Context in Context

Contents:

• Editorial: Context in Context – Bruce Edmonds and Varol Akman (springerlink)
  
• The Significance Of Context In Comprehension. The ‘We Case’ – Carla Bazzenella (springerlink)
  
• Micro Situations And Macro Structures – Anita Fetzer (springerlink)
  
• Variation In The Contextuality Of Language: An Empirical Measure – Francis Heylighen and Jean-Marc Dewaele (springerlink)
  
• Context-Dependence In Human And Animal Communication – Pietro Perconti (springerlink)
  
• Building Context In Everyday Life – Juliette Rouchier, Martin O’Connor and Mélanie Requier-Desjardins (springerlink)
  
• A Context-Based Computational Model Of Language Aquisition By Infants And Children – Steven Walzak (springerlink)
  

In this special issue, we have tried to focus attention upon the opposite approach.  We assume that the world is, to a large extent, a messy and contingent place.  This means that the transfer of knowledge from learning to application is only possible by a diverse collection of heuristics which exploit a heterogeneous set of commonalities which occur for a variety of reasons in different domains.

The alternative approach is to: search for local commonalities and heuristics in particular contexts and see how they can be utilised to produce useful techniques.  Later some careful and incremental generalisation might turn out to be possible. In this way, we can truly start to ‘map out’ the practical limits of generality using context-like constructs and maybe avoid deceiving ourselves with overambitious schemes which later fail to scale up. This special issue includes half a dozen papers exemplifying this approach.

Foundations of Science is published by Springer. See  Springer's FOS page for ordering information: