Meaning in Context: Is There Any Other Kind?

Abstract

While the contextual grounding of the meanings of human action and language is vital to our everyday understanding of our own and others' behavior, the importance of context has been largely ignored by traditional research approaches in the social and behavioral sciences and in their application to the field of education. The positivist model, which has dominated these disciplines, has led to a search for universal context-free laws and to the use of context-stripping methods. Investigators in developmental and social psychology and in educational research have increasingly begun to note the inadequacies of this approach. Drawing examples from phenomenology, sociolinguistics, and ethnomethodology, Elliot Mishler proposes alternative approaches which are more appropriate to the study of meaning in context.