that a house that is only visible, which means it has neither weight nor resistance when you lean on it, and would, therefore, not behave according to the physical laws that normally apply to (sortal) houses, not at all would fall under our usual concept of a house and, hence, cannot be classified as a house without further ado: What appears in a corresponding picture, however, is generally understood as such a sortal individual – or more precisely: as the current appearance of such an individual because sortal objects never encounter us in any other way. Otherwise, all corresponding speech acts that relate to the content of the pictorial space with their propositional angle would become either incomprehensible or in great need of explanation because a rule for a particular use that deviates from the norm is by no means evident here. Thus, with those “objects in pure visibility”, it remains unclear what kind of objects they are supposed to be. The modal image theory attempts to avoid these shortcomings of the older approaches by explicitly considering the image use as a context-building use of image carriers. With the image, one tries to establish a situation not usually present as an inter-individually available context. Of course, the four aspects of use mentioned above also apply to this context, whereby here, in particular, the Gestalt formation through the visual perception of the situation becomes available (empirical context formation). Context and diegesis The concept of contexts in modal image theory is closely related to the use of the expression ‘diegesis’ in film and literary studies. According to [Wulff 2007a]Wulff, Hans J. (2007): Schichtenbau und Prozesshaftigkeit des Diegetischen: Zwei Anmerkungen. montage AV - Zeitschrift für Theorie & Geschichte audiovisueller Kommunikation, 16, 2. , „the term diegesis for the world view that a fiction offers has become common since Etienne Souriau“ (p. 40; cf. [Souriau 1951a]Souriau, Etienne (1951): La structure de l’univers filmique et le vocabulaire de la filmologie. Revue de Filmologie, 7, 8. Notiz: Dt.: Die Struktur des filmischen Universums und das Vokabular der Filmologie. In: Montage AV 6,2, 1997, S. 140–157 ; [Souriau 1953a]Souriau, Etienne (1953): L’Univers filmique. Flammarion, Paris. ). For Souriau, „everything that is considered to be represented by the film and that belongs to the reality that its meaning presupposes“ is part of the ‘diégèse’ ([Souriau 1951a]Souriau, Etienne (1951): La structure de l’univers filmique et le vocabulaire de la filmologie. Revue de Filmologie, 7, 8. Notiz: Dt.: Die Struktur des filmischen Universums und das Vokabular der Filmologie. In: Montage AV 6,2, 1997, S. 140–157 : (German) p. 151). Dominique Chateau understands the diegesis of a film accordingly as a set of behavioral situations pre-structured by various specifications that are mutually accessible ([Chateau 1976a]Chateau, Dominique (1976): La sémantique du récit. Semiotica, 18. : p. 215). The respective approaches are established primarily through film-narrative elements. From its introduction in film studies in the 1950s, the concept of diegesis was adopted in literary studies, particularly in France, in the 1970s and 1980s (e.g., [Genette 1972a]Genette, Gérard (1972): Figures III. Seuil, Paris. ). In the article already mentioned, Wulff points out, among other things, that the diegetic aspect of a film is generally to be understood as an extremely complex, spatiotemporal structure of situations, which is also distributed over several levels; the actors act in those situations, which can be perceived by them (and in films within limits also by the spectators, of course) – and finally: about which one can (propositionally) talk. In other words, it is a question of many interconnected behavioral situations – contexts in the sense explained above. In contrast to the concept of contexts in modal image theory, with its references to logical propaedeutics, philosophy of language, and image anthropology going far beyond individual analyses, the concept of diegesis has so far mainly been used to analyze the structures of a single work. See also: Context-Building Acts Cyberspace Deceptive and immersive modes Equality, Similarity, and Identity Fiction Figure/Ground Differentiation Film Image Anthropology Image Content Image in reflective use Interactional, Expressive, and Propositional Angles Interactive Image Mimesis Modality Nomination Phenomenological Image Theories Predication Proposition Reference Reflection and Transparency Semantics of logical images Sign, Sign Carrier, Sign System Sortal objects and individuation Space and Geometry Theories of Image Space Verbal metaphors and general metaphorology

Notes Literature [Barwise & Perry 1984a]Barwise, Jon & Perry, John (1984): Situations and Attitudes. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.[Brentano 1874a]Brentano, Franz (1874): Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt. Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig.[Chateau 1976a]Chateau, Dominique (1976): La sémantique du récit. Semiotica, 18.[Fauconnier 1985a]Fauconnier, Gilles (1985): Mental Spaces. Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.[Frege 1892a]Frege, Gottlob (1892): Über Sinn und Bedeutung. Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, 100.[Genette 1972a]Genette, Gérard (1972): Figures III. Seuil, Paris.[Husserl 1929a]Husserl, Edmund (1929): Formale und Transzendentale Logik. Niemeyer, Halle (Saale).[Kaczmarek 2007a]Kaczmarek, Ludger (2007): Allyfying Leibniz. Einige Aspekte von Kompossibilität und Diegese in filmischen Texten. montage AV - Zeitschrift für Theorie & Geschichte audiovisueller Kommunikation, 12, 2.[Kamp 1990a]Kamp, Hans (1990): On the Representation and Transmission of Information: Sketch of a Theory of Verbal Communication Based On Discourse Representation Theory. In: Klein, E. & Veltman, F. (Hg.), Natural Language and Speech. Springer, Berlin.[Kripke 1972a]Kripke, Saul A. (1972): Naming and Necessity. In: Davidson, D. & Harman, G. (Hg.), Semantics of Natural Language. Reidel, Dordrecht.[Lakoff & Johnson 1980a]Lakoff, George & Johnson, Mark (1980): Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London.[Levinson 1983a]Levinson, Stephen C. (1983): Pragmatics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.[Meinong 1907a]Meinong, Alexius (1907): Über die Stellung der Gegenstandstheorie im System der Wissenschaften. Voigtländer, Leipzig [Schirra 2001a]Schirra, Jörg R.J. (2001): Bilder   ——   Kontextbilder. In: Sachs-Hombach, K. (Hg.), Bildhandeln. Interdisziplinäre Forschungen zur Pragmatik bildhafter Darstellungsformen. Skriptum, Magdeburg.[Souriau 1951a]Souriau, Etienne (1951): La structure de l’univers filmique et le vocabulaire de la filmologie. Revue de Filmologie, 7, 8.[Souriau 1953a]Souriau, Etienne (1953): L’Univers filmique. Flammarion, Paris.[Tugendhat 1976a]Tugendhat, Ernst (1976): Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die sprachanalytische Philosophie. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/M.[Wiesing 2008a]Wiesing, Lambert (2008): Die Sichtbarkeit des Bildes. Geschichte und Perspektiven der formalen Ästhetik. Campus, Frankfurt/M. & New York.[Wulff 2007a]Wulff, Hans J. (2007): Schichtenbau und Prozesshaftigkeit des Diegetischen: Zwei Anmerkungen. montage AV - Zeitschrift für Theorie & Geschichte audiovisueller Kommunikation, 16, 2. Version 1: 2013 Responsible: Schirra, Jörg R.J. Editing: Sachs-Hombach, Klaus Contributions by: Joerg R.J. Schirra und Marcel Lemmes — (Note) Quote as: Schirra, Jörg R.J. (2013). Context. (Ausg. 1). In: Schirra, J.R.J.; Halawa, M. & Liebsch, D. (Hg.), Glossar der Bildphilosophie. (2012-2026). [bildglossar.org/index.php?title=Glossar-English:Context].