Abstract
The concept of context began to be used in fields such as language philosophy and semiotics to explain the conditions for forming meaning. In architecture, it has been used to explain the conditions surrounding the design object since the second half of the twentieth century. From an ontological point of view, it can sometimes refer to the part-whole relationship in physical reality and sometimes in social reality. From an epistemological point of view, on the one hand, context appears as a descriptive and analytical concept that refers to the meaning and truth conditions of judgment, discourse, or knowledge. On the other hand, it emerges as a normative and doctrinal concept that directs the design, with a normative basis, and keeps the design away from arbitrariness. When this multidimensional and multi-layered structure is not analyzed and the distinctions are not revealed, the concept gradually loses its functionality in practice and the theoretical field due to semantic ambiguity. This study aims to make the concept more specific in architecture by analyzing the context conceptualizations in architectural theories from an epistemological and ontological point of view.