Monday, October 12, 2020

Context - provided by the ‘Human-centeredness' of the Meaning


We all know that meaning rests upon context.

Claim : It is provision of human-centered meaning / personification, that provides context.

Suppose you are holding a cell-phone for the first time. You see the screen. On the top right corner, you see ‘5:43 pm’. (Exclude factors like maybe the clock is not adjusted to the current local time). You intuitively and immediately conclude that it is the current time. Now, logically speaking, there is a cell-phone with a display, containing a data-element which reads as ‘5:43 pm’. That, in no way, necessarily implies that the current time is 5:43 pm!

What then makes you immediately feel that the current time is 5:43 pm? It is awareness of the context you are in - you are holding a phone - an electronic gadget; it is supposed to DISPLAY things to you (you are holding it FACING YOU) i.e. information, etc. So a time-mention should convey the current time since conveying time to anyone by anyone, in general too, is mostly, the current time. The ‘5:43 pm’ MEANS the current time to you, because of the CONTEXT you are in. 

Now look at this from the human-centered meaning or personification angle - you have sort of given a human identity to the phone by seeing it as an entity telling you things, talking to you, showing things to you etc. So, one can say that Psychologically speaking, it is the human-centered meaning provision or the personification angle given to entities one is interacting with (even seeing things - without holding them, as in this case) which runs the context-program (associated with the meaning of the entity), in the brain.


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