Peircean foundations for a theory of context

Abstract

Contexts have become a topic of major interest in linguistics, philosophy, and artificial intelligence, but no one has been able to give a definitive definition of context that is widely accepted. Yet the basic ideas for a theory of context were all present in Peirce’s writings in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This paper shows how Peirce’s work provides a foundation that unifies ideas on context that are scattered in modern research on logic, philosophy, linguistics, and artificial intelligence.