Category of «Context» and Contextual Approach in Psychology

Abstract

The article contains a brief review of the concept «context» which is gaining itsplace among the key concepts in modern theoretical and empirical psychology. Acomprehensive analysis of scientific literature leads the authors to distinguish twocomplementary conceptions of context – structural (which regards a fragmentof a text as a semantic system) and functional (which treats it as a mental sensegeneratingmechanism). The authors suggest an understanding of mentality as arecursive-contextual phenomenon, where each fragment of its subject matter existsin the context of other fragments – parallel, preceding or ensuing. Such understandingmay form a basis for the contextual approach in psychology.

Keywords

• a context
• contextualism
• contextual approach
• structure and functional approach
• recursion.