Niels Bohr — "The meaning of our words depends on the context in which they are uttered."
The meaning of our words depends on the context in which they are uttered.
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More from Niels Bohr
"The electron is not a 'thing' in the ordinary sense, but a 'tendency to exist'."
"The atom is not a mechanical system, but a system of relationships."
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Details
From discussions on language, philosophy, and the interpretation of scientific theories.
Date: Mid 20th century
GeneralVerification
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Words don't carry fixed, universal meanings on their own — their meaning shifts depending on the situation, conversation, and framework in which they're used. What a word means in one setting can differ entirely from what it means in another. Communication requires shared context; without it, the same phrase can mean completely different things to different people at different times.
Relevance to Niels Bohr
Bohr spent his career navigating the radical strangeness of quantum mechanics, where the same particle behaves differently depending on how it's observed. His complementarity principle — that light is both wave and particle depending on experimental context — directly mirrors this idea. He famously struggled to articulate quantum phenomena in ordinary language, making him acutely aware that scientific terms like 'position' or 'state' only make sense within a defined experimental framework.
The era
Bohr worked during the early-to-mid 20th century, when quantum mechanics was overturning classical physics and forcing scientists to confront the limits of everyday language in describing atomic reality. Logical positivism and philosophy of language were simultaneously reshaping how thinkers understood meaning itself. The Copenhagen Interpretation debates — where physicists fought over what quantum formalism actually meant — made contextual meaning a live, urgent scientific and philosophical problem.
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