What is context?
This academia.edu article is (in my opinion) needlessly complicated (just look at the graphics), yet its conclusions (quoted below) are still helpful:
Conclusion: What is context?
Apparently, the conception of context outlined here is a cognitivist one. Its essence is that context resides neither in the surrounding text nor in the situation, but in the mind. This view of context has a number of important implications:
Context is unitary: During language processing, the cognitive system does not distinguish between contextual information carried over from previous utterances, contextual information retrieved from the current perception of the situation and contextual information retrieved from long-term memory (cf. Blakemore 1992: 27).
Context is subjective: Neither the current perceptive input nor the cognitive and cultural environments of different persons can ever be identical. As a result all individuals involved in an act of communication bring their own context to bear on their interpretative efforts, and this in turn implies that the mental representations construed by different people in response to one utterance can never be identical.
Context is dynamic and reflexive: Context does not precede and determine decoding but is constructed in interaction with it. Vice versa, text is not only interpreted with the help of context, but leaves its mark on the latter. The interaction between text and context is characterized by a constant reciprocal updating of the mental representation of the text under construction on the one hand, and the context on the other.
Context is potentially infinite: The only limit to the amount or kind of knowledge that can have some bearing on the mental representation a person construes in response to a given utterance is his or her total cognitive environment. This, as we all know, is potentially infinite. Since hearers can never activate their total cognitive environment for an act of comprehension, the crucial question is how they select and activate those pieces of information that are relevant in an actual decoding situation. This, however, takes us beyond the limits of this paper because it concerns actual contexts rather than the potential context. Readers interested in the puzzling question of actual context selection are referred to Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory, which provides the most elaborate and ingenious answer suggested so far.
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Great conclusions by Schmid! I confess in prostration, from the floor, that I will read the text of the article later [promise] and only respond to the conclusions here. The one/two that need sifting are (i) no two members of audience will necessarily reach identical interpretations [so Lynell's comment]; (ii) context is potentially infinite. Following up the original approach through relevance theory, it can be emphasised that (1) we can anticipate that interpretations will overlap to a greater or lesser extent; ie, using another RT term, they will resemble one another in meaning properties. Often, when we "pounce" on interpretive differences, we fail to focus/identify much that is common to both. We do need to see resemblance as the result of many shared meaning properties, as well as some that differ; then to consider what contextual difference leads to difference in interpretations. Also, (2) that the utterance/text/stimulus shapes what are the strongest communicated contextual assumptions. If we miss those stronger ones, or make a jump to weaker ones, we will end up with an interpretation that may lie outside what the communicator intended. Harriet Hill's four-box summary of contextual matches and mis-matches is helpful: assumptions that are shared [by communicator and audience] and rightly included in forming an interpretation // assumptions that are shared, but overlooked by the audience [e.g., too weak to form part of a limited, finite context] // assumptions that the audience employs for interpretation which the communicator didn't have accessible // assumptions of the communicator which the present audience is completely ignorant of. Great conclusions! Hard work to uncover biblical contexts, but every partial effort leads on onward.