Context as a psychological category

The paper reviews the development of the concept "context" as one of key categories of modern theoretical and experimental psychology. On the basis of scientific literature analysis the authors identify two complementary interpretations of context: structural (a fragment of text as a semantic system) and functional (a mental sense-generating mechanism) The authors suggest understanding mentality as a recursive-contextual phenomenon in which each fragment of its contents exists in a context of other fragments, including previous ones.