What is context in communication?

Context in communication is a concept in personal epistemology: Always give your audience the context they need to interpret your message correctly.

Example: You send a Slack message: 'We should switch to Postgres.' Your teammate reads it and thinks you're proposing a migration of the entire production database this quarter. You meant the new microservice that hasn't launched yet. The instruction was clear. The context was missing. Now you're spending 45 minutes in a meeting that didn't need to happen — because you assumed they knew what you were referring to.

This concept is part of Phase 9 (Context Sensitivity) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for context sensitivity.