What is the explanation and filter function of context?

Answer 1

Well, the context of an event or even a sentence can help you to understand it and filter your assumptions. If you take something out of context from a book, like the phrase "kill them." ... That's all you have to go on, so you might think that the character saying that phrase is murderous, cruel, or morally questionable in other ways. But if that sentence came at a crucial time in the book, after a story of a person who values life and community and who has struggled with the ethical dilemma of harming anyone even when it seems to be for the good of the community... tries to reform these people, but they continue to rape and pillage and harm the new colony on another planet. There is no prison system that can keep them... when you are there, in that story, and you hear this person who worked the entire book to save these people finally give up and say "kill them" ... it is an entirely different experience, and we make very different assumptions. Taking anything out of context actually removes some of the meaning, because you don't have the story to help you understand why this phrase or this event happened.

It's like someone asking about Romeo and Juliet and you just tell them that Romeo kills someone. If you haven't read the play, then you might think that Romeo is just a really bad guy that runs around killing people and robbing them or something. But reading that event in the context of the play and what is going on in the story at the time, you don't make those assumptions, and you understand why it happened.