Buena Vista Social Club - El Cuarto De Tula

Taking Things Out of Context Is Like Lying to Make Your Point

"When you take somebody's quote out of context, which happens all the time, nobody's ever going to go and do the research on their own and figure out that you got it wrong." (Cultural historian Thomas Frank) Esoterica: "Context" is defined as "the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed." In broader terms "out of context" (sometimes referred to as contextomy) is a logical fallacy in which a passage is removed from its surrounding matter in such a way as to distort its intended meaning. Good examples of taking things out of context are the sentences or partial sentences originally written by scientists that have been selected for other meanings by overly-zealous creationists, and sometimes vice versa. Taking things out of context doesn't lead to truth in argument or in art.