Contextualism
✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.
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.
And, 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.