Glossar-English:Context-Building Acts

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Sub-Item of: Image Pragmatics

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Access to non-present situations

Living beings are generally concerned only with the environment directly given to them. At best, the past appears implicitly in behaviors that have just been activated, insofar as these have previously been changed by certain situations, and the future as the conditions for fulfilling current desires. In contrast, humans master the ability to detach themselves from the here and now spontaneously and to explicitly align their current behavior to non-present situations. This ability is demonstrated not least in using propositions, i.e., sign acts with a propositional angle, especially assertions.

The specific relation to a context, which represents a central functional requirement for assertions (⊳ modality), is usually created by a separate component in the overall sign act that forms the assertion. This act of context formation is called ‘context building’. Typical forms of context building include partial sign actions indicating that a situation in the past or future, a hypothetical or fictitious situation is being discussed, or that a situation from the perspective of another agent is considered (more on this below).

What is often linguistically called the ‘discourse universe’ of a group of people communicating with one another consists, on closer inspection, of a dynamic structure of different contexts that can be connected and nested in many different ways. On the one hand, individual sortal objects can connect the contexts via their spatiotemporal development. On the other hand, embedding relationships exist when one context can be reached from another context, i.e., can be derived from it. The immediate utterance situation usually represents the starting point for context formations that embed other contexts in them so that the communication partners cannot only refer to objects in either the current or the embedded context (⊳ Nomination). Rather, they are also able to establish relationships between the two (or between the modes of appearance of one and the same object that are available in this manner).[1]

Figure 1: ‘Orson Welles is Alfred Hitchcock’ – example of false identity statements with two mental spaces in Fauconnier[2]

The expression ‘context building’ follows the terminology of Gilles Fauconnier, who in [Fauconnier 1985a]Fauconnier, Gilles (1985): Mental Spaces. Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
 has worked out a linguistic approach to the propositional angle of verbal utterances: A ‘mental space’ designates an intentional set of objects to which one refers verbally. They are generated linguistically by so-called ‘space builders’ and can form complex embedding structures with different types of connections between objects in different mental spaces. With this conception, Fauconnier can elegantly solve several difficulties that arise, among other things, in the linguistic analysis of the reference relationship for counterfactual statements and in the case of inauthentic statements of identity (see Fig. 1).[3]


Context building and context referencing

The act of context building has two subtypes. On the one hand, a (partial) sign act can bring an independently accessible context into play: context referencing. Context referencing occurs, for example, through explicit or implicit references to place and time. Even tense indications can, thus, implicitly focus on a temporally specified context, making it “accessible” from the utterance situation.[4]

On the other hand, by the (partial) sign action, a context can first and foremost be created: It is then a question of context building in the narrower sense. For example, a narrative represents a (very complex) form of context building in the narrower sense since the number of objects mentioned in it, their relationships to one another, and their development over time are not independent of the overall sign act that forms the narrative. The truth of a statement about those objects can ultimately only be determined based on the propositional angle of the sentences in the text of the narrative (relative to an assumed communication situation when the text is received; ⊳ Image reception as a communication process). The context conveyed by such a context-building act does not simply include the set of propositions explicitly stated in the narrative. Rather, it is one of those contexts in which, among other things, all those proposed states of affairs apply together with other states of affairs that the recipients assume to be valid here (presuppositions and implicatures), as well as the overall possible implications (deductive completeness of the situation); the mediated context is, therefore, dependent to a certain extent on the sign-actors and, thus, on the utterance situation (hermeneutic circle).

A media-referencing sentential adverb, such as ‘in Uwe Johnson's novel «Anniversaries»’ is, therefore, a context-referencing act that refers to such a context-building act in the narrower sense. The same applies to references to other media, especially images and films: ‘in Leonardo da Vinci's painting «The Lady with an Ermine»’; ‘in Alfred Hitchcock's film «Vertigo»’. These examples suggest that context building in the narrower sense represents a fundamental communicative function of image use (⊳ modal image theory).

Unsaturated or saturated context-building acts

An apparent difference between the examples of context building mentioned above is that tense indication, temporal and local sentential adverbs, and adverbial supplements with references to medial works cannot occur on their own: They are (in Frege's sense) unsaturated and require further partial sign acts, which usually carry out a proposition relative to the context built. In contrast, a narrative as a whole results in a saturated, i.e., stand-alone form of context building. Again, this closure can also be assumed for other media forms of context building in the narrower sense (which, as indicated above, can be referred to by verbal context referencing), especially images. Their use would then correspond to a saturated act of communication with the aim of introducing a new, now jointly available (complex) context in the discourse universe of the communication partners.

Nevertheless, it should be noted that such context building is generally not carried out merely as an end in itself. In principle, its primary purpose is to be able to use the newly introduced contexts as a basis for further joint action (especially talking about it). Saturated context formation is, therefore, always carried out within the framework of further communicative interactions between the participants.

Propositional angle and truth in context-building acts

Since context-building acts form the basis for propositions, at least acts of context-building in the narrower sense are sign acts that do not have a propositional angle of their own since, otherwise, an infinite regress would occur. Context building in the narrower sense initially introduces the context to which a potential propositional angle of a sign act would have to refer: Context building opens up the possibility of performing another (partial) sign action with a propositional angle in the first place. To put it differently: Since a situation does not simply correspond to a finite set of applicable states of affairs (facts) but is open to interpretation, i.e., in principle, encompasses the potential for an infinite number of descriptions relative to quite different conceptual fields, it makes no sense to assume a final finite set of propositional descriptions that fully captured a context intersubjectively introduced by context building and whose propositional angle could, therefore, be conceived as the propositional angle of the (partial) context-building sign act as such (⊳ also Ecphrasis).

Subsequently, it is also not straightforward to apply the concept of truth to context-building acts since this concept is used as a measure of whether a state of affairs asserted relative to a context is either deductively compatible with an accepted set of assertions about that situation (coherence theory of truth) or demonstrably (empirically) applies in the context (correspondence theory of truth).

The expressive angle of context-building acts

Due to the lack of a propositional angle, the expressive angle plays a vital role in context-building sign acts because only the self-representation of the communication participant performing a context-building action can take on the task of providing an intersubjectively available reference basis for propositions building on it. It is essential to realize that it is also possible (and even inevitable in remarks about context building) to talk about situations/contexts propositionally and to refer to them nominatorily. However, this also means confronting situations as objects, which again occur as objects only in certain abstract spaces (i.e., special metaphorical situations = contexts again) that, in turn, must first be made available by an act of context-building. The act of context-building itself must, therefore, culminate in the self-representation thereby accomplished. Due to the lack of a propositional angle and the focus on self-reference, context building belongs to the proclamations or to the proclaiming part of a sign action.

The expressive angle of context-building acts, in general, must obviously consist in a self-representation that can be described by the following phrase: ‘To present oneself as someone whose attention is explicitly turned to another situation’. Although the ostentatious demonstration of specific spontaneous reactions to the meant situation belongs only in the borderline case to the self-representation, the latter appears particularly clearly in such a demonstration.

Logical and empirical context formation

One can, of course, also present oneself as one who turns in this distanced way to the current situation. However, there is a clear difference to other cases of context building: It is only possible in the current context to empirically test a concrete proposition related to the context. The sensorimotor test routines associated with the discrimination habit, which in turn is determined by the predication of that proposition, can be directly applied to the objects identified by the nominations of the proposition in the context, thus providing empirical evidence. Suppose, for example, it is asserted that the apple in the distant kitchen at home is red-cheeked; because of the distance, looking at that apple and judging it for red-cheekedness is not readily possible. If, on the other hand, it is claimed that the apple here is red-cheeked, it is sufficient to look at the apple present: Our sensorimotor equipment allows us with justification to confirm the predication or to contradict it.

The distanced attention to the current situation is, therefore, a context-building act with empirical re-present-ation: in short, an empirical context-building act. This case is contrasted with context-building acts with merely logical representation (in short: logical context-building acts): Here, without empirical access, the truth of an assertion relative to the context can only be judged coherence-theoretically via logical compatibility with other assertions about the context.[5]


Pictorial acts of context-building

As mentioned above, adverbial complements that refer to an image can be used as context-referencing acts. For instance, the expression ‘in Picasso's «Les Demoiselles d'Avignon»’ may casually serve as opening a context for the assertion that ‘three women wear a kind of African masks’. In the absence of the image, however, the formation of the context remains purely logical. In view of the picture, however, that assertion can be empirically decided as obviously false. It is reasonable to assume that the context-referencing act through the reference to the image is, in fact, secondary to the more original context-building act in the narrower sense through the presentation of the image itself. Indeed, images are usually employed to present individuated objects in some shared situation – a statement that also applies to novels, even if there are many other differences. In particular, in contrast to the act of purely logical context-building through a text, the pictorial context formation is at least partially an act of empirical context-building because the validity of the predications of visual features or other distinctions dependent on them can be verified more or less directly in the pictorial space. The pictorially conveyed contexts, thus, appear partially fused with the current behavioral situation.

Therefore, the core thesis of modal image theory states that image use is fundamentally visual-empirical context building in the narrower sense. It has to be taken into account that the contexts for different types of images are formed quite differently.

Pictorial context building with figurative images

With the help of figurative images, primarily visual aspects of possible behavioral situations are made available as contexts for joint linguistic or non-linguistic action. Analogous to the interpretation of the respective current appearances of sortal objects in the perceptual space as persistent individuals, in the appearances presented by pictorial context building in a perpetual present, modes of being given of temporally persistent individual objects are comprehended: Although there are usually no other modes of occurrence of the objects depicted – no encounters in other contexts are possible – we understand them as objects with history, as objects that we could, at least in principle, encounter again (as the same objects) in other situations.[6]

This interpretation plays a central role in depictions of real objects, such as mug shots. The search is not for a person who resembles the pigment surface of the picture carrier but for this person in the image space. The nomination ‘this person’ is bound to the context opened up by the image.

Pictorial context building with trompe l'œils

The peculiarities of the special figurative images of the trompe l'œil type (or the immersive image) are not due to the fact that, in this case, no context is built in unreflective reception since the image is not recognized as an image at all. Instead, it is a case of too-well done and, thus, dysfunctional pictorial context formation, which acts as a completely normal pictorial context building in production and reflective viewing (⊳ Deceptive and immersive mode).

Pictorial context building with logical images

Since logical images present, at least in part, something that is not in itself visually perceptible, their meaning is based on a metaphorical conceptual transfer from the represented domain to the domain of visible and, thus, pictorially directly representable entities. Consequently, a behavioral situation provided by pictorial context building is used as a model for a more or less complex non-visual state of affairs. The context-building function is thus extended to the area of ​​phenomena that is not perceptible per se: In particular, any abstract states of affairs become visually experienceable as a (potential) behavioral situation and empirically accessible inter-individually (⊳ image schemata).

Pictorial context building with image quotations and other reflectively used images

Reflexive sign uses are generally derived usages (⊳ Image in reflexive usage). The now primary exemplary demonstration of peculiarities of the respective sign use particularly overrides the actual pragmatic function of the cited or reflexively used sign. This applies analogously to reflectively employed images. An originally context-building function would, therefore, no longer be effective in the case of reflexively used images – unless it is precisely the feature to be exemplified – or at least no longer directly effective. Nevertheless, this purpose of use is closely related to many other aspects of image use, so although the actual context-building function is annulled since the presentation of the image now serves another purpose, it remains a central factor embedded in this exemplification.

Pictorial context building with non-figurative images

The lack of reference to spatial objects in the usual (sortal) sense initially suspends the mechanism that establishes pictorial space as a visually perceived behavioral situation in the case of non-figurative images. So, at first glance, it seems implausible to assume context building as its primary pragmatic function for this kind of image.

However, non-figurative images can very well be understood as reflexively used images with negative exemplification so that their purpose of use would, on the one hand, (as a result of reflexive use) be set off from the primary use of images anyway and consist more in exemplifying aspects of image use, not in context building. On the other hand, the negative exemplification in their case concerns precisely the non-functioning context-building ability, which in turn would be confirmed ex negativo as typical for images in the standard case.


Primary context building

In anthropological image theories, the main concern is to place the role of the ability to use images within the framework of the differentiae specificae of philosophical concepts of man. From the point of view of modal image theory, it is, therefore, indispensable to clarify whether and in what way image competence already assumes a systematic function in the transition to the concept of a being with the ability to context-building – the primary context-building act.

Indeed, good reasons can be given that a primary act of context-building cannot be rationally conceived without taking into account the use of at least one kind of sign close to perception that serves as an inter-individually available basis for the empirical anchoring of the referential function of propositional language ([Schirra & Sachs-Hombach 2006b]Schirra Jörg R.J. & Sachs-Hombach, Klaus (2006): Fähigkeiten zum Bild- und Sprachgebrauch . Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, 54, 6.
Webadresse: www.jrjs.de/Work/Papers/P06/P06-5/index.html
, [Schirra & Sachs-Hombach 2011a]Schirra Jörg R.J. & Sachs-Hombach, Klaus (2011): Anthropologie in der systematischen Bildwissenschaft: Auf der Spur des homo pictor. In: Meyer, S. & Owzar, A. (Hg.), Disziplinen der Anthropologie. Waxmann, Münster.
Webadresse: www.jrjs.de/Work/Papers/P11/P11-1/index.html
, and [Schirra & Sachs-Hombach 2013a]Schirra, Jörg R.J. & Sachs-Hombach, Klaus (2013): The Anthropological Function of Pictures. In: Sachs-Hombach, K. & Schirra, J.R.J. (Hg.), Origins of Pictures. Anthropological Discourses in Image Science. Halem, Köln.
). Nevertheless, the empirical-context-building function of these pre-images can only be stabilized via a verbal (i.e., logical) context-building act interconnected with them: Image competence and language competence are, therefore, considered equally original and logically interdependent. At the center of this dependency is the connection between the concept »mental image« and the situation of the primary context-building act (⊳ Logical context formation and mental images).

See also:

Notes
  1. ↑ Assertions with identity sentences are typical examples of sign acts with a propositional angle that relates to objects in different modes of being given – i.e., that appear in different contexts. As Frege's analysis has made clear, utterances with sentences like ‘The morning star is (identical to) the evening star’ are only meaningful (read: informative) if the asserted identity does not already follow analytically from understanding the nominations. What is then informative is that ‘morning star’ and ‘evening star’ – as two objects appearing in different (classes of) contexts (namely once only ‘at morning’ and once only ‘at evening’) – are to be considered as aspects of the same sortal object (‘planet Venus’); cf. [Frege 1892a]Frege, Gottlob (1892): Über Sinn und Bedeutung. Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, 100.
    Webadresse: www.gavagai.de/HHP31.htm
    .
  2. ↑ ‘Hitchcock meets Hitchcock’: Such a statement makes perfect sense in this example by Fauconnier: It is about a film in which the actor Orson Welles plays the film character Alfred Hitchcock, while the director Alfred Hitchcock himself plays in the film the character «the man at the bus stop». The identifying relationships of the objects in the two participating contexts/mental spaces H and F correspond, on the one hand, to the relation Fd ›actor represents character‹ and, on the other, to the relation Fi ›person is represented by character‹.
  3. ↑ The concept of contexts goes beyond Fauconnier's concept of mental spaces, particularly in the sense that contexts are related to the behavioral possibilities of the observed being in the contextual situation. Correspondingly, context building – beyond the concept of space building – opens up the perspective of jointly expanded scope for action concerning other situations.
  4. ↑ Since nominations always work only relative to a context that is assumed to be known by the interlocutor, at least designations can also be used as implicit, albeit usually very vague, context references, provided that neither the utterance situation nor another previously introduced context is likely as context (i.e., if no object of the corresponding type is present there). For example, in the current context, there could suddenly be the talk of ‘the king of Kulestra’. In such a case, a neutral, i.e., a largely unspecific context with a (proto)typical example of the specified type, together with the environment typical for the occurrence of these objects, is made accessible – as a starting point for further informative statements or parts of statements. This context serves, among other things, as a background for presuppositions and conclusions about what has been communicated.
  5. ↑ The distinction between logical and empirical context-building acts modifies one aspect of the juxtaposition of diegesis and mimesis from Plato's «State» and Aristotle's «Poetics», respectively; ⊳ Mimesis; ⊳ Context: Context and diegesis; cf. Wikipedia: Diegesis.
  6. ↑ Using figurative images, e.g., in operating instructions, would otherwise be incomprehensible.
Literature
[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.[Schirra & Sachs-Hombach 2006b]Schirra Jörg R.J. & Sachs-Hombach, Klaus (2006): Fähigkeiten zum Bild- und Sprachgebrauch . Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, 54, 6.[Schirra & Sachs-Hombach 2011a]Schirra Jörg R.J. & Sachs-Hombach, Klaus (2011): Anthropologie in der systematischen Bildwissenschaft: Auf der Spur des homo pictor. In: Meyer, S. & Owzar, A. (Hg.), Disziplinen der Anthropologie. Waxmann, Münster.[Schirra & Sachs-Hombach 2013a]Schirra, Jörg R.J. & Sachs-Hombach, Klaus (2013): The Anthropological Function of Pictures. In: Sachs-Hombach, K. & Schirra, J.R.J. (Hg.), Origins of Pictures. Anthropological Discourses in Image Science. Halem, Köln.

Version 1: 2013

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Editing:

Contributions by: Joerg R.J. Schirra und Marcel Lemmes — (Note)

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Schirra, Jörg R.J. (2013). Context-Building Acts. (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-Building_Acts].
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