ABSTRACT
This chapter briefly recapitulates the path that Harry Broudy followed in arriving at his emphasis on context. It notes an interesting and pervasive ambiguity in the concept of context between context as the existential situation in which a knower is operating and context as the conceptual framework the knower brings to bear on the existential situation. The chapter urges that this ambiguity actually points to a central feature of context — namely, the necessity for an interaction between the actual situation and any categorization in the knower's cognitive repertoire. It suggests that attempts to account for context solely in terms of a representation, no matter how rich and varied, is to miss the point of an appeal to context and to raise once again at a new level just the problems context was introduced to solve. The chapter also suggests that a cybernetic model of action and perception apparently provides just the right mode of handling the notion of context.
