When Context Really Matters: The Case of Schizophrenia

This paper will focus on the way played by context in schizophrenia, both at the linguistic and the social level. As regarding the linguistic level, several authors have claimed that one of the core deficits in schizophrenia concerns the ability to represent and maintain context (Cohen & Servan-Schreiber, 1992; Braver & Cohen, 1999; Barch et al., 2001). This would affect the way people with schizophrenia engage in a conversation. But, most importantly, the difficulties that schizophrenic subjects have in semantics, that they have with meaning, depend heavily on this problem with context. At the social level, schizophrenic subjects often complain that they are not able to understand clearly social rules that are perfectly plain, and often evident, to other people (Blankenburg, 1971; Stanghellini & Ballerini, 2011). More over, they often break social rules, but seem to be completely unaware of that. Thus, even context in the broad sense, the so called social knowledge, seems to be affected in this mental disorder (see Cutting & Murphy, 1990; Langdon et al., 2014). The social naïvete of schizophrenics would not be the result of psychosis in general, because other psychotic subjects, like manic or depressed patients, usually perform better in this field; so, it seems to be a specific trait of this mental disorder. My claim is that the case of schizophrenia confirms that what we call meaning is not a datum, which context contributes to clarifying, but a social construction, an active operation largely based on context, and that the problems that schizophrenic people have with context are one of the causes, not only of their bizarre language, but even of some difficulties of their everyday life. Thus, in the case of schizophrenia, it seems that these subjects are confused by context, and that this heavily affects both their communication skills and quality of life.