Contextualism

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In philosophy, contextualism mostly just emphasizes that actions and utterance happen inside a particular context.

• For example to point out that the meaning of some actions may only be understood in that context, and not just from also being another person that exists.

• Somewhat more controversially, that how correct a choice or outcome is may be similarly contextual - which gets into ethical relativism, or at least situational ethics.

In linguistics, it seems contextualism might signal

awareness that utterances are from a discourse, and interpretation draws from the whole

a formalized semantic system of interpretation - sometimes just "we are restricting ourselves to a domain", sometimes because that makes a particular task less messy.