According to a well-known statement by Donald Knuth, "Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do." If we use Knuth's criterion, we must probably conclude that contemporary investigations of the 'context' of a social activity - as offered in fields such as linguistic pragmatics and social psychology - are still art rather than science (Reich 2010). The blunt truth is that social scientists have tended to treat context as a residual category that encompasses 'everything else' with regard to the object of interest (a communicative message, a social situation, and so on). The few explicit attempts to theorize context that do exist (e.g., Gumperz 1992; Sperber and Wilson 1995, chapter 3; Akman 2000; Dijk 2006) are general and exploratory, hence only marginally helpful for the purpose of specifying a precise, operational, implementable model.
展开▼
